Chinese mainland's first flagship store Suzhou Chengpin Bookstore
Shenzhen Wanxiang Tiandi Chengpin Life
The popularity of cultural bookstores has been endowed with various fashionable concepts such as "new retail", "new species", "consumption upgrade", "small trend" and "little luck" by various media tycoons, cultural scholars and observers. I have always had instinctive doubts about these metaphysical and fashionable concepts. I always feel that they are just tools for self-media and online writers to brush traffic, not the essence of things. Instead of pursuing hot spots, I prefer to calm down and study in depth to dig out the story behind the storm.
As "the most beautiful bookstore in the world", daikanyama Tomoya Bookstore is highly sought after by people. Its success has naturally become the research object of many business operators, designers and cultural scholars.
Successful people often take success for granted when summing up the past. Ever since, we have heard Ma Yun say that "the most regrettable thing in life is to create Alibaba", and the best-selling book of success is the same logic: assume that you are a successful person to write the so-called "success truth". If you believe it, it is no different from being brainwashed by pyramid schemes. In my opinion, the house bookstore has changed from ordinary to great.
Tomoya Bookstore was born in Mei Fang with a population of only 40,000.
Mr. Yitian Zhao, founder of Tomoya Bookstore and CCC Group.
The first Tomoya bookstore was born in March of 1983, in Mei Fang, the hometown of founder masuda. But a year ago, on March of 1982, LOFT, a record rental store, opened on the 5th floor of an old department store in the north entrance of Mei Fang Station. LOFT is the predecessor of Tomoya Bookstore. Without LOFT, there would be no later Tomoya Bookstore.
The department store in front of Mei Fang Station is the former site of the wooden house bookstore.
In fact, LOFT was founded only because Mr. Zhao Yitian found that a record rental store in the next city, Sichuan Province, was very popular and profitable, but not in Mei Fang. As for why the record rental store should be combined with catering, it is because the empty shop on the fifth floor of the department store can only be rented to restaurants (because the fifth floor is the catering management floor), and Mr. Zhao Yitian finally decided to combine catering with record rental, which is also a helpless move, not an intentional "cross-border". At that time, the catering was Delhi, an Indian curry coffee shop in Tokyo, which was taken care of by Masuda's mother and sister.
Masuda's mother (left) and sister (right)
After the success of record rental and restaurant LOFT, Masuda was worried that if he opened a bigger store on the 1 floor on the other side of the station, he would take away most of LOFT's customers. At this time, he was burdened with a lot of debts. So he decided to open a bookstore and a record rental store near the station, because there is no bookstore in Mei Fang until late at night. In this way, the first real house bookstore opened in LOFT a year later.
The first book Jin Wu Shu Mei Fang branch
When I went to Japan, I visited the United States, and the location was very biased. Strictly speaking, it is not a city. It is a small town at most in China. I was still wondering. Is this the place where "the most beautiful bookstore in the world" made its fortune? It's amazing. Greatness always comes from the ordinary, not so conspicuous. There are not so many flowers applauding, and there are not so many tall concepts.
The daikanyama store opened on 20 1 1 really made Tomoya Bookstore famous at home and abroad. Unlike being sought after by young artists, daikanyama Wu Shu Bookstore was originally designed for the elderly. Now is the Internet age. Many social relationships of the post-90s generation were built online, but they didn't have familiar friends when they came to the physical bookstore. However, Japan's aging is extremely serious, and its population structure presents an "inverted triangle" model.
Today, there are a large number of elderly people aged 60 to 70 in Japan. These people were born in the post-war era, which is the highest birth rate in Japan. By the1970s and1980s, they were just 30-35 years old, in the golden age of their lives, and the 1970s and 1980s were also the most prosperous period of Japanese economy. Now these people are still the mainstay of society, with large savings and high spending power. It is this generation that has grown up with bookstores for more than 30 years, but they are relatively slow to the emerging Internet. Therefore, Masuda decided to build an elderly bookstore in daikanyama.
The planning and design of daikanyama Store revolves around the concerns of the elderly. Until now, the name of the bookstore has been expressed in English as TSUTAYA BOOK. Because Japanese elderly people use more Chinese characters, designer Kenya Hara was specially invited to design a new Chinese character shop named "Tomoya Bookstore".
The name of the Chinese character shop in Tomoya Bookstore designed by Kenya Hara.
In addition, the theme of "keeping in good health" is deeply explored in book selection, and the most comprehensive cooking (medicine and food homology) book area in Japan is created. Considering that the elderly are more concerned about "death" than living methods, special areas have been set up for books on different living methods such as religion, philosophy and biography.
Old people like to get up early and advance the opening hours of bookstores and cafes to 7 o'clock. In order to alleviate the loneliness of the elderly, a pet shop with a pet hospital was specially launched.
In addition, in order to take care of the elderly with inconvenient legs and feet, Motovelo, a specialty store selling electric power-assisted bicycles, was built. In order to facilitate the elderly customers to buy gifts for their children and grandchildren, foreign environmental protection toy stores have also been introduced.
Electric bicycle specialty store motovelo
Tomoya Bookstore also pays special attention to the integration with the surrounding environment: there are many embassies near daikanyama, where foreigners are concentrated, and all the words in the store are expressed in Japanese, English and Chinese. There are also many creative studios near daikanyama, which set up second-hand book salons for magazines, books, movies and other archival materials needed for creative work. For the convenience of creative workers, the closing time is extended to 2 am, and they are allowed to bring books to Starbucks to study and work at the same time. To this end, a theme restaurant has been opened to facilitate creative exchange.
Finally, our goal is not to create "world first", but to realize "customer value".
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