ITOCHU Corporation (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Keita Ishii, President & COO; hereinafter “ITOCHU”) announced today that it has acquired the master license rights of and the rights to import and sell the Italian sportswear brand Kappa in the Japanese market. ITOCHU will launch the brand through a wide range of sales channels, from sporting goods stores to select shops, in the spring and summer season of 2024.

Kappa^® is a sportswear brand born in Turin (Italy) in 1956 as an underwear brand. In 1968, it became a casual wear brand with the name Robe di Kappa^®; ten years later, it was launched as a sportswear brand by sponsoring the Italian football top club Juventus with the label Robe di Kappa^® Sport, later simplified as Kappa^®. In the Eighties, Kappa^® became worldwide known as the Official Sponsor of the U.S. Track & Field at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. Since then, Kappa^® has sponsored many sports teams on the five continents with stylish uniforms beloved by athletes and fans. At present, they make a wide variety of sports apparel and footwear for the main sports disciplines, among which the four pillars are football, skiing, rugby, and motorsports, gaining fans around fashion in addition to sports. Its casual wear extension Robe di Kappa^® gained the same reputation. Their iconic logo is the OMINI, featuring the silhouette of a boy and a girl sitting back-to-back. The Kappa^® BANDA is the vertical OMINI repetition as a motif emblematic of the brand. The brands’ owner is the Italian BasicNet Group, whose parent company is listed on the Italian Stock Exchange.

Together with sublicensee companies, ITOCHU aims at expanding the Kappa business by combining its extensive experience and knowledge of the brand business with the licensee companies' know-how in product development and sales. More concretely, ITOCHU will sell not only products designed in Italy but also Japanese original products such as apparel, footwear, and general goods, using a wide range of sales channels, from sporting goods stores to select shops. Moreover, ITOCHU will actively engage in collaborative activities with artists and brands that resonate with the Kappa brand identity.

ITOCHU has positioned the expansion of the steadily growing sports-related business as one of its priority strategies. ITOCHU wants to achieve an even higher degree of recognition by highlighting the appeal of the heritage sportswear brand Kappa, aiming to achieve sales of 10 billion yen on a retail basis in five years.