BEAMS TOKYO CULTuART aggregates Tokyo urban culture & art

If you wanted to sum up your city in one room without making it cluttered, what would you put in there? This is precisely the challenge that TOKYO CULTuART, a new project and shop from BEAMS in Harajuku, is taking on since its opening two weeks ago.

While their main business is design and apparel (ranging from casual to business to t-shirts), culture is also a valuable commodity, a point not lost on BEAMS RECORDS. CULTuArt is in the culture business, taking the best of Tokyo’s art and design scenes and letting it all play together, regardless of medium or genre.

Recently we were lucky enough to spend some time with Nagai-san, the General Manager of CULTuART and a mainstay at BEAMS for over two decades. According to Nagai, CULTuART is an aggregator of urban Tokyo, bringing its many faces and artists into one place that acts as both retail outlet and museum.

YAMANAYA pieces from famed figure-maker M1GO

From the Gundam figures of Akihabara to design books and prints found in Ueno, CULTuART spans the urban landscape of modern Made in Japan, shows it to the world, and makes it available to the masses all at once. The contents reflect the tastes of modern Japanese, but also those of its curator who values a piece’s cultural and aesthetic qualities at once.

The shop is decidedly down-to-earth in its sensibilities, but that doesn’t mean it comes with a small price tag. While Modoka Morikawa’s Peloqoon stuffed figures can go for around $150, one-of-a-kind pieces like the Doraemon stained-glass lamp from Pucci (seen in the slideshow) can exceed $7000. This is surely the nature of bringing in the best of the best, and makes it a great stop for both foreign and local visitors to get a solid overview of Tokyo culture and design in a very pop-culture kind of way.

Technology certainly has its place in CULTuART’s space as well. Aside from multiple Mac models open for use, they’ve also created a special browser-based application for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Each item has its own number which, when clicked on, brings up detailed information about the piece and its artist in both Japanese and English. If you have one of the devices yourself, click here to browse on your own, and check out pieces like MODERHYTHM’s very cool CHUBU 01, pictured below.

Gadget-less customers can get loaners to use during their browsing time, but Nagai-san notes that devices integrated with the shopping experience are going to expand even more in the coming years, incorporating RFID and other technologies to better provide interactive information about the displays.

For the next step in its evolution, CULTuART is expanding to bring the best of Tokyo to other major cities around the world, though they haven’t made any firm plans yet as to where they’ll be going. Since they’re interested in spreading culture, a unique or unusual location (in our opinion anyway) would be far more interesting than the usual suspects.

However, the concept can work both ways as well, as many Japanese are increasingly travel-minded and appreciative of other cultures. TOKYO CULTuART would be interesting in Brooklyn, but how about a BROOKLYN CULTuART version in Paris or Cairo?

To visit for yourself, click for a map from Harajuku Station.

Tags: Art, Beams, Culture, design, Retail
Category: Fashion & Lifestyle Trends
Other categories: Technology & Gadget Trends, Marketing & Ad Trends

Hello Kitty sexy body fashion water bottles

We weren’t able to find anything online about these, but our recent trip to a Lawson convenience revealed these very cool Hello Kitty bottles. Aside from being rather ergonomic, the seemingly Gaultier-inspired sexy bottles are also sporting the latest in Kitty-chan fashion.

Of course, for 368 yen ($4), this is clearly water for cute-loving women over 30.

Tags: beverages, design, Fashion, FMCG, Hello Kitty
Category: Fashion & Lifestyle Trends
Other categories: Technology & Gadget Trends, Marketing & Ad Trends

Taspo rules bring retail back to tobacco

Last summer, the Japanese tobacco industry imposed a rather large burden on itself by requiring the use of Taspo (tobacco passport), an RFID identification and payment card, for adults to purchase tobacco from vending machines. While the cards require photo registration my mail, the benefit is that they can also act as cash for purchases much like PASMO, Nanaco, and other e-money.

However, despite heaps of money spent on Taspo awareness through flyers, advertising, and hands-on a marketing campaigns, most Japanese smokers aren’t signing up for the card. As a result, vending machines are losing revenue, smokers are frustrated, and convenience stores are happily picking up the slack.

While Japan has tobacco vending machines just about anywhere, rendering all of them inoperable to most of the public has driven the market back to retail. Japan used to be littered with tiny tobacco shops that sold its wares out of a small window, but these storefronts dwindled and were eventually replaced by vending machines. Now the shops are coming back, and brands are making it their new business to focus on making the shops look as spiffy as possible.

The shop above (on the left) is in Harajuku, and surrounded by what used to be busy vending machines. Now it has a brand new interior and exterior, plus staff inside to sell their wares. For marketers, this is a new opportunity to connect with customers in a way that they couldn’t with vending machines. New campaigns, free gifts, and other benefits are simple with small retail spaces.

Of course, this will all be contingent on where the government and tobacco industry go from here: Whether driver’s licenses are eventually allowed to be used at the machines, they relax the rules (unlikely), or if they reinforce an already ridiculous policy by requiring Taspo at retail locations as well.

Tags: RFID, Taspo, Tobacco, Vending Machines
Category: Marketing & Ad Trends
Other categories: Technology & Gadget Trends, Fashion & Lifestyle Trends

New Intelligence Toilet II targets women

Toto (the toilet maker) and Daiwa Housing are teaming up once more to offer a sequel to their infamous 2005 “Intelligence Toilet.” The new “II” is equipped with all of the original health monitoring features (urine sugar analysis, blood pressure check, BMI and body weight measurement), plus an additional function designed to appeal to women: urine temperature measurement and analysis.

According to the press release, this data can be used to determine one’s basal body temperature and hormone balance—information which can help women keep track of their menstruation cycles, in addition to increasing physical awareness with the aim of “smarter” dieting and skin care. Like the original, all of this information collected by the toilet is beamed through your home network to your PC where it can be monitored in the form of charts and graphs.

While an innovation like the Intelligence Toilet is quick to make headlines both in Japan and overseas, the question remains: how many people are actually shelling out the ¥350,000 ($3,500) plus (and upwards of ¥610,000 or $6,100) to have one of these systems installed in their homes? On that note, it was interesting to learn that Daiwa has reportedly sold 10,000 Intelligence Toilets since the April 2005 debut (Toto makes them, Daiwa sells them). Not exactly a revolutionary number, but not a mere pittance either. Their sales projection for the II is more modest: 4,800 in three years.

For a more in-depth look at the world of Toto toilets, see the recent PingMag interview with Mariko Shimasaki from Toto. For those of you in Tokyo, Toto also runs the excellent Gallery Ma, an architecture and design gallery (with a noteworthy book shop) in Nogizaka near Tokyo Midtown.

Tags: health, Lifestyle, Toto, Women
Category: Technology & Gadget Trends
Other categories: Marketing & Ad Trends, Fashion & Lifestyle Trends

DecoChoco, custom chocolate straight from the game center

At the beginning of the year, we covered Tirol’s DecoChoco service, which encourages consumers to customize the packaging of these popular little chocolates with photos uploaded onto their PCs. Since the interface allows for decorating the photos with stamps and borders a la print club, we likened the service to the popular schoolgirl pastime of “purikura.” Now, however, Tirol has teamed up with innovative maker of print club machines Furyu, to offer the service directly from the arcade using actual print club photos.

Furyu print club machines offering the DecoChoco service have a function for users to input their mobile phone address (after the finishing decorative touches have been added). A text message is then sent to the indicated phone that contains a unique access link for a site where users can choose which of their prints to turn into candy wrappers and place an order. A set of 45 costs ¥2,362 and takes 2-3 weeks for delivery (no, delivery doesn’t usually take that long in Japan, these things are just really popular.)

Decorative print club stickers were emblematic of a whole generation of pre-mobile phone camera gyaru, but these days the clunky, stationary photo booths have a lot of competition as mobile phones allow users the same functions of print club and then some—meaning purikura needs to modernize or face extinction.

However what is perhaps more telling by this DecoChoco meets print club innovation is how it cuts out the PC, as the idea of going home and uploading the photos interrupts the immediate and social aspect of the experience. Since September, Tirol has offered its original PC-based DecoChoco service on mobile phones and with the print club element filling in for what the mobile is lacking (larger interface, increased decorating options, room for more than one user), the service is now finely tuned to meet the needs of the current generation of picture posing, chocolate chomping school girls (for whom, given their propensity for mobile phones, are just as likely to view the PC as clunky and stationary) .

Tags: FMCG, Purikura, Tirol, UGC
Category: Technology & Gadget Trends
Other categories: Marketing & Ad Trends, Fashion & Lifestyle Trends