Nitori opens its 600th store in Japan, a milestone at Aeon Town Kamaishi in Iwate
Nitori's 600th domestic store opens 24 July inside Aeon Town Kamaishi in Iwate — a milestone reached, true to the retailer's regional playbook, by leasing space inside someone else's mall rather than building its own.
Nitori will open its 600th store in Japan on 24 July, a milestone reached with a new outlet inside Aeon Town Kamaishi in Iwate Prefecture, the furniture and home-goods retailer said in a release. Counting group brands together, it is the 1,086th store Nitori Holdings operates.
The roughly 700-tsubo (about 2,300 square metre) store, on the third floor of the Aeon Town Kamaishi mall in Kamaishi City, will open daily from 10am to 8pm, according to the company. It is Nitori's seventh store in Iwate Prefecture. To mark the opening, Nitori is running a discount campaign from 24 July to 3 August across Aeon Town Kamaishi and 19 other partner stores spread across Iwate and neighbouring Miyagi prefecture.
A milestone 600th store landing inside an existing regional shopping centre, rather than a standalone flagship, is consistent with how Nitori has built out its network across Tohoku and other regions with shrinking, ageing populations: leaning on space a mall operator has already anchored, rather than committing to its own site, keeps the capital cost of reaching deeper into smaller regional catchments low. Coordinating the opening promotion across nearly twenty existing stores in the two prefectures also puts Nitori's already-dense Tohoku network to work selling in the new one.