Hasta La Gadget!

German online retail site brands4friends yesterday launched its service in Japan, in which it sells remainders of high quality brand name goods through temporary auctions.

Auctions are familiar to Japanese users through already popular ones like Yahoo! but this represents a new kind of service for the market. Through brands4friends consumers can get their hands not on cheap used goods (which consumers here are traditionally suspicious of anyway), but brand and outlet fashion products that can sell for up to seventy percent off. Auctions are organized by brand and the duration of each one is fixed (75 hours), along with the number of items, thus making each sale a kind of event in which consumers are encouraged to enter quickly.

The company has promised some four hundred brands — clothes, of course, but also household goods, appliances and accessories. Already a hit in its native Germany, the service hopes to have a quarter of a million registered users in two years’ time, and annual sales of 100 billion yen ($1.1 billion).

To register you require an invitation from a current member, though it is open to any user to join until March 11. This slight sense of exclusivity, coupled with the temporariness of the auctions (once over apparently you cannot search for sold items or prices), should build buzz for the site.

We have already seen how this real-time got-to-get-it-now kind of retail experience has been a hit for Tokyo Girls Collection, where consumers are able to purchase clothes through their phones as they watch them being worn by popular models. If brands4friends succeeds, it will be another milestone in the trend towards democratic and cheap fast fashion.