This feature first appeared in Inside Retailing Magazine. Click here to subscribe.


Tokyu Hands is cramped, crowded, bewildering - and almost impossible to categorise. It’s best described as a department store, but not in the way any Australian would know it. If you’re the sort of person who marvels at the offer and execution of JB Hi-Fi or who loves exploring the chain store’s shelves for bargains and the obscure, you’d easily enjoy a half day on the multiple floors of a Tokyu Hands store.

The tour group visited the Shinjuku store which comprises seven compact floors, crammed with a dizzying array of merchandise, much of which is never seen outside Japan. It sells hardware and cooking ware, calligraphy tools and toys, apparel and pushbikes, stationery and curtains, cosmetics and snackfoods.

Its brilliance is its product range: you’re guaranteed to find something you never knew existed and never realised how much you needed until it leapt out from the shelf and screamed ‘buy me’. Westfield World Retail Study Tour travellers bought everything from kitchen gloves you use to peel potatoes with to miniature characters from popular movies - collectibles for family members back home who wouldn’t have known they existed.

The first Tokyu Hands store, opened in the Tokyo nightlife and retail precinct of Shibuya in 1976, initially focussed on DIY lines (which explains the two hands logo). It grew into craftworks and progressively expanded from there.

Today the chain comprises 19 stores in Japan and five in Taiwan, trading as Hands Tailung.

One of the best features of the store Shinjuku store visited was a display cabinet with the best new ideas on display from across the many departments.

 

Photo credit (of Tokyo hands figures): Unfolded (www.flickr.com/unfolded)