Manhattan’s Soho district is full of retail stores from high end to fast fashion. For a while now, Uniqlo has occupied a popular stretch of the area and now, not too far from it is GU, its sister brand that offers a range of trendy styles for an affordable price.
“Uniqlo offers high-quality, high functional, basic guidance at a reasonable price, and GU offers more trends and variety of reliable quality [clothing] at an even lower price,” GU CEO Osamu Yunoki told Retail Brew over a Zoom call from NYC, where he was visiting to oversee the opening of the brand’s flagship store.
The retailer, based in Japan, already has stores across Asia, including in South Korea, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The new Soho outpost essentially marks the brand’s first store outside of Asia.
“We decided to accelerate our globalization to become a global fashion brand as soon as possible, so we decided to come to New York to figure out how we can do business in the US,” Yunoki said, adding that New York was the perfect spot as it is the center of “fashion…culture, lifestyle, economics—everything.”
Indeed, the new store was set up with a strategy in mind. In fact, GU had been operating a pop-up in Soho for about two years to better understand the US customer, which according to Yunoki, includes “all genders and ages” but is focused on Gen Z.
Perhaps the social media generation, alongside those situated outside of NYC, will also delight in the fact the brand is also launching a website and a shopping app to go with the store.
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Big in Japan: Aside from figuring out how to target its younger consumer base, GU also learned a lot about the differences between Japanese and American customers, starting with the diversity of body shapes in the US, which Yunoki said led the retailer to design an altogether new silhouette.
“Japanese people tend to prefer to hide their body shape or skin, but it’s not the case [in the US],” he explained. “So we changed a lot. What was accepted here in the US was products that combine fashionability, high quality and low price…We narrowed down the variety of products intentionally to make products easy for customers to understand [and] to mix and match.”
But while it might seem like the retailer has figured a lot of things out about the US market and customers, it cannot ignore the stiff competition it will inevitably face as fast fashion and affordable brands compete for the same consumers.
Yunoki calls New York GU’s “toughest market,” but also its “final destination.”
“That’s the reason why we chose New York to accelerate our globalization and our improvement—so we can differentiate ourselves from competitors,” he said. “Our concept, we call it mini edit—minimum curated collections, minimum prices, to produce maximum quality and mix and match. And we found that nowadays, information overflowing and so many choices that competitors are offering, we can go the opposite way to create products in advance on behalf of customers to make it easy to be accepted by Gen Z, who wants to enjoy [fashion] very smartly.”