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.

Paging all butterfly-admiring netbook lovers! With spring upon us, HP’s officially launching the Mini 210 Vivienne Tam edition that it previewed back at September’s Fall Fashion Week, and, well, it sure is unique looking. We actually got to take a peek at it a few weeks ago, and while the butterfly adorned cover may only appeal to a certain sex type, the gold covered keyboard is what you’d expect kings and queens to type on. Okay so, the design wasn’t really in line with our tastes, but at least we’re comfortable with the internal specs which are identical to the Mini 210 we recently reviewed (sans the Broadcom Crystal HD). And apparently the Mini should sound as good as it looks — HP’s updated Vivienne’s netbook with Beats by Dr. Dre audio software, which to date has only been found in the company’s Envy line. Interesting move, but of course it’s still very hard for us to understand why anyone would spend $600 on a netbook that’s got an extremely frustrating touchpad and only a three-cell battery — but we’d guess that it probably has to do with that whole ‘beauty is pain’ thing. The full press release is after the break.

Continue reading HP Mini 210 Vivienne Tam Edition leaps off the runway and into our hands

HP Mini 210 Vivienne Tam Edition leaps off the runway and into our hands originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is certainly an innovative and chic mixture of the new and the old if ever there was one.

Design firm Maruwakaya specialize in stylish consumer goods that collaborate with contemporary brands and traditional crafts. They previously worked with Puma to produce an extraordinary wooden bento box. Now they have created a cover for your iPhone made out of lacquer and deerskin leather (known as “inden” or 印伝/印傳), a technique famous in Yamanashi. As you can see below, this is not only an original choice of materials but the results are very striking too.

What the inden technique does is it makes leather-ware highly durable; ideal for handsets that you take everywhere around with you. The product comes in four different colors and designs. It also comes with a wooden box but, with a price tag between 11 and 12,500 JPY (c.$110-250), this is definitely not a casual purchase. Manufactured in strictly limited numbers and only available online, Maruwakaya is taking orders to be shipped in February at time of writing.

Diesel’s streetwear sub-brand 55DSL’s Japanese side has done an interesting collaboration with Coca-Cola that evolved from a simple bottle design contest. We first found these a couple of months ago while scouring Harajuku with a client (conveniently an FMCG client), and the bottles immediately grabbed our attention as we walked by.

The design contest started with a call out for designers to make their own contour bottle for Coca-Cola, and the finalists were boiled down to fifteen choices. From there, a winning design was chosen and made into t-shirts and skate decks for sale.

We actually thought that the bottles were cool enough on their own, but, alas, they weren’t for sale.

Not sure if the display is still up, but the bottles were all on display for a while, as well as the winning design’s goods.

Speaking of fixed-gear bikes, one of the most fun (and expensive) parts of riding one is customization. That can be as simple as keeping your alleycat road-race spoke-cards in the wheels, or as expensive as buying imported vintage Japanese frames.

Now your customization can go to the absurd lengths of chainring engraving. Session Sprockets will sell you an aluminum chainring engraved with the message or artwork of your choice. The site even has an easy-to-use Flash-based tool to help you design it. Here’s my awesome effort. I decided to use the supplied high-quality clip-art to represent a giant chick attacking a car:

Session Sprockets was founded by MIT mechanical engineering student, and the chainrings are milled and engraved in-house. You can choose from two sized rings, standard (130 mm BCD, 48 tooth) or track (144 mm BCD, 49 tooth) for $100 and $110 respectively.

Session Sprockets [Session Sprockets via