Hasta La Gadget!

Since fashion market watcher David Marx hit the bulls eye perfectly with his assessment of Abercrombie’s new Ginza flagship store, we have very little to add to the story besides the tweet we blurted out while in the midst of the most traumatic shopping afternoon ever. Actually, we were scouting the store for a client report, but it didn’t take long to confirm what we knew already.

To be fair, I don’t want to write a hit job on the brand, but the market-entry history of Japan in the last…well…150 year suggests that you can’t just waltz into the market, business as usual, and sell a bunch of American goods to consumers that you perceive as desperate for something new. Especially if the items are marked-up in a time of recession, and when real fast-fashion brands are doing brisk sales.

However, this recent damning review by Japanese celebrity Midori Utsumi pretty much sums up what I’ve heard from every other Japanese consumer I’ve queried about the shop. Granted, she’s not exactly the target customer, but there are elements of the Japanese retail experience that cross most demographics.

Money quote: もう、最悪！でした。(Ugh, it was the worst!)

She goes on to talk about the darkness, the smell, how cramped it is, and how the elevators only go straight to the seventh floor, leaving you to navigate the rest of the building by stairs. The women’s dressing room is only on the 10th floor, and the cash register is only on the 11th. Plus, when she asked where the restroom was, she was told that they don’t have one. Much of the rest of the blog piece is a lament on the poor training and manners of the staff.

As a native Ohioan who grew up with the brand all around me, I have a love-hate relationship to its image. While many of my friends and classmates wore A&F or worked at its shops (and eventually in its offices), I was never able to get excited about the clothes there because they never seemed to look right on my slim, 5′8″ frame. Since my body size is fairly average around these parts, I feel that Japanese men have similar issues.

Here’s a great video of one of the A&F Ginza shop’s recent spelunkers.

It could have a lot to do with the nature of the brand itself, which oozes New England, blue-blood arrogance mixed with the sweat of jocks who push geeks into lockers. Not that I was one of those geeks or anything…I’m not bitter, I swear.

It’s odd enough that the first five sales floors of the 11-story building are for men’s clothes, and 8~11 are for women. Go into nearly any other retail shop in Japan that has mixed fashion and the women’s clothes are ALWAYS first. So, the shop that has half-naked male models and eleven floors of portraits of naked sportsmen adorning the staircase is prioritizing its male customers? Why didn’t they just open up in the middle of Shinjuku ni-chome and get it over with?

To get an idea of the digital buzz around the brand, check out the official A&F Mixi group. I’m not saying that it represents all of Japan, but just the number of members compared to similar brands can provide some perspective.

In the end, it’s an interesting experiment and I wish A&F success, especially since the Asian market as a whole has better chances for finding the right consumer. Looking forward, since former company-mate Victoria’s Secret will surely be coming into the local market soon let’s see what kind of approach they take. Somehow I think that big, busty, leggy models will resonate with Japanese women the same way that blue-eyed and buff A&F models do with Japanese men.

That doesn’t mean that they can’t come to Japan, but it does mean that they need to do some research first.