The term "LIVE STOCK" was coined to bring dead stock back to life.
First of all, please tell us how the idea of "live stock," which is also the basis of the "Editoreal Store," was born.
Ozawa:Originally, I was working on a brand, but after some twists and turns, I decided to stop making clothes for a while. When I was cleaning out my office, I found a lot of packing materials. I thought, "If there is this much stuff at our scale, other brands and manufacturers must have a much harder time. . It was a pain that stayed with me for a long time.
In the midst of my bewilderment, when the Corona disaster struck and the world's sense of values changed drastically, I suddenly realized that the value of things differs from person to person.
. You are saying that we cannot measure only on the axis of new, old, expensive, or cheap.
Ozawa:I have been involved in the fashion industry for a long time, and I felt that there was something I could do to address the problems facing the industry in my own way. That is why I opened the "Editorial Store" one year ago.
For example, original items from each select store are displayed on the same rack.
In the world of magazines, you can see original items from various stores on the same page, but this is not the case with stores.
Ozawa:Yes, I know. But for me, magazines had a sense of reality. So I thought it would be interesting to make a 3D magazine. And in order to gather products, I went to various places with the idea to present it.
The "Editoreal Store" is lined with items from stores, manufacturers, and brands that support the idea.
Ozawa:We visit warehouses and re-edit aged stock that was on store shelves just a short time ago, using a kind of stylist's aesthetic eye. In other words, we are reviving dead stock, and we coined the term "LIVE STOCK.
. In the past, out-of-season clothes were sold at outlets or family sales, weren't they? In a sense, it was illegal to have out-of-shape items on store shelves in the fashion world, but this stereotype has been broken, hasn't it? Is there a growing movement to solve the problems faced by the fashion industry?
Negishi:. I feel that this is a global trend. In the case of Ron Herman, we have always tried to purchase and develop products in such a way that we do not have excess stock.
However, I also realized something: In 2018, I attended an event hosted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which was attended by people from industries other than apparel, where we talked about the future of various industries and their environmental impact. Of course, I had some knowledge of the problems faced by the apparel industry, but I learned that the industry we belong to has the same environmental impact as the oil industry. I had been fascinated by the world of fashion since I was a little girl, and I thought it was a wonderful profession that would make everyone happy, but on the other side of the world, there were serious problems.
So we decided that we couldn't go on like this, so we participated in the Ethical Association's courses and acquired various knowledge with the involvement of the president and executive board members.
We asked experts to participate in this process, and we thought about what we should change as a store and as a brand. We decided that we should decide the value of the products we sell ourselves, and we have been working to abolish sales at all of our stores by the end of 2023. We have begun to reform our business structure so that we can make a profit without holding sales by reducing the amount of excess inventory while determining the appropriate quantity to purchase.
