Ludacris, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, and Pharrell Williams are among the stars rocking Bape product. You can’t pay for advertising like that, and Bape doesn’t; in its 14-year history, the company has never bought a page of magazine advertising. Yet the wave of exposure has positioned Bape as the first Japanese clothing firm since Comme des ­Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto in the 1980s to become an international household name and, potentially, a global power.

Feltwell and I walked to various Bape clothing boutiques in the Harajuku youth-fashion area of Tokyo, as well as to a Bathing Ape hair salon, a Bathing Ape kids store, and finally, a Bathing Ape café, where we ate curry rice served on Bathing Ape plates and drank iced oolong tea from Bathing Ape glasses. The brand has had product tie-ins with DC Comics and Pepsi, among other firms. At one point in 2001, it seemed that every Pepsi can in Japan was wrapped in Bape camouflage.

Every location, brand tie-in, and celebrity-in-Bape sighting has been carefully calculated by Nigo to maintain the company’s mystique. The clothing boutiques, co-designed by Nigo and designer Masamichi Katayama, were conceived to "not feel luxurious," according to Katayama, "but fresh." And he means fresh, as in raw-fish-in-a-refrigerated-case fresh. The clothes and footwear are intended to be seen as perishable; rare; manufactured that morning, perhaps; and presented for you in a sushi-bar-style display. Katayama points out that keeping clothes and sneakers behind glass also makes sense because of a unique problem posed by Bape’s popularity: The stores have to look inviting despite the fact that, at times, there’s little product available to buy. “We sell out too fast,” Feltwell explains, “so the stores could look a bit forlorn.” Katayama’s solution is the glass cases, and Nigo came up with additional innovations, since imitated by other retailers: vending machines selling $80 T-shirts, and sneakers rolling out on conveyor belts. In an attempt to control the burgeoning resale market, clerks prevent customers from buying pairs of sneakers that aren’t their own size.

In a notoriously fickle market—urban street­wear—Bape is a curious mixture of exclusivity, inscrutability, and steady growth that could be turned into a torrent of revenue that establishes Nigo’s brand as an iconic global name. Or it could become yet another superhot brand that grows too fast and sees its business collapse as shoddily licensed product clogs outlet-mall racks around the world. The cautionary tale of the breakout youth brand that dies too young is an oft-told fashion-­industry parable—Mossimo, Freshjive, Mecca U.S.A., Gotcha, Jimmy’Z, Von Dutch—yet every new brand faces the same dilemma. Demand is insatiable; money is just sitting there in teenagers’ and twentysomethings’ wallets. Why not just reach in and take it? “Growing fast is always tempting,” Nigo says. “I could double our sales immediately, but then the brand wouldn’t be fresh anymore.”

Thus far, Bape has stuck to its formula of funding all its growth internally and through a low-interest line of credit. Japanese interest rates are famously low. Banks charge highly rated clients like Bape a mere 3 percent for loans, making it easy for Bape to fund its limited expansion thus far. “When you can borrow at the attractive terms we can,” Feltwell says, “finding outside investors is not as urgent as it would be for an American company. Of course, there comes a point when you have to consider it.”

“I’ve thought about bringing in investors,” Nigo says. “It’s not hard for outsiders to see the potential in this brand.”

The possibilities are dizzying. The American urban-fashion retail business, according to the NPD Group, a consumer-­research firm, is worth about $3 billion a year and will grow 5 percent in 2007. While industry analysts consider a brand with a 20 percent sell-through rate healthy, Bape moves more than 98 percent of what it produces and has never held a sale.