I still remember the talk like it was yesterday… Back in November of 2008, I was sitting in the offices of a well-known Japanese streetwear magazine. We were discussing what was slated to be big in 2009. Among the brands mentioned by my Japanese editor counterpart was Bedwin/Deluxe and WACKOMARIA, both sharing a somewhat similar heritage/trad approach to their aesthetics. Fast forward to over 12 months later… while WACKOMARIA is still on the radar (the brand was created by at least one or maybe more former Japanese football/soccer players I believe), Bedwin and Deluxe have blown up quite nicely. However, as I looked further into the matter, what was a simple and honest prediction, perhaps had some underlying information to it which wasn’t disclosed.
In one of the places around the world that still maintain some sort of strong magazine culture, Japan’s affinity for magazines are dying off like other places around the world. However perhaps not at the same rate as some of its counterparts. I largely equate commuter countries/cities as being ripe for magazines meaning Hong Kong has a thriving market for magazines as well. If you’re taking the train/bus/subway and don’t need to drive, you’re obviously going to look to kill time. Luckily you don’t have to worry about being behind the wheel either Nobody will bust out a Kindle that’s for sure, magazines, are cheap, easy to consume and disposable forms of entertainment.
If you dig a little deeper into how the Japanese magazine market works, you’ll realize that the consumer market on the whole looks to its media on what to buy, where to buy, when to buy it and how to wear. Trends start very much so in the latest pages of magazines. Here are a few excerpts from clast and a few different articles that further outline the situation. clast is a Japanese-based agency which deals quite extensively in branding and media with some interesting articles, it’s just too bad they update so infrequently.
Whether or not booms seem like a product of media excess, the market ended up organizing itself around predictable patterns of short-lived trends. By setting up each year as the nest for a different “boom,” cultural producers were able to reduce risk. The usually fickle youth consumer behavior could become as planning-friendly as steel or coal. No one could perfectly forecast exactly what would boom in a few years’ time, but they knew something would.
Japanese companies in the cultural industries have not always succeeded in pushing products on consumers, but they should probably take most of the credit for creating the society-engulfing booms that really mattered. Now that consumers are much more dispassionate about following media-created styles (either a sign of Western-style individualism or hikkikomori-style solipsism, depending on whom you ask), the result has not been more consumer-driven booms, but less booms total. Booms always needed media and manufacturer coordination to make the boom visible on national level, put the products in stores at the ideal time, and then pull the rug out from under everyone in a year’s time to make room for something new. Now that consumers are behaving more freely from the “mass media,” tastes have diffused and consumer needs no longer change on the exact same schedule as the industry’s seasonal framework. Booms no longer fit the market.
The latter half of the second quote goes against what I’ve sort of mentioned but I still think that the institutionalization of buying what magazines tell you doesn’t disappear overnight.
Article #2 – AneCan: Media Leads Production and Consumption
General lessons to learn from this successful media-manufacturer-retailer coordination:
-Japanese magazines often define markets rather than respond to them. In this case, a successful magazine did not “curate” or style its own look out of pre-existing brands but instead coordinated the creation of new brands appropriate for its readership.
-Consumers will gravitate towards the purchase of specific items featured in the magazine as these are seen as perfectly “safe.”
I don’t think that Bedwin and Deluxe would have fell flat on their face without the help of a strong push from the Japanese magazine market, cause the product is by-far some of the best out there. The whole brand is so well done by Bebetan and Hue and everything is packaged properly… but I’m not sure to what extent they would have had such accelerated growth without the involvement of magazines. I’m sure it perhaps helps to some degree. Now I don’t know if/how much the aforementioned brands made it into magazines over the last year cause I don’t read every single issue, but it was more so the last few months and the relatively recently launched online presence for WARP which got me thinking. 68&BROS has seen an EXTREMELY solid push from WARP… the screen-grabs don’t lie. So addressing the business plan aspect of this post’s title, yes, editorial does sometimes get paid for and yes that’s how it works, just nobody talks about it obviously. Personally I don’t know much about the brand 68&BROS and I’m not sure if I will help add fuel to the fire to be frank. But if there’s anybody that does “aditorial” properly, it is Japanese magazine. Go and drop your $10 USD + on that next issue of SENSE and tell me you aren’t blown away.
I wanted to write this for some time but just been so busy with other shit… glad to get this one off the chest I guess.
