Sustainable footwear brand Öffen opens its first Nagoya store on Takashimaya's shoe floor
Öffen, the sustainable footwear label run by Kobe's Norms Corporation, opens its first directly run Nagoya store on JR Nagoya Takashimaya's fourth floor next week, backed by a limited lace collaboration built around onigiri and tamago kake gohan.
Norms Corporation, the Kobe-based operator of sustainable footwear brand Öffen, said it will open its first directly run Nagoya store on 2 September, taking space on the fourth-floor women's shoe department of JR Nagoya Takashimaya. The store will keep the same hours as the rest of the floor, 10am to 8pm.
To mark the opening, Öffen has made a limited run of lace shoes with Chikasawa Lace Shop (近沢レース店), built on its "pointed-SIMP" style and printed with onigiri (rice ball) and tamago kake gohan (egg over rice, known as TKG) motifs — black for the onigiri pair, white for the TKG pair. The shoes are priced at ¥25,300, tax included, limited to 40 pairs (20 of each colour) and sized 22.5cm to 26.0cm. Norms said the first 40 customers who spend ¥20,000 or more at the store on opening day will also receive a set of original socks.
The opening is a concession, not a stand-alone shop — a route that lets a values-led, direct-to-consumer footwear brand borrow a department store's footfall and credibility rather than build a Nagoya presence from scratch, while Takashimaya fills a category, sustainably positioned footwear, that its existing shoe tenants may not cover. JR Nagoya Takashimaya has been reworking parts of its floor plan this year, including its basement food hall, and a new directly run brand on the shoe floor fits the same pattern of tenant churn.