Human Made built a system to stop people queuing
Photo: Courtesy of Human Made
Human Made opened its largest store in Harajuku on Saturday with a mobile ordering system it developed itself, the first of its shops built to keep customers from queuing at the door.
HUMAN MADE TOKYO runs to about 595 square metres over three floors, roughly four times a standard store, Fashionsnap reported after visiting before the opening. The company said the ordering system was introduced to ease congestion and give staff longer with each customer.
The queue is the oldest instrument in streetwear. Supreme built two decades of pricing power on the Thursday-morning line, and the photograph of a crowd outside a shop has been the category's proof of demand since the 1990s.
For a privately held brand that queue is free marketing. For a company that reported to the Tokyo Stock Exchange for the first time last November, it is unconverted demand and a staffing cost, and it shows up in the numbers four times a year.
A listed streetwear company opened its biggest shop on Saturday, with software designed to get the crowd off the pavement.
The store sits on Meiji-dori near Meiji-jingumae station, with tills on the ground floor, the main sales area on the first and free space on the second. Interiors are by the studio I IN, which also designed the brand's Shinsaibashi Parco and Shanghai stores, in matte metal with curved edges.
Crowds in Harajuku are also a neighbour problem before they are a financial one. Brands that draw lines on Meiji-dori deal with the local authority about it, and a system that moves people indoors solves that whether or not anyone is reading a quarterly report.
What is harder to see as coincidence is the timing. The shop opened ten months after the listing, three weeks after Human Made disclosed it will pay ¥554m for Undercover, and in the district both labels came from.
Each Human Made store is given a symbol animal. Chief executive Rei Matsunuma said the lion suited the largest one, the shop carrying Tokyo's name, because it is the king of beasts.
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Human Made's biggest store opened in Harajuku on Saturday with a mobile ordering system designed to keep customers from queuing outside.