Ito En opens a tiny tea-concept shop, Tea Diary, on Daimaru Kobe's ground floor
Ito En is opening Tea Diary, a 6.2-square-metre specialty tea counter built around a Kobe travel theme, on the ground floor of J. Front Retailing's Daimaru Kobe on November 4 — a small but prime-position bet by a beverage major on its own single-brand retail format.
Ito En Food Service Co., a group company of Ito En, said it will open Tea Diary, a specialty tea shop, on the ground floor of Daimaru Kobe on November 4, according to a release dated October 23. The counter occupies just 6.2 square metres and will run the same hours as the department store.
The shop sells about 14 varieties of bagged tea — Japanese green tea, black tea, flavoured tea and rooibos — with featured blends such as Darjeeling and a honey black tea priced at 702 yen for a five-bag pack, an eight-tea gift box at 5,412 yen, and mixed sets of three or five varieties. Packaging carries illustrations by Kobe-based illustrator Ayumi Arimura (有村綾) depicting a girl travelling the city, and the interior is done in white and navy, a reference to the ijinkan (異人館), Kobe's cluster of Western-style merchant houses. Ito En is running a separate signing event on opening day, and the first 1,000 customers to buy something receive a postcard.
A beverage major taking a ground-floor tenancy this small, inside a J. Front Retailing department store, with a retail format of its own rather than a wholesale beverage counter, is a compact but telling move: it is the kind of single-brand pilot manufacturers increasingly use to test a direct retail presence on prime floor space without committing to a larger footprint. Whether a 6.2-square-metre counter earns Ito En a bigger shop elsewhere will depend on how it performs once the opening-week attention passes.