Hasta La Gadget!

Purikura, the photo booth printing trend popular among teenage girls for years, is a versatile beast. We’ve seen it morph into video versions, mascot and character-themed booths, lend itself to FMCG packaging, and even inspire whole digital camera products. Now Sega is opening Japan’s largest purikura facility, named the P+closet, which is remarkable not just for its size but also for its integration of fashion and apparel into the purikura experience, apparently the first of its kind. Opening on July 16, visitors can try on a range of clothes and see how they look in them through purikura photos. Essentially, the booths will now become social changing rooms with the “costumes” being real fashion from brands.

An exercise in very experiential tryvertising for the 13 brands involved, the clothes will become for the target female users another “cute” tool for making themselves look better (or just different). Initially there are some 26 types of items available for trying on (two “co-ordinating patterns” each), from brands like BEAMS, OLIVE des OLIVE and Pageboy. Significantly the opening event will see a dokusha model (”reader model” or a pseudo-amateur model) attend. Purikura is another way for girls to make themselves more beautiful and model-like while having fun with friends, and adding fashion elements both enhances the experience for the girls and provides a new marketing channel for brands.

For the uninitiated, in a nutshell Purikura allows you to take cute pictures with your friends in the booth, and then digitally customize and decorate the images with letters, slogans, motifs and all manner of cute extras before printing them out. The ability for this trend to evolve always surprises and impresses us. The first booths emerged in 1995 and a generation later are still very much around, especially where girls congregate. However, since 2002 booth numbers have been falling, so purikura has been making efforts to enhance its functions as technology and lifestyles/fashion have changed. Now you can send the images directly to your phones and SNS pages using infrared transmission, FeliCa readers and QR codes, or even use your iPhone camera to make purikura pictures when an actual booth is not around.

Of course, fashion and beauty has also evolved. Perhaps most notorious has been the Jewella Eye machine for its dekame (big eye) effects, tapping into the trend for local girls to want to make their eyes look larger. However, it would appear, nigh two decades after their genesis, the very recognizable purikura brand of cuteness itself is still holding strong the tides of change simply because it’s a real world, social activity.

Additionally JJ, a fashion magazine popular among the teenage girl market, is also hopping onto the boat at P+closet with Sega. A terminal will be available inside P+closet that offers JJ’s recommended clothes and accessories, connecting visitors to the magazine’s e-commerce site so that they can purchase anything that catches their eye (including, presumably, the items they try on for the purikura photos). It would be exciting to see other brands catch onto this trend, and perhaps in the near future, purikura takers would be able see themselves carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag or even try on Swarovski x House of Hello Kitty accessories.

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