YKK Research & Development Centres

Product Innovations

Product innovations developed by YKK’s Research and Development centres have served as the vehicle to propel the YKK Group to its position as a global leader in fastening technology. Engineers from the EMEA R&D Centre based in Runcorn, North West England provide support to our network of R&D facilities across the EMEA region in places as far as Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland and Turkey. YKK’s engineers visit customers together with sales and marketing teams to obtain first-hand knowledge of the processes our items go through after they leave the YKK production sites and to ensure that our solutions are always customer focussed.

But R&D at YKK does not stop at providing products. We work in tandem with our customers to develop the best manufacturing options for installing fasteners into their end-use goods. We understand that our fasteners are not end-use items in themselves; rather, they are critical components within our customer’s products.

Although the EMEA R&D Centre’s main focus is on functional items for the automotive, PPE/GOV, and Outdoor functional segments, other sites in EMEA have further focusses, for example our R&D Centre in Italy focusses very much on the fashion industry, developing luxury items and tapes. And our main S&B developments taking place in Germany and Turkey.

The EMEA R&D centre also develops bespoke machinery for manufacturing new items fulfilling the specific needs of the EMEA region.

YKK’s Network of R&D Centres

The YKK Group has research and development centres located strategically around the world to serve our valued customers. Our largest R&D centre, located in Kurobe, Japan, focuses on Core Technology and Fundamental Research for applications across a broad spectrum of fastening markets.

R&D facilities also develop lease machinery that can automate the attachment of a YKK fastener into a customer’s product on the customer’s factory floor, improving the quality of a final product as well as reducing costs.

Machinery & Engineering

YKK’s Machinery & Engineering Division works closely with R&D to make their developments operational by designing the necessary manufacturing technologies, processes and tools necessary to economically manufacture these new products. The YKK Group’s Machinery & Engineering Group supplies machinery specialized for the Fastening Products and Architectural Products business groups to YKK Group factories all over the world by developing materials, developing machinery and equipment, and manufacturing machinery parts and components of machinery and equipment.