Long journey

ASIAN designers have little trouble appealing to wealthy fashionistas in the West. Last year, a long yellow cape dress worn by Rihanna at the Met Gala made a celebrity of Guo Pei, a Chinese designer. Winning over the mainstream shopper is another story. In 2005 Uniqlo, a Japanese brand with a genius for selling multicoloured basics, entered the American market with three stores in suburban shopping malls in New Jersey, only to close them within two years. It has yet to turn a profit in America with its other stores; between this January and June it closed five outlets.

Now Muji, another Japanese clothing and lifestyle giant, is expanding. It has ventured into New Jersey with a big new store in a glitzy mall. The difficult thing is reaching local people and selling them ordinary, daily essentials, says Asako Shimazaki, the head of operations in America. Customers queued for the store’s grand opening last month. But their aim, they said, is to be part of a cool, niche group of Muji fans: not exactly what the brand had in mind.

The majority of the world’s clothes, bags and shoes are manufactured in Asia. But the region’s brands have made little headway in the West. Of the ten most valuable global apparel labels ranked by Millward Brown, a market-research firm, only Uniqlo is Asian. Li-Ning, one of China’s best-selling sportswear brands, tried to enter America in 2010. It opened a flagship store in Portland, Oregon and later launched an English-language online store. Both failed. Other “Asian” labels, such as SuperDry and Shanghai Tang, are actually owned by Europeans.

What makes the journey so hard? Adjusting to Western tastes takes time. Although Uniqlo became the largest Japanese apparel brand by selling US-style clothing, it still encountered cultural barriers in America itself. For example, vests are one of Uniqlo’s most popular products at home, but relatively few Americans and Europeans wear an additional layer beneath their shirts, says Dairo Murata, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase, a bank. It was only two years ago the firm also realised that XL was not big enough in America; it now duly provides XXXL.

Another problem, at least outside the big cities, is price. Uniqlo takes pride in the use of high-tech, comfortable fabrics, an attempt to differentiate itself from other basic clothing brands like Gap and Old Navy. But at Danbury Fair, a Connecticut shopping mall that is a barometer for retail trends in the suburbs, people prefer Primark, a super-cheap Irish retailer which recently opened, to Uniqlo, which shut up shop in June. Mall visitors are conservative about fashion and about spending, explains F.K. Grunert, its leasing manager.

What still seems to work better is concentrating on chic urban centres, even though that means a smaller potential market. This month Uniqlo opened a revamped stand-alone store in Manhattan’s Soho; such shops tend to do well. In 2002 it had 21 stores in Britain, dotted around the north-west, Midlands and south-east; now eight of the ten it still has are in London.

One answer could be e-commerce. Uniqlo is shifting its attention to the internet. But Asian retailers in America face the same hardships as local vendors: matching the convenience of Amazon is difficult. Not even Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce firm, could make a fashion website work. Last year it sold its American online boutique store, 11 Main, a year after the launch. Customers declined to visit in large enough numbers, and 11 Main had to ask merchants to ship their products directly to consumers, which meant high costs and inconsistent delivery speed. It was a humiliating moment for a company that, like most of Asia’s big retailers, usually gets it right at home.