Takayuki Fujii takes a fresh look
A healthy form of non-native.

Fujii: I basically worked remotely from home. When I wasn't working, I was tending to my garden, but I wore my "Brand Stone" boots so much that the sole cracked. I couldn't repair them and had to throw them away for the first time (laughs). I also went to a lot of home improvement stores for garden-related work. I even changed my electric screwdriver from Bosch to Makita.

Fujii: Various brands have started up their fall and winter seasons, but "non-native" does not refer to them as fall and winter, but as winter and spring. If you take a look at this season's lookbook, you will see that it is called the "38th COLLECTION," rather than the entire season. I put my own message there. In the fall, I focused only on the standard "DWELLER" series, and started with winter. This is the look I am presenting here. The winter looks will be announced around the end of September. Please look forward to it (laughs).

Fujii: While we were waiting for samples remotely in March and April, we thought a lot about it and analyzed it together, and what came out was that with the stores closed and unable to sell spring and summer items, we wondered if we could include fall outerwear during the heat wave in August. So we decided to skip the fall season! So, we decided to make the items we had planned for the fall into spring items. Since the exhibition was held in a more difficult situation than now, we knew that the quantity of orders we would receive would naturally drop, so we decided to take this opportunity positively and turned the fall/winter exhibition into a winter/spring exhibition. Furthermore, spring outerwear is a problem every year, regardless of Corona. I think it is the same for all brands, but they don't sell well from April to May, and on the other hand, they don't sell well in the rainy season either. If you think about it, SS collection would start around February every year. The actual selling period is only about one or two months, and I wondered what this cycle was. I thought that making it a slide at the beginning of January would be a solution.

Fujii: I also wondered why the fall/winter sale was in January. We asked our wholesaler to start the winter sale in February, and the spring sale in May, and asked for a sale time for each season. It takes more time and effort, but I believe that by doing so, we will be able to have a longer sale period for the propers and also be on-time in terms of climate. It is true that some stores agreed with us on this and others did not. But, here in the Corona Disaster, it will be a year round sale kind of situation. We also gave out coupons, which made us think about the meaning of the top price (fixed price). Non-native" has been said to be a brand that holds its seasonal exhibitions late, but in fact, it hasn't changed at all. I think this is partly due to the fact that information about the Paris Collection has become too familiar through SNS.

Fujii: In such a fast-paced environment, exhibitions are said to be too slow, and the invisible competition makes it difficult to take the time to carefully look at the clothes. I feel that I have been dragging various doubts along with me for some time now. It seems like the first come, first served, and before you know it, there will be a surplus of clothes on sale. In the past, designer brands and domestic brands were separated, but now they are combined, and the only difference is the form and timing of the collections. Also, in the past, when you appeared in a specialized magazine such as "gap Press MEN," you were the center of attention, but now you have access to more information than before the magazine came out. In that sense, I thought this was the only time to change our cycle.

Fujii: Yes, because it would be a major change from the past. But to take it to the extreme, I also think that even exhibitions may disappear in the future. In fact, "non-native" is coming closer to presentation, but I can no longer overlook the fact that I have been wondering about it for a long time. That is why we decided to do something different instead of an autumn/winter exhibition.

Fujii: In Corona, the "vendorAfter the "Cover Code" closed, the staff started coming to work in the "Cover Code" office. If it remains closed, only clothes would accumulate rapidly. Only this year, I wondered if "non-native" should sell leather jackets and down vests in August. It should be fine when it gets real cold, so from now on we should try to offer our spring and summer stock as long as possible. If we can't do that, I thought, we can't get back to a healthy state. I am sick and tired of seeing the cycle of sales going on.

Fujii: We, too, once reached a point where we thought, "We don't need new clothes in today's world. There are too many more important things. Now is not the time to go into debt to buy clothes, nor is it the time to settle for low-priced clothes. To be honest, our clothes are modest, but I think there will come a time when they will be more needed. That said, I was very worried about holding the exhibition. The mood was not right at the time, and I had already made everything, so what was I going to do? So this time, we made appointments, and for those wholesalers who couldn't make it, we handled them via Skype. The showroom is usually bustling with people during exhibitions, but it was a strange scene.