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In Tokyo’s Shibuya, independent store Radd Lounge has held fort for the past decade, reliant on the trust founder Irikita Akihiro has built among returning clientele. Positioning the likes of New York labels Eckhaus Latta and Collina Strada alongside fashion newcomers such as Copenhagen’s PLN and German-Somali CSM grad Nora Kassim, Radd Lounge has created a solid business maintaining a strict taste level, based on Akihiro’s values.
“I don’t care how many followers [designers] have on Instagram, who wears their brand, or which famous stores they have signed up with,” he says. “I’m handling their product because it’s cool.”
Radd Lounge is one of many Japanese concept stores that are feeding consumer demand for distinction amid the homogenous luxury buys available across global retailers or department stores. In the West, fashion retail is at a crossroads. With the collapse of major e-commerce platforms like Matches and the ongoing slump in sales at major household names — be it Burberry or Nike — there’s a feeling that something needs to change.
Japan has remained a resilient fashion market over recent years, thanks at least in part to its innovative approach to retail. According to data from Euromonitor, Japan has shown year-on-year growth in the apparel and footwear markets since 2021 and is forecasted for continued growth — albeit at a slower rate of around 3 per cent, in tune with the global climate — through to 2026. In its latest earnings, LVMH reported a double-digit increase in revenue from Japan in the first nine months of its financial year, though it noted that growth slowed in Q3 as the value of the yen rallied. Ferragamo also highlighted Japan as a bright spot.
“Despite high inflation and cost of living pressures hindering private domestic consumption, the overall forecasts for sales of apparel and footwear in Japan — valued around $52 billion in 2024 — remain cautious but positive,” says Marguerite Le Rolland, head of footwear and apparel research at Euromonitor.
As such, it’s a wise time for the Western stalwarts — particularly US retailers — to look East, taking cues from Japan, where personality, curation and experience have always been integral to retail. “Prioritisation of efficiency over experience can leave US retailers playing catch-up when it comes to integrating immersive, engaging in-store experiences,” says Dr Neri Karra, professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at Oxford University.
Curation and character over trends
It’s this market differentiation that Japanese stores thrive on. You can see it in the achingly cool set-up and choice stock that defines boutiques such as Oops, an Osaka store where shoppers can find everything from growing London brands such as Martine Rose and Mowalola to young, underground brands like Jian Ye and XLIM, of Tokyo and Seoul, respectively.
In crude terms, such businesses are still, technically, just small shops, but their daring buys and set designs — a hallmark of Tokyo youth culture since the ’80s — have birthed new models worth replicating. “We contact brands we like and designers whose ideas we share, both in Japan and abroad, and purchase their works to sell in our stores,” says Hijiri Kimura, who founded Oops two years ago after retail stints at Comme des Garçons and Contenastore. “We strive to source original, unique products, regardless of whether they are well known or emerging and independent.” Kimura also notes that her customers are often young and “passionate about fashion”, which ensures they’re attuned to novel products and brands. “I imported 4FSB [an independent British brand that creates custom caps] products to Japan for the first time — they sold out quickly,” says Kimura.
The same could be said of Softs in Tokyo, a store specialising in performance outerwear for running, hiking, hunting and more, that’s built a consumer base of dedicated menswear fanatics. The store, which inhabits the rooftop of a multi-tenant building in Kichijoji, has survived for 15 years and counting. At present, the cash-only business doesn’t offer (nor plan to offer) overseas shipping and only does domestic mail orders upon request. “I just look for clothes I like, or make them if I don’t have them, and then offer them to customers,” says founder Wagatsuma Ryo. “I can’t keep up with the fashion cycle where clothes are in stores and then on sale within a few months, so I prefer to carefully select and then slowly propose them to customers.” That’s not to say Softs’s approach equates to huge profits, but it does build a returning niche that doesn’t rely on the global luxury market, but a more specialised one.
“It survives thanks to the support of a very small number of people who love clothes. I thought that if I was on a rooftop, people who liked what I was proposing might find the place somehow.” he adds. “I decided on this location because I was determined to offer interesting proposals, so to not disappoint people who had taken the trouble to come to my shop. Customers seem to think that stores like this are very rare these days, so they want to support us somehow.”
Here, the good news is that buying from the heart does more than simply build loyalty. It also offers a sense of belonging, one that works among the smaller and bigger retailers. Take Beams, for example, a multi-brand retailer and fashion label rolled into one. Despite operating approximately 170 shops across Japan and Asia, the company ensures that each and every outpost is catered to the customers and cultures of its locality — from the interior design to the product assortment and visual merchandising. Beams’s Japan store in Shinjuku curates its food, fashion, arts and homewares in tight accordance with the country itself; and unlike some of the more commercial approaches taken in the UK, such as branded tube signs, Beams’s array is tactful and richly researched, showcasing traditional Japanese craft, design and clothing under its Fennica line, which focuses on local rather than global cultures, from Indigenous Northern Japanese wood to Okinawan pottery.
In Beams more broadly, sales associates are actively encouraged to voice their opinions on product planning and buying for their store, says Beams president Yo Shitara. “Being closest to our customers, their approach is invaluable,” he says. “This may not be the case with Western retailers who tend to separate product teams from sales teams.” The Beams sales team are style influencers in their own right, encouraged by their employer to embrace their personal style and be open about their interests. In fact, in 2019, Beams discovered that the majority of its shoppers had engaged with the sales staff on the shop floor before buying anything. This remains true today, Shitara confirms.
There’s even social networks built on the tastes of Japan’s sales associates, who are increasingly becoming creators in their own right. Staff Start, a major Japanese social platform, allows store staff — many of whom are from Beams — to share posts and comments about their favourite products from the stores they work in, tapping into the empathy and trust shoppers place in them. These posts are shoppable online, bridging the gap between e-commerce and the in-store experience. Its success so far — from September 2022 to August 2023, there were 233,000 active accounts — highlights an inextricable link between community and consumer that Japan is continuing to pioneer.
Part of why curation and person-led shopping works as a business model is also down to national nuances. Stores specialising in a niche are more likely to survive because Japanese consumers are more willing to take risks on small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs), which, according to a report from the Japanese government, make up 99.7 per cent of the country’s total businesses. There is a large proportion of “young people, including individual designers, who want to build their own independence and the [Japanese] market is remarkably open to this”, says Roy Larke, research director at retail and consumer markets insight firm Japan Consuming.
As to why “there are relatively few ‘cookie-cutter’ or ‘category-killer’ retailers” in Japan, according to Japan Consuming co-founder Michael Causton, can also be attributed to Japan’s high sales density per store, which ensures that even experiential stores make good money. “Those sales densities mean that new brands are being developed and can grow to a significant size,” he explains. This in turn makes way for a constantly renewing market — in other words, the weird and the wonderful labels stand a better chance in Japan.
However, it’s not only the weird and the wonderful stores that thrive here, but also the highly specialised and honed ones. For example, LL Bean, a classic US-born outdoors label, was first exported to Japan in the late ’80s and early ’90s without any major involvement from the brand, to appeal to a Japanese market intrigued by Americana. The label’s commitment to quality and authenticity made it highly covetable in Japan, so much so that in 1992, the brand opened its first-ever stores there outside of Freeport, Texas. “Though our Japan stores have a smaller footprint, they look and feel a lot like our stores here in the US, albeit with an assortment tailored to the market,” says Charlie Bruder, VP of international and wholesale at LL Bean. “We do build a collection of products specifically for the Japan market and we are seeing interest in those products in the US.”
Western retailers keen to emulate the Japanese store playbook should consider whether this kind of retail can be fostered and nurtured in the West. At a time when direct-to-consumer and more horizontal fashion selling methods are coming to the fore, Japan might serve as a much-needed blueprint.
Consider the recent Palace x Vivienne Westwood collaboration, which came with a campaign shot compiled into a one-off edition of Fruits, the cult Japanese street style zine founded by Shoichi Aoki. The fashion vanguard and collectors lapped it up, drawn in by the personality-led casting. Like all other Fruits editions, models appeared in street style photos, with their name, “current obsession”, age and profession credited beside them, a nod to the on-the-fly shoots that made proto-influencers out of Harajuku subcultures upon the zine’s launch in 1997. This kind of pomo content speaks to a newfound global interest in Japanese models, whereby subcultural cachet counts.
It’s a nuance Fruits’s Shoichi knows back to front, having lived and breathed the Tokyo retail scene. He points first to the city’s ‘DC Boom’ (‘designers and characters’ rather than faceless entities) in the ’80s when the Japanese began looking to homegrown talents such as Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons’s Rei Kawakubo. As he explains, from there, the DC Boom waned in the ’90s, making way for more underground brands like Milk, one of the original lolita (a hyper-cute, kawaii Victoriana style of dress) and the iconic Chicago vintage stores, alongside London-born brands like Vivienne Westwood and Chrisopner Nemeth. “The defining feature of Harajuku is the concentration of stores with diverse backgrounds in a small area,” he says. “In Tokyo, it’s typical for brands or select shops to start as small businesses run by individuals or a few people,” he adds, citing stores like Jun Takahashi and Nigo’s Nowhere, which went on to become Undercover and Bape, playing a major role in the proto-streetwear style. He also nods to Hiroshi Fujiwara, a pioneer who embodied the scene, and initiated the wave of stores that would follow in Harajaku’s backstreets.
Similarly, this lifestyle aspect was important for young women, too. “The characteristics of women’s brands, shops and vintage stores includes their owners and staff becoming charismatic fashion icons in Harajuku,” he explains. “This was somewhat essential, and Fruits accelerated this phenomenon. Likewise, Ura-Harajuku stores functioned like small fashion schools.”
Perhaps, it’s this sense of education, care and emotional investment in the retail models that Japan has made its name on that could reignite the West’s bricks-and-mortar shopping scene. At a time when the digital world is leaning towards personality over polish, it makes sense that the stores would follow suit, building a creator-led, taste-driven approach where trust in individual staff and buyers (and their visions) plays a core role. Shopping on a purely functional basis is a Western sensibility, while Japan has always treated shopping as a hobby. Just recently, Palace collaborated with Beams, suggesting the trend has legs. Here’s just hoping the West can make it a thing.
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