Baroque Japan Limited will open its first store in New York this autumn. It will set up two simple street-front stores – one ENFÖLD shop set to open in the West Village on 9 September, and a MOUSSY branch that will open in Soho in October. The company will aim to produce sales of 1 billion yen in the US by their third year of operation there.
Baroque Japan set up a new company in the US in April, Baroque USA Limited (CEO: Tetsuto Fukazawa) and has been working on preparations to open its shops since then. MOUSSY, which specialises in jeans and casual clothes, already has 81 stores overseas on the Chinese mainland and in Hong Kong. It also sells wholesale to speciality stores in the US. To commemorate the opening of its store in Soho, it will be wrapping its made-in-Japan denim in washi (Japanese paper) and packaging it in paulownia wood boxes. The MOUSSY store is to have a sales area of 165 square meters.
ENFÖLD debuted in Japan in 2012 as a leading Japanese contemporary brand, and already has been dealing with speciality stores in Europe. Its West Village store will have a sales area of 79 meters squared.
Baroque Japan Limited has asked Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, the famous firm that designed the global Apple flagship store and Shanghai Uniqlo flagship store, to design both shops.
As of the end of June, Baroque Japan Limited operates 356 domestic stores and 165 stores overseas (in the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong).
Commenting on the stores, Baroque Japan Limited CEO Murai said, “We have grown even within the stagnant economic climate in Japan. The turmoil in the global economy means that the number of competitors we face is decreasing, and so we think that now is the perfect time to expand overseas. First we will create locations in the United States, and then move into Europe. Then, rather than just focusing on sales in these locations, I want to gather information, and eventually move into developing economies.
It will be hard for us to win out in overseas markets, but if we can capture niche markets around the globe, we should be able to make hundreds of billions of yen on that alone.”