Goldwin opens its first directly run store in Kyushu, inside Fukuoka's Tenjin Big Bang tower
Goldwin Inc. will open its first directly operated store in Kyushu on November 21, inside a Fukuoka tower built under the city's "Tenjin Big Bang" redevelopment -- the sixth Goldwin-brand store nationwide, and a step toward a company sales target that leans on Fukuoka's Korean and Asian inbound traffic.
Goldwin Inc. (株式会社ゴールドウイン), the Tokyo-based sportswear maker that runs its own in-house Goldwin brand and holds the Japan licence for The North Face, will open its first directly operated store in the Kyushu region on Saturday, November 21, the company said in a November 13 announcement. "Goldwin Fukuoka" occupies the ground floor of Tenjin Business Center II in central Fukuoka, a tower built under the city's "Tenjin Big Bang" redevelopment programme, and is the sixth Goldwin-brand store nationwide. The roughly 169-square-metre shop is open 11:00 to 20:00.
Goldwin built the interior around materials tied to the brand's own history rather than off-the-shelf fixtures: a central display stage uses solid Kitayama cedar columns and a zelkova (keyaki) tabletop, a silk lantern (andon) woven in Toyama -- the prefecture where Goldwin was founded -- sits on the stage, and the fitting-room doors and salon walls are finished in paulownia (kiri), referencing a traditional paulownia-bamboo-phoenix motif the company calls auspicious. The company said the combination is meant to evoke "earth" and "knowledge" moving together under "wind," in keeping with what it calls its "Dedication to Detail" design approach, and that it plans exhibitions by Fukuoka-based artists working with regional materials alongside community events.
The location is the more telling fact than the décor. Fukuoka draws more visitors from South Korea and elsewhere in Asia than most Japanese regional cities, and Goldwin said it sees the store partly as a base for reaching that audience -- a Place decision as much as a retail one, opening its own flagship in a city it has long sold through wholesale accounts. It is also a small, concrete step toward a target the company has set for itself: roughly ¥50 billion in Goldwin-brand sales by the fiscal year ending March 2033, a goal Goldwin states as its own ambition rather than one this single store is likely to move much on its own.