Aeon Retail brings dress-rental brand LULUTI to Osaka's HEP FIVE, its first flagship in the city

Aeon Retail said it will open a store for its dress-rental format LULUTI at HEP FIVE in Osaka's Umeda district on September 17, the company's first flagship within Osaka city and its fourth LULUTI location in Osaka Prefecture.

The roughly 102-square-metre store, on HEP FIVE's sixth floor, will carry 185 rental item types, including 90 dresses along with jackets, shoes, bags and accessories, according to Aeon Retail. Dresses rent from ¥6,600 to ¥22,000, tax included, for a standard three-night, four-day loan, with a ten-day extension available. The line-up adds several brands new to LULUTI, among them the Japan retail debut of South Korean label LE ROMAN, alongside dazzlin, MERCURYDUO and kaene.

Aeon Retail belongs to Aeon Group, Japan's largest retail conglomerate by sales, and putting a rental-fashion format into a marquee Kansai fashion building rather than a suburban mall is a different kind of bet than LULUTI's earlier stores. It puts rent-rather-than-own fashion in front of the browsing crowd at one of Umeda's busiest young-fashion buildings, testing whether a mainstream operator's rental arm can hold its own against the floor's usual buy-to-keep tenants.