From mediocre sales to now becoming the top Japanese casual wear brand, what exactly has been Uniqlo's secret formula? On May 15th, the opening of Uniqlo's (Uniqlo) global flagship store on Nanjing West Road in Shanghai saw queues that snaked around several bends at the entrance. Staff were forced to hold up signs saying "Queuing here will take 1 hour to enter the store" to warn customers. "I haven't even visited the Expo yet, and I've already experienced this kind of scene," someone complained. Yet the queue kept getting longer, and by 9 PM that night, it showed no sign of decreasing.
Even the opening of H&M's Huaihai Road flagship store in Shanghai wasn't as bustling as this. Uniqlo rented half a building on Nanjing West Road, with a business area of 3,300 square meters, surpassing the previous fanfare of any other flagship store in London, New York, or Paris. Half a month before the opening, the entire Nanjing West Road and Wujia Road were festooned with advertising flags. Despite being prepared, the staff were still caught off guard when the store opened.
Looking at this brilliant scene, who could have imagined four years ago that Uniqlo was struggling at the edge of its biggest crisis since its founding in 1984, with stagnant sales growth, and newly opened low-profit stores becoming one nightmare after another.
In 2005, the Asian market was also worrying, with both sales and brand awareness declining. The failure was so severe that then-president Motoi Tashiro lost his actual authority as president, and Chairman Tadashi Yanai retook control of the company.
The problem wasn't just about opening stores. Uniqlo's preference for basic styles over trendy ones earned it praise for being "simple and brisk," but also made its brand identity unclear. Sandwiched between H&M and ZARA's trendy new products, consumers thought Uniqlo was "not fashionable enough." Worse still, simple styles made it easier to copy and imitate.
The turning point came after a meeting between Tadashi Yanai and designer Kenya Hara. Yanai isn't the type to be easily impressed by clichéd "creativity," but after seeing an interview with Hara on TV, he decided to meet him. No one knows what they discussed, but soon afterward, Yanai hired the almost perpetually unsmiling young Japanese designer as creative director, and Uniqlo's sales began to show significant improvement.
Yanai believes that Hara has unique creativity and modern sensibility: "He not only understands Japan's past creativity clearly, but also knows Japan today very well, so we chose to collaborate with him."
In Japan, Hara is known as the "Quick Draw Samurai." Previously, he had worked as a designer and creative director for Kirin Ichiban beer advertisements and NTT Docomo's mobile phone products. This designer from an advertising background enjoys breaking the rules. In the Kirin project, he successfully captured attention by covering parked vehicles on the street for free with logo-printed advertising tarps.
He proposed the concept of "Ultra-Organizing," where office meeting rooms contain nothing but tables and chairs, and when going out, he only brings items that satisfy the minimum needs. After completing each project, Hara would require employees to thoroughly organize their computer and desktop files. He feels this has a great connection with design: "To create a design, one must thoroughly organize and find the essence."
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