New Balance: Tokyo T-House And Beijing NB Grey

Since 2020, New Balance, which was once so popular and experienced a long period of "tepid", has regained its popularity and popularity in the field of sneakers.

It not only opened a new concept store "T-HOUSE New Balance" in Tokyo, Japan, but also opened a global "gray" themed NB Grey concept store in Sanlitun, Beijing last week. Of course, a series of co branding cooperation is also necessary.

　　 Global NB Grey concept store landed in Beijing

On September 10, New Balance opened the global NB Grey flagship store in Taikoo Li, Sanlitun, Beijing. This is a comprehensive sensory experience store, presenting the lifestyle recognized by New Balance from the perspective of vision, smell and hearing.

This is the first time New Balance has built a trendy retail space with GREY as the core concept. GREY, as a representative and recognizable color of the brand, runs through two product lines of leisure life and professional sports.

The store follows the gray system and wood color throughout the space, showing the tone of simple trend and starting the urban sports trend. It is mainly divided into four functional areas, and also divided into shoes and co branded areas.

NB GREY represents the products of New Balance worldwide. It not only sells products in Japan, the United States, Britain and other cultural regions, but also sells 9 BOX, Incomplete&Waist To Toe, TDS series and other Japanese products.

It is reported that the signal that NB GREY stores want to convey to consumers is: "a hybrid modern life concept from city to nature, from sports to leisure".

Before the opening of the Beijing store, New Balance opened a more special concept store in Tokyo in August this year.

　 Tokyo T-HOUSE: Retail+Art+Innovation Studio+

"T-HOUSE New Balance" is a new concept store jointly created by New Balance and Tokyo Design Studio, a design unit. It is a space for TAs to display brand concepts and convey information. This store is different from the previous New Balance store in terms of design, concept and product, and has a special positioning.

The store is located in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan (an old city, far away from the traditional shopping area). Its facade is a pure white single family building with minimal design. There is no shop sign, only a wooden door leading to the store, which can be said to be a very low-key but modern existence.

It is reported that the predecessor of the building is a 122 year old Japanese traditional KURA warehouse, so the interior decoration is also full of historical traces, using a large number of wooden structures combined with modern building materials. The local architectural designers combined traditional Japanese architecture with modern elements to reshape T-HOUSE.

T-House's "T" stands for "Tea", "Tokyo Design Studio" and "Transcendence". The design inspiration of the store comes from the Japanese teahouse.

T-HOUSE New Balance is not a simple concept store, nor just an experience store, but covers the retail area showroom、 Art space, innovative studio and other functions, fully understand the charm of the brand from the product, architecture, art itself.

The first floor mainly sells seasonal products in limited quantities; The second floor is the design studio of Tokyo Design Studio.

As a store combining retail and art space, T-HOUSE brings innovative products and presents the Lifestyle product series under the brand.

　　 What makes New Balance hot again?

In addition to the opening of brand concept stores and flagship stores in succession, the success of New Balance this year may be due to a series of marketing methods and new actions, such as its continuous blockbuster co branding plans, and New Balance 327, one of this year's popular series.

With a high cost performance ratio of 759 yuan, this retro running shoe, New Balance327, has a retro fashionable look and more than ten colorful color choices, which caters to the current young consumers' pursuit of "trendy shoes". The series also launched a joint brand cooperation with the Paris fashion brand Casablanca and the Hong Kong fashion brand Madness, which caused a lot of repercussions.

New Balance, founded in Boston in 1906, has also been a century old brand. In addition to American and British products, New Balance's Japanese products have always been in the forefront of the trend. The Japanese market has always been one of its important overseas markets, and the global limited styles almost come from Japan. This is thanks to New Balance's global LIFESTYLE product design department established in Tokyo in 2012, which is also one of T-HOUSE's partners "Tokyo Design Studio".

Joint names and restrictions have always been the attraction of New Balance Japan. Like this T-HOUSE, it not only brought sneaker styles, such as the first pair of "make in Japan" NB sneakers M1300 JPJ, but also made great progress in clothing series and co branding cooperation, bringing many products.

New Balance has always paid full attention to the manufacturing of running shoes, and the "Modern Classic" clothing series recently launched in the Japanese market is inspired by kimonos and integrates Japanese culture into casual clothing. Recently, there are also co branded clothing series with Japanese outdoor brand Snow Peak.

In addition, New Balance has also worked with ceramic artist Shiho Takada to create utensils. The portable tea bag set, as well as the magazine NOT FAR, which is provided free of charge, and the global cooperation series that have not yet been released in Japan, can be purchased in this store in cooperation with Japanese tea brand NAKAMURA, which has a 100 year history of tea farms in Shizuoka County.

With the trend of youth, even New Balance has to try its best to capture the hearts of consumers of Generation Z. In addition to making efforts in design, the brand spokesperson has also found Zhang Zifeng, one of the representatives of Generation Z, born in 2001. It can be seen that the brand also attaches great importance to women's consumption market share. At the same time, New Balance has also invested heavily in popular variety shows, such as Youth Has You, China Has Hip Hop, etc. All these actions are enough to show that New Balance is trying to make the brand more interesting and more popular.