World Group's off-price arm &Bridge tests a mall pop-up in Yokohama
AndBridge, World Group's excess-inventory format, has opened a temporary womenswear-led store inside a Yokohama shopping centre's event space rather than a standalone site — a small but telling test of how a major Japan apparel group works through surplus stock.
AndBridge, the off-price retail subsidiary of World Group, opened a temporary store on 10 August inside Seibu Higashi-Totsuka Shopping Centre in Yokohama, according to a company release. The roughly 114-tsubo (about 377 sqm) shop occupies an event space on the mall building's fourth floor and will run for a limited period, though the company did not specify a closing date.
The assortment leans towards womenswear, with menswear and household goods filling out the rest, drawn from surplus stock across multiple brands, the company said. Summer items are marked down by as much as 90%, with an additional 10-20% off for multi-item purchases and a further 10% off for shoppers who register a LINE account, according to the release.
AndBridge frames the format as a way to make effective use of surplus inventory while cutting disposal waste, the company said in the release — the now-familiar sustainability rationale off-price retailers use to justify deep discounting without diluting a parent brand's full-price stores.
The choice of venue is the more interesting signal. Rather than commit to a standalone lease, AndBridge is renting an event space inside an existing shopping centre — a low-capital way for World Co., one of Japan's largest apparel groups, to test off-price demand suburb by suburb before deciding whether the format deserves permanent floor space. For a mall operator like Seibu Higashi-Totsuka, filling an event space with a deep-discount draw is also a straightforward footfall play, at a time when many regional shopping centres are working harder to keep browsers coming in between anchor-tenant renewals.