Nike in Japan -The Secret of the 1Love Airforce 1 store in Tokyo

It's hard to find size 12 shoes in Japan. Nike is one of the few companies here that provides size 12, and even that it usually slim pickings. More often than not I just have to take what I can get, settling for colors I don't like because they're the only shoes that fit my feet. so I was surprised to see the hip-hop blogosphere drooling over a set of Nike shoes that were not only available in Japan, but only available in Japan, at the Nike 1love store in Harajuku, Tokyo. It is currently the only store in the world that sells these unusual brands of Nike sneakers. The sneakers coming out of this store have very short production runs, making them so rare that some models are eventually re-sold in the US for thousands of dollars. I was in the neighborhood last week and decided to stop by.

I assumed it being a Nike store, it would be on a main road next to a Sony store and a huge Starbucks. Not so. It turned out to be a small, inconspicuous little shop in the fashion district, huddled in unceremoniously amongst all the independently owned hipster boutiques. Its not even like they have that many customers. The store only had 2 or 3 people in it at a time, and was empty when I got there.

Looking in, all you can see is the fishbowl shoe Aquarium. Don't get the impression this is just a small display at the front of the store. It more or less is the store. As you can see from this better picture linkjacked from dezeen.com, it takes up most of the surface area of the shop.



As it is explained on Dezeen, this display was designed to look like an Aquarium, with all the shoes pointed in the same direction, so that they resemble a school of fish. When the store opened earlier this year, it was filled entirely with dummy white shoes for design purposes. However, as various releases of the store's stock comes and goes, styles from the previous months are inserted into the aquarium, so that it serves as a museum of what the store has sold in the past. Here's one of the weirder ones I saw, definitely a "Japan only" kind of thing-

Some of the models where really cool though, and I preferred them to anything Nike sells in mass production world-wide. Check out these-






Here's the question though- why does a huge, multi-national corporation such as Nike, with retail outlets all over the world, open a cramped little backstreet shop in the fashion district of Tokyo to sell fantastic and bizarre sneakers that can't be bought anywhere else? Considering how short the production runs are (a few months per cycle?), they can't possibly make a profit off it, at least not the kind of profit they're accustomed to.

So here's my theory about the function of the shop- Producing a shoe in mass quantities likely takes a lot of money. If you guess wrong about the color and style people want, you could wind up with a lot of overstock , and lose a lot of money. So corporations test market their products, paying people they deem as trendsetters to participate in focus groups and tell them what's cool.

It began to occur to me that most of the designs, bad and good, had a bit of a "drawing board" feeling to them, that they were the wild and wonderful ideas of Nike designers that may or may not get the go-ahead for mass-production. My guess is that for the most part, that's precisely what most of these very "Limited edition" shoes are- samples. But rather than test them out just using the regular focus groups, Nike decided to make Harajuku, the cutting edge fashion district of Tokyo, it's own personal focus group. They sell the shoes at a slight premium (about $180-200 each as opposed to the standard $120-150 here), and then stand back to see what will hit and catch on. If the hipsters that shop in Harajuku get excited about a new style and it sells out quickly, Nike knows its might be on to to something, and gives that style further attention for a possible national (or even worldwide) mass release.

So think of it as the opposite of a factory outlet store. Rather than pay a cheaper price for last year's overstock, you pay a higher price for next years' pre-stock, and for a premium, buy the privilege of being part of Nike's experimental new focus group.


Bonus- Nike commercial here in Japan