SHIRO opens a Ginza flagship built inside a renovated 1960s building

SHIRO, the Japanese cosmetics and home-fragrance brand, opened a two-floor flagship at 3-3-12 Ginza, Chuo-ku, in central Tokyo, on November 6, built inside a building dating to 1960, according to the company's October 28 announcement. The shop keeps the structure's original reinforced-concrete frame rather than replacing the building, which was previously home to the fashion brand 45R and the carpentry and timber-joinery outfit Sankakuya (三角屋).

SHIRO said it reused wood, stone and travertine the two former tenants left behind, and had a kiln in Tajimi, in neighbouring Gifu Prefecture, remake the building's chipped exterior tiles to match the original pattern. The ground floor is built as a doma (土間, a traditional earthen-floor entry space) with two sliding storefront doors that open the shop directly onto the street; the second floor houses what SHIRO calls the Potpourri Blender Lab (ポプリブレンダーラボ), stocked with seasonal plants and offcuts of wood sourced from around the country.

The store sells four exclusive scents under SHIRO's SHIKI FRAGRANCE line -- SAKURA, TAKE, MATCHA and AKARI, each built around a season and a feature of Ginza itself, from its willow trees and shop windows to its brick streets and gas lamps -- at ¥5,060 for a 40ml bottle, SHIRO said. A fragrance-and-potpourri workshop, in which visitors blend their own scent, runs about 30 minutes and costs ¥3,960. Shoppers who buy one of the exclusive scents or take the workshop receive a postcard they can write and post on the spot, from a vintage post box SHIRO found in the building during the renovation and kept in place.

The shop was designed by Hiroyuki Ogura (小倉寛之) of the design studio DRAWERS, who also designed SHIRO's shop inside Isetan Shinjuku and MAISON SHIRO, the brand's lodging property in Naganuma, Hokkaido. SHIRO, incorporated in 1989 and based in Tokyo's Aoyama district under representative director Takahiro Fukunaga (福永敬弘), manufactures its products at a factory in Sunagawa, Hokkaido. The Ginza store opens 11:00 to 20:00, with irregular closures.

The bet here is Product and Presentation rather than price: at a time when Ginza's ground floors increasingly go to European maisons' concessions and corporate flagship towers, a homegrown Japanese brand chose to make restoration itself the draw, keeping a 1960s building's bones and commissioning a Tajimi kiln to match tiles that only a long-time Ginza shopper would have noticed were missing. For a brand that already builds its identity around a Hokkaido factory and salvaged materials, that is as much a statement about where SHIRO sees its future as the store's product mix is.