The best Muji experience: on seven floors

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For nearly 20 years, Muji’s flagship store in Tokyo’s Ginza district served as the perfect symbol of the world’s most successful unbranded, value-focused megabrand. It was based in a temporary-looking metal wedge topped with a red tin roof. A simple and eminently functional building.

Ginza itself, increasingly visited by high-spending tourists, was becoming increasingly saturated with high-end luxury names. But how MujiAlthough evangelical minimalism evolved from marketing to philosophy to a quasi-social movement, the Ginza store was compelling evidence that Muji was following that path. Despite a difficult few years in the UK, the brand has continued to thrive in its home market, in the face of fierce competition from Japanese retailers such as Uniqlo and Daiso. Its strategy in Japan of supplying individual stores in a manner highly tailored to the local customer has been key to its continued success and the strength of the company’s stock.

Urban planning for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 created an opportunity to make an even bolder statement. The land on which the flagship stood was owned by the government and had to be returned for use in the games. So they started work on a new store 200 meters away, even deeper into Ginza’s Graff, Canada Goose and Chanel street rabbit hole.

All the elements of Muji’s ‘all-value, no-frills’ ethos are there

The result, from the ground floor market selling fresh fruits and “Ginza blend” coffee exclusive to this store to the design studio for product customization, is powerful. All the elements of Muji’s “all-value, no-frills” ethos are there; that perfection of elegant practicality that makes the buyer imagine that each item fits perfectly into their kitchen, wardrobe, living room and life. There are the classic gel pens (¥120, around 63p), the rainbow of ribbed socks (around £2) and the plastic boxes that no Japanese home is complete without (from around £2.50). But this is also, to some extent, a theme park: a concentration of everything Muji is for a generation of buyers who demand experience.

The new store houses seven floors of retail, exhibition spaces, art installations, a café, a bakery and Japan’s first Muji hotel. Muji seems to be saying, “Our neighbors may do bold, ostentatious, shameless consumerism, but we will do it right.”

The idea behind the store, which looks huge but homely at the same time, was to create a place in Ginza that people could identify as what its store manager, Takuya Narukawa, describes as a “natural base.” “Ginza is a very unusual district, because the real residential population does not exceed 10,000 inhabitants, but the daytime population is 30 times larger: workers and tourists. Many of them will have a Muji near where they live, but when they come to Ginza they want a special experience,” says Narukawa. “It wouldn’t make sense to have this store here in Ginza if people thought they came here looking for something they could have somewhere else.”

There are ambushes around the store that make it unique as a Muji outlet: between the second and third floors is a hanging sculpture made up of thousands of metal coils recycled from clothing factories. As Muji has evolved through its exclusive Idee range, its offering now also includes crystal wine decanters (around £46) and side tables made from solid wood (around £300).

But the real push for something unique, Narukawa says, centers on the food offerings on the ground floor. “We decided to learn from the cultures and wisdom of the world, and I thought food was the place where we could experience this the most,” he says. Upon entering the store, the visitor is drawn to what, for Muji, has become an exclusive range of pre-made curries, pasta sauces, dry foods and gourmet coffee blends. This is a store that perfectly meets the exact demands of the true consumers of modern Japan, a land on which Muji has quietly and minimalistically had an extraordinarily influential influence.

Leo Lewis He is the Financial Times’ Tokyo bureau chief.