Reinventing the merchandise around youth fashion and DC brands (1980)

What kind of store are we? — a question, once remade, returns

The heart of this decision was that a company built on installment selling made high-priced youth fashion — merchandise that should have been ill-suited to installment credit — its main line. By binding a hard-to-predict market together through the card’s pay-in-instalments and tying it to the strength of prime downtown real estate, the design remade Marui from an installment department store into an urban fashion retailer for the young. It can be read as a decision that turned the headwind of consumers drifting away from credit into a tailwind by reworking what the stores sold.

Yet the dependence on DC brands and a young clientele became, in turn, the next weakness. As the 1990s arrived and youth spending on high-priced goods thinned, and new low-price, high-quality formats spread, the model built around DC brands and installment payment grew hard to sustain. Marui, having once remade the question of what kind of store it was, would face that same question again a dozen-odd years later — in the form of organizational reform and a redesign of its card business.