FMCG History | Jingumae 6-10-8 — The ¥1,900 Fleece and the Store That Sold It

The price was ¥1,900, and it did more for UNIQLO than any shop in its first fourteen years. Fast Retailing's own chronology puts the fleece campaign in October 1998 and the opening of the Harajuku store on Meiji-dori the month after. The company describes that store as its first city-centre location in the Tokyo metropolitan area, which is the precise claim — UNIQLO had been trading since 1984, but on suburban roadsides and in provincial arcades. Until Harajuku, a chain built on cheap basics had no address where Tokyo's fashion press had to walk past it. Fleece was the right product for that address. It was a technical fabric sold at a price that made buying three colours a reasonable thing to do, and it arrived in the winter the strategy needed. When Fast Retailing announced the store's next life nine years later, its own press release credited Harajuku with lighting the fleece boom. That next life began on 28 April 2007, when the shop reopened as UT STORE HARAJUKU, a T-shirt specialist of about 170 tsubo across four levels, with an LED ticker over the door and Kashiwa Sato's bottle packaging on the shelves. It closed for good on 11 March 2012. Five days later UNIQLO opened its Ginza global flagship, with a UT floor of its own, and Harajuku's job was finished. UNIQLO stayed out of the district until 2020, when it took space in the With Harajuku complex beside the station — a different building on a different street, and not this address. Nothing in the company's published record marks the address. The cover photograph shows the storefront in July 2008, when it was trading as UT STORE HARAJUKU; the LED band above the entrance is the one described in the company's 2007 announcement, and two areas of poster artwork have been pixelated by the uploader for copyright reasons. Photo: DocChewbacca, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.