Layered own-label expansion around the listing, and the move to design-led merchandise (2002)

How a shop that edits became a shop that designs

The shape itself — holding more than half of sales in own-planned goods — had already been declared by 1999; what changed over the few years from 2002 was not the ratio but its content. Merchandise at the level a buyer specifies as a special order was replaced by merchandise a designer and a patternmaker lay out. That the funds and the credit won by listing could be directed at the making side rather than at the number of stores appears to have been the dividing line of this period.

That said, the pattern of adding labels did not by itself guarantee growth. So long as the density of a dozen-plus product types per tsubo is maintained, there is a limit to how many stores any one format can hold — at the end of March 2006 the United Arrows format itself stood at just twenty-three stores. The routes to higher sales narrow to raising a label into a separate format or enlarging the boxes. That President Osamu Shigematsu's 1999 vision of ¥100 billion by 2009 arrived three years late is a measure of how heavy that work was.