Weekly Blog Parts: Uniqlo UT loop

Written by: Michael Keferl on May 18, 2008 at 12:08 pm | In Marketing & Ad Trends, Technology & Gadget Trends | No Comments

Coming off of last year’s popular UniQlock blog parts, casual retail giant UniQlo has made a nifty little widget that you can customize with your own “beats” from their library. The UT loop has lot of claps, laughs, and other snippets to piece together with your keypad. Then, upload and share.

I made one under the name CScoutJapan, but it won’t embed correctly because Firefox and Wordpress, despite my love of both, do not reciprocate my affections.

Tags: Blog Parts, Uniqlo, widgets
Category: Marketing & Ad Trends, Technology & Gadget Trends
Other categories: Fashion & Lifestyle Trends

Uniqlo continues into digital territory

Written by: Michael Keferl on March 27, 2008 at 5:57 pm | In Fashion & Lifestyle Trends, Marketing & Ad Trends, Technology & Gadget Trends | 3 Comments

Surely no stranger to digital integration with shopping and branding, casual fashion (and T-Shirt innovator) Uniqlo is now working directly with web and mobile companies to further brand themselves as modern and hip.

Right now Uniqlo is offering special Google-branded goods to selected users who install the Uniqlo button for the Google Toolbar. Products range from keitai straps to special Google bags.

Japanese brand Cecile may have launched their way into Second Life, but Uniqlo has taken a practical approach to dressing up avatars in an SNS that people actually use! The mobile game-centered virtual community Mobage Town developed by DeNA has been an enormous success in Japan, and now users can dress their avatars in Uniqlo fashions with specialized backdrops. The campaign started on March 4th and continues until April 6th.

To celebrate the 50th anniversaries of the decidedly analog Shonen Sunday and Shonen Magazine mangas, Uniqlo is releasing classic character t-shirts on a gradual basis. As usual, the web interaction is engaging, and the interface quite similar to the touchscreen displays they utilize in the Harajuku UT store.

Of course, one of the best showcases of Uniqlo’s enthusiasm for the web is the “blog part” and masterful viral campaign piece Uniqlock (below).

Tags: Google, Mobage Town, Mobile, Uniqlo, Web 2.0
Category: Fashion & Lifestyle Trends, Marketing & Ad Trends, Technology & Gadget Trends
Other categories: No categories

Uniqlo’s UT shop becoming…a Uniqlo?

Written by: Michael Keferl on September 16, 2007 at 5:42 am | In Fashion & Lifestyle Trends | 5 Comments

For a guy like me who wears jeans and t-shirts almost everywhere, having a broad selection is a necessity. Being past the “ironic t-shirt” phase of my geek life, Japanese clothes brand Uniqlo has been a trusty source of decent shirts that don’t cost more than twelve bucks.

Three years ago, getting a Uniqlo t-shirt meant getting the same Andy Warhol banana shirt as everyone else, but their foray into limited editions made them into a relatively cool brand. The debut of the the UT shop in Harajuku sealed the deal.

The UT shop’s attraction was that it was full of shirts, and only shirts. Lots of them, and with a cool touchscreen menu to find them in their plastic tubes. Now, the UT store is making the next logical step and including jeans and jackets to go with the shirts. A smart move perhaps, but that opens up a question: Why stop there?

Don’t people need socks too? And belts for the jeans? Underwear? The UT shop may be slowly moving from t-shirts-only to being a hip Uniqlo, and possibly pushing the brand in two directions: Hip stores for jeans and t-shirts, and relatively conservative stores for everything else. It’s hard to fill three floors with only t-shirts, so this may be the natural progression, but the presence of anything besides t-shirts completely changes the atmosphere.

There certainly seems to be less customers these days at UT, so the novelty may have already worn off. In addition, an increasingly eco-conscious Japanese society may not be too comfortable getting each t-shirt in a thick plastic container. Perhaps they could work on a similar concept, but on a paper-bag model and using “green” materials and design?

Tags: Retail, Uniqlo
Category: Fashion & Lifestyle Trends
Other categories: Technology & Gadget Trends, Marketing & Ad Trends