"Curious Design," Winner of the "PLUG IN│Editorial GRAND PRIX" at the March 2023 Show
Praised for a Sense of Unity That Went Beyond Clothing and Hats as Separate Items
Curious Design
UPLOADED 20 JUNE, 2023
At the joint trade show "PLUG IN │ Editorial" (co-hosted by Senken Shimbun and CREDITS), held in March 2023, first place in the "PLUG IN │ Editorial Grand Prix," which selects the brand that left the strongest impression on visitors, went to women's apparel company Curious Design (President Yozo Katafuki). Working with Mizuno Millinery (Tokyo; President Keitaro Igarashi), a 99-year-old hat wholesaler and manufacturer, the two companies displayed hats and clothing under a single shared theme and earned the most votes.
Visitor comments included: "A proposal that wasn't bound by conventional planning or existing merchandising methods," "It felt like an experiential store," "Both the clothes and the hats had real sensibility," "It felt cohesive," and "The hats had an elevated fashion feel and worked as one look with the clothes."
What they presented was "a select shop built around hat-centered styling proposals." They designed the booth around the concept of a single select shop, curated jointly through the hat brand "Millina" and the women's apparel brand "Parc·un." To make the proposal easy to read, they deliberately limited themselves to just two mannequins, unifying color and material to create a cohesive look. They built out the interior and display in detail, jointly shot the visuals used to decorate the booth walls, and developed dedicated hat fixtures — the fruit of nearly two years of work.
Curious Design is a young company founded in 2019, a planning and sales firm focused on store design and experiential retail. This collaboration began in response to buyers who said, "With hats alone, it's hard to picture the full coordinate" — with the goal of elevating the pitch into a genuinely new sales-floor proposal. Their planning meetings started with discussing the theme, then reworked the merchandising to match the materials and colors of trending apparel, and worked through product assortment, styling proposals, VMD, interior design, and visuals with the sales floor in mind. That's how the new brand "Millina" was born.
"We were thorough about starting our thinking from the sales floor," says Mr. Katafuki of the project. He judged that this would let Mizuno Millinery's years of accumulated Japanese technical and manufacturing strength truly shine. "There was a lot we newly realized — about making products that go with clothing, how to present them, and more," says Yukari Takahashi of Mizuno Millinery's merchandising department.
Exhibiting led to placements at major retailers. Going forward, the plan is to "use this proposal as the skeleton and build it out further" (Ms. Takahashi).
Your thoughts on winning the award?
It's an honor to have been chosen for the Grand Prix. For this exhibit, we limited ourselves to two display mannequins so buyers could clearly grasp our design and styling proposals. We also put real care into our fixtures and interior visuals, to convey both our "design, make, and sell" stance and the sense of unity between clothing and hats. I think that's what was recognized. Our business discussions also went well.
What point did you most want to emphasize in your proposal?
This time, our aim was to present hats and clothing together as one unified fashion proposal. We started by thinking about what was causing that sense of disunity in the first place. What we landed on was item-based structure. In other words, as production and sales systems developed separately for each item category within single-item sales floors, the barriers between categories grew higher — affecting everything from how inventory is held to how planning and sales-floor design happen. We came to think that, within that structure, sales-floor design and VMD built around styling with clothing had been lost. But resolving that mismatch in practice took time.
Please tell us the key points.
I believe the single most important thing for a clothing retailer is the physical store space. To get past the divide between items and the walls between merchandising categories, we went back to that fundamental point in our proposal. To begin with, a store is where consumers encounter products and brands. At the same time, it's also a place to feel the sensibility of the era. Sellers and makers should be doing more to express that sense of the times through their stores. That's something I felt acutely both when I ran a select shop in Minami-Semba, Osaka for eight years before founding this company, and later, when I was involved in opening and running new and limited-time stores at several apparel companies. But in recent years, many companies have become consumed with building out physical spaces just to open stores, or with developing new formats, and with e-commerce growth pulling their attention, the ability to proactively communicate and build sales floors that reflect the era has weakened. There's nothing that beats a real, in-store experience. In fact, the brands doing well are the ones putting real effort and care into their store spaces and how they communicate. That's something worth learning from. I call this building a "real floor."
A "real floor"?
Rather than developing store formats just for the sake of opening stores, or relying on e-commerce, retailers should focus on building sales floors that incorporate a sense of the era and on offering a real shopping experience. When merchandising and VMD cross item boundaries to curate a sales floor that reflects the times, conversation and communication naturally spread from there. I believe how to cultivate that real floor is exactly the direction retail needs to head in.
【Exhibiting Brand】
"Curious Design": Expresses, through design, the new forms born from unexpected combinations, and the sense of relaxation that comes from wearing a "design" that lets you be yourself. A brand built for a new kind of society, one where individuality meets individuality and creates art together.
【Office Notes】
At a time when e-commerce's market share has passed 20%, how do we build and offer real spaces that create unfamiliar experiences, new encounters, and communication? I felt again that the question of what a physical store should be, and what function a real sales floor serves, is being asked anew. As President Katafuki emphasizes, what makes up a store isn't just interior design, VMD, and staging skill — it's the sum of human factors (staff skill — service technique and the atmosphere staff create), product factors (merchandising strength and sourcing ability, the quality of the assortment and curation), and beyond that, planning ability for services, events, and fairs ("soft" strength). Having a "general producer" walking alongside you makes realizing all of that far more reassuring. Curious Design's booth this time was the fruit of exactly that kind of effort. We hope, together with visitors, that the "real floor built by curating the sensibility of the era" the company is aiming for will keep spreading through the trade show as well. By Staff N