Tokyo Just Got an Ambitious New Department Store. What Makes It Special?

In other words: how is a shopping mall supposed to feel new today?

On April 15, a colorful sign reading "shinjuku (Shinjuku)" went up at the new South Exit of Shinjuku Station. Together with the world's largest train station, it pulls in plenty of tourists who stop to take photos — and directly across from it stands NeWoman, a department store that has just opened.

NeWoman belongs to the Lumine chain, whose parent is the East Japan Railway Company (JR East). That is how Lumine came to hold the best plots around Tokyo's major stations, and its Shinjuku store rings up the highest sales of the lot.

Shinjuku Station handles as many as 3.6 million passengers a day, and about 1 trillion yen of merchandise is sold around it each year: roughly 500 billion yen at the East Exit, 400 billion yen at the West Exit, and only 100 billion yen at the South Exit. In other words, the South Exit is not a saturated market for department stores. Which means Lumine Shinjuku and the newly opened NeWoman may still have room to grow.

NeWoman covers about 7,600 square meters and holds 100 shops, and its first-year sales target is 20 billion yen. For comparison: Isetan Mitsukoshi, Japan's number-one department store, booked 265.4 billion yen in 2015.

Even so, Japan does not have many super-department stores like Isetan Mitsukoshi that clear 100 billion yen in revenue — 11 of them in fiscal 2015. Seventy-nine stores reached 20 billion yen.

Isetan Mitsukoshi is a high-end department store selling high-value goods, so 100 billion yen makes sense. For NeWoman, which has not a single traditional luxury brand, 20 billion yen looks more like an ambition.

"Right now we log about 50,000 purchases a week, and 20% of them are foreign visitors," a NeWoman staff member told QDaily. NeWoman also shares a membership card with Lumine, which channels shoppers in.

That ambition may have something to do with how Lumine Shinjuku itself has performed. It aims at customers aged 20 to 30, has no luxury brand at all, and fills three buildings with brands from every direction instead. Last year it grew 4.1%, to 47.8 billion yen in revenue — a good result in a year when Japan's department store industry as a whole shrank. According to what NeWoman has disclosed, its own target customers are women aged 30 to 40 with high standards for the quality of their lives.

Let's look at what makes this mall special. It may hold lessons for China's fast-growing lifestyle brands, and for the multi-brand stores that carry them.

To Be a Good Place to Meet a Friend, It First Has to Feel Like a Big Garden

"I work nearby and heard a new mall had opened here. I decided to come after work, and made a coffee date with a friend while I was at it," a female office worker drinking coffee at Garden House, on NeWoman's fourth floor, told QDaily. "The view here is good — it's like a big garden."

Garden House started out as a coffee shop in Kamakura. In its 60-odd years, it only ever meant to be a place where you could sit with friends, and it gradually won over the tourists who come to Kamakura. On March 25 it opened its first branch at NeWoman — the first step in its expansion.

This Garden House is far larger than the original in Kamakura, and it has taken the best terrace on NeWoman's fourth floor. Plants spill over indoors and out, making it a "Garden House" that earns the name — and drawing crowds.

On the sixth floor, rosemary's has the whole rooftop view to itself.

rosemary's is a popular coffee shop out of New York, and it picked NeWoman for its first stop in Japan. Inside, the New York look carries over; outside is the noise of Shinjuku's streets.

One more thing worth mentioning: on the seventh floor, NeWoman has built an open-air vegetable garden that individuals can rent by the plot.

The garden is called soradofarm, and you need bring neither tools nor any knowledge of farming. Fertilizing, planting seedlings, weeding — professional staff walk you through all of it. Every material cost and consulting fee that comes up while you farm is included in the rent.

April 1 to January 31 of the following year is soradofarm's first ten-month term. You can choose among three plot sizes — 3, 4, or 7 square meters — renting for 120,000, 140,000, and 180,000 yen respectively, plus 8% consumption tax.

Shinjuku is one of Tokyo's busiest wards; some 3.64 million people pass through Shinjuku Station every day. Office towers for Japan's biggest companies cluster here, and tens of thousands of office workers come in each morning. For anyone stuck at a desk, a work break spent wandering NeWoman, drinking a coffee, and going up to inspect your own small garden may not be a bad idea.

The Brands Don't Have to Be Famous, But They Do Have to Have Taste

"This place is very different from other malls. I don't know a lot of these brands, but I still want to buy them," said a Chinese exchange student browsing NeWoman on her own.

She has a point: about 80% of the shops at NeWoman exist nowhere else in Shinjuku. NeWoman is a brand-new center of consumption for the whole ward, and it has brought the area a new style.

For a shopping center with no supermarket floor and no cosmetics floor, choosing which brands to let in took enormous effort. As NeWoman opened, one after another they became talking points on Japanese social media.

Start with fashion. NeWoman has assembled a large number of multi-brand boutiques, which already sets it apart from the ordinary department store built around brands' own shops.

Drawing Numbers is one of them. Started by Osamu Yamazaki around the idea of "high style," it gathers specialists from every corner of lifestyle to build a new kind of shop that sells clothes, serves food, and mounts exhibitions. When it first opened in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo, in 2014, the press wrote it up as an entirely new retail format. It later opened a second shop, inside the Takashimaya in Futako-Tamagawa. This is its third, and its first in Shinjuku.

H.P France Inn is a multi-brand boutique built around hats and bags. "We swap out our merchandise about once a month, for completely different brands. That idea is what makes us so popular in Japan," the shop's manager told QDaily.

As the manager says, H.P France Inn is a boutique with a real name. NeWoman appears to be counting on that name to hold on to more shoppers, which is why the shop sits beside the elevator on the second floor — a good spot, right next to the information desk.

Thanks to the customer base H.P France Inn has built in Japan, H.P.F,98 Christopher, another brand in the H.P France group, opened its second store at NeWoman, this one outside New York. Unlike H.P France Inn, Christopher hunts down jewelry from the more obscure corners of the market. Its NeWoman shop is on the basement level, where daily traffic is thinner than on the first floor. A Christopher salesperson told us the shop logs only about 30 purchases a day. For a new store making its Japanese debut, building a name will take a long stretch of time. "But we aren't too worried about that. This is NeWoman, after all, and H.P France Inn is here too."

Besides the boutiques, the other draw is restaurants worth a trip of their own.

Come out of Shinjuku Station's new South Exit and you land on NeWoman's second floor — the level that decides whether foot traffic flows straight in.

The dining on this floor splits in two: a hall inside the ticket gates, and freestanding shops outside them.

The hall inside the gates is mostly bread, sushi, and chocolate, so you have a dazzling spread to choose from without tapping out of the station. Each shop is small, takeout only, with no seats.

Even with shops this small, NeWoman worked hard to make the products distinct.

Into the hall it brought BbyB, a two-Michelin-star chocolate maker from Belgium; "Kobe Beef Meat Pie," an old-line shop founded in 1923; and Lady Bear, a dessert shop opened by a long-established maker of natural flavorings.

The freestanding shops outside the gates are mostly much-discussed names from abroad.

Janice Wong, who was named Asia's best pastry chef two years running, designed a special menu called kyoto garden (Kyoto Garden) for her first Japanese shop at NeWoman, and her classic Classic Plum is a hit as well. Japanese commenters online say it is "just like a work of art."

It is a dessert bar aimed at the high end, and the Shinjuku shop uses black concrete to build a cool, standoffish mood. The prices match: the cheapest dessert costs 1,500 yen, which next to a good cheesecake at 400 yen is not exactly welcoming. The business is still solid. "We serve about 300 customers a day," one of the staff said.

Next door to Janice Wong is 800°DEGREES NEAPOLITAN PIZZERIA, a popular pizza shop from the United States. Like Janice Wong, it is landing in Japan for the first time. It sells good pizza cheap, and it was already a topic on social media when it announced the opening. NeWoman read the Japanese public's appetite for American pizza correctly and gave it the spot right at the mouth of the new South Exit; whenever you go, there is a long line waiting for a table.

Cosmetics Shops, Yes — in the Name of Lifestyle

There is no cosmetics floor. Instead a small handful of brands are scattered through the building. That may be the largest difference between NeWoman, a shopping center built around women's spending, and every other department store.

First, who got invited in.

Aesop, John Masters Organics Select, Cosme Kitchen & Naturopathy, THREE, and CHANEL.

Organic and natural is what these shops have in common. Even CHANEL is treated less as a cosmetics counter than as a way of living: the CHANEL on the second floor is a beauty bar, and it mainly does makeup rather than simply selling products.

Cosme Kitchen & Naturopathy, on the M2 level, is a multi-brand shop built around natural skincare. It logs about 100 purchases a day.

Aesop and THREE, meanwhile, sell things here you won't find at their other shops.

"Essential oils and aromatherapy — not every shop carries those," an Aesop salesperson told us. This Aesop shares NeWoman's first floor with the popular coffee chain Blue Bottle Coffee, and logs about 60 to 80 purchases a day.

As one of the few THREE concept stores, it brought new products to NeWoman: beauty capsules, filed under "lifestyle" alongside "skin care," with a display stand of their own.

"THREE doesn't have many concept stores. These lifestyle products are only sold at the Aoyama flagship, the Lumine Yurakucho shop, and here at NeWoman," a THREE salesperson said.

Is a Shopping Mall All the Parent Company Wanted?

As noted above, the new South Exit was not a lively place. An elevated road separates it from Lumine Shinjuku and Marui at the old South Exit. On the far side of the road is a cluster of department stores with enormous foot traffic; on this side there were a few scattered retail shops that never amounted to much.

JR East, the parent company behind NeWoman, is trying to bring some noise back to the long-quiet Koshu-kaido by building a new station and then fusing a bus terminal with a shopping center. It gathered the bus stops scattered around Shinjuku Station into Shinjuku's largest highway bus terminal, and put that new transit hub directly above NeWoman.

From here you can board a highway bus straight from Shinjuku to the airport, or even a long-distance bus to the Tohoku region. The new terminal will unquestionably deliver crowds to NeWoman. Set against the relatively deserted old South Exit, the new South Exit will draw people naturally.

By building a new station and then fusing a bus terminal with a shopping center, JR East is trying to bring this block its prosperity. For a street forgotten as long as the Koshu-kaido, though, the din arrives a little late.

Cover image source: Time Out