United Arrows bets on a small, residential-adjacent format in Jiyugaoka

United Arrows will open a new women's store in Jiyugaoka Muse Square, a commercial development opening this September in Meguro Ward, Tokyo, the company said. The roughly 173-square-metre store takes the first floor of the complex and opens 17 September.

The same announcement covered two further changes: a similarly sized women's store opening in Okayama on 18 September — the retailer's first location in Okayama Prefecture — and the reopening of the women's floor at United Arrows' store inside Fukuoka's VIORO complex on 20 August, with the men's floor to follow in October.

United Arrows said it designed the Jiyugaoka shop around a sense of reassurance that extends from everyday life, paired with the lift fashion can bring — its language for a store meant to serve local, residential shoppers rather than draw regional footfall.

Muse Square is a newly built complex in one of Tokyo's more affluent, low-rise residential shopping streets — a smaller footprint than the department-store and mall floors that have anchored most of United Arrows' recent openings. Paired with a same-sized debut in Okayama and the Fukuoka renovation, the retailer is spreading its store investment across a new-build suburban development and its existing mall and department-store base rather than concentrating it in one format — a hedge easier to afford after a quarter in which the company's profit growth outpaced its sales growth.