- Information
- AI Chat
Uniqlo Ariake project
Marketing (AB1501)
Nanyang Technological University
Preview text
My name is Dai Tanaka and I am Group Executive Officer at Fast Retailing.
Today, I want to talk about our transformative Ariake Project that we are channeling efforts into right now across the whole Group.
We have been promoting Ariake Project reforms across Group companies since 2017 as part of our drive to realize our corporate transformation into a digital consumer retailing company.
The digital consumer retailing company is a new business format that Fast Retailing is aiming to achieve based on our unique LifeWear clothing concept. It is a company format that will enable us to pursue even higher levels of ultimate customer satisfaction and create an even better society through commerce.
Broadly speaking, a digital consumer retailing company involves five important underlying concepts.
First, regarding our commitment to build customer platforms that link directly with individual customers and facilitate two-way information communication, we have been working to expand our e-commerce and app membership base. We currently have approximately 140 million app members worldwide, with UNIQLO and GU apps in Japan achieving a combined total of approximately 57 million members.
Building these platforms has enabled us to receive daily comments from customers. Indeed, if we include the opinions that we receive from our instore staff, our platforms collected approximately 27 million opinions last year. These opinions and comments from customers, combined with the customer purchasing information that we acquire through e-commerce and stores, have become an important source of information for fully understanding exactly what customers want right now, and a key focal point for creating those desired products and services.
At the same time, we are also diversifying and refining the ways in which we convey information to our customers. In addition to conveying information via our app and social media, we are also developing our own information channels through StyleHint and LIVE STATION for example in order to transmit more information that is closely tailored to each individual customer and based on digital marketing platforms.
Our second pillar initiatives involves turning information into products based on opinions and comments received from our customers.
LifeWear is ultimate everyday wear that has been created to satisfy our customers’ everyday needs. Up until now, we have tended to come up with ideas for new products and improvements through design processes that sometimes involve collaborating with global designers and analyzing the opinions and comments that we receive from customers on a daily basis. The number of products that we develop based on customer opinions is increasing every year. In fact, in the past year we developed over 50 such product items. Some of the items developed for our 2021 Fall Winter Collection, such as souffle yarn sweaters and our ultra light down relax coats, were derived from customer opinion.
At the same time as we seek to turn information into products, we are also working to turn products into information. We work on every detail of every product to ensure it has the potential to improve customers’ lives, and we believe that clearly conveying the value of those products to our customers is just as important as making them. That’s why we set up a top-class Japanese photography studio on the fourth floor of our Ariake headquarters in April, 2021 and are currently working to create information that conveys the value of our products through various channels, including our LifeWear Magazine and Masterpiece catalogue.
The fourth pillar involves reforming our retail frameworks and merging our physical stores and e-commerce operations to ensure customers can enjoy fun and convenient shopping experiences anytime, anywhere.
The first thing we did here was to position e-commerce as our main business. We have launched digital flagship stores that boast a broader range of products than any physical stores all around the world and have successfully expanded e- commerce sales to approximately 18% of total sales. We are pressing ahead with the global introduction of our own commerce platforms that are designed to support this kind of e-commerce business and assume the merger of our physical and online stores. We are also gaining the ability to build convenient services swiftly by shifting our development engineer system inhouse.
Parallel to these efforts to make e-commerce our main business, we are also pressing ahead with the creation of new combined physical store and e-commerce services. Having unified store and e-commerce inventories, customers can now pick up any products that they purchased online immediately at one of our stores. We are also launching various other services that make shopping more convenient, such as sending out products ordered online directly from our stores. Our instore pickup service currently accounts for over 40% of online purchases, proving just how popular these services are with our customers.
We are also working to improve customer convenience in our physical stores by introducing self-checkouts and UNIQLO Pay payment options.
We believe our stores are important bases for our business, so, going forward, we intend to develop a new type of store that incorporates e-commerce and online-to- offline (O2O) services as a matter of course and offers a unique instore brand experience.
The fifth pillar refers to reforming our working styles so that all Group employees are able to coordinate their work based on a customer-centric approach. Under Ariake- style working practices, all 120,000 Group employees strive to work for the benefit of our customers, while all accessing the same information and coordinating their work in real time from a Groupwide perspective. In order to ensure that everyone has access to the same information for their work, we are building a framework that unifies information across the Group. We are also implementing working styles that enable all staff across our global headquarters, individual market operations, head offices, and stores to work in true coordinated fashion based on the same information, regardless of their department or rank.
We are working to further evolve our thinking and raise our level of execution especially in the areas included in the brown bubbles on the screen, including further reducing overall lead times across the supply chain by, for instance, speeding up the conversion of information into products, dispatching products directly to stores, or using air freight.
In addition, the most important element for the Ariake Project is that we base all these initiatives on the comprehensive vision that I explained at the beginning of this presentation and pursue comprehensive reforms designed to realize our ultimate digital consumer retailing company. All Group employees are united in our drive to accelerate reform to achieve that aim.
In addition, as a way of deepening and widening our Ariake Project, from this year, we have been working on merging our Project and sustainability objectives. Fast Retailing’s corporate mission is to contribute to customers and society through the clothing business. That means we shouldn’t be satisfied just with the reforms that we have been pursuing so far to become a digital consumer retailing company but should instead pursue reforms from the perspective of a sustainable digital consumer retailing company. To that aim, we intend to reform Groupwide operations to ensure that any Fast Retailing growth is achieved through operations that make a sustainable contribution to the environment and society.
We are looking to deepen our Ariake Project by realizing an operation that strives to fundamentally reduce CO2 and waste. So far under the Ariake Project, we have worked to create products based on a system that commits to make only what is really necessary. On the retail side, we have committed to fundamentally reduce CO2 emissions and cut waste to zero and we are currently working to build operations that fulfill these aims. In concrete terms, we are working to fulfill our commitments on Science Based Target (SBT) approved targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% for our stores and offices and 20% for materials, products and production processes.
We have also started working on expanding our Ariake Project by pursuing reforms designed to create a circular economy. To date, Fast Retailing has focused on making and selling the products that customers want. However from now on, as a sustainable digital consumer retailing company, we intend to help realize a circular economy by reforming our operations and responsibly collecting and reusing/recycling clothes in various different ways when customers have finished wearing them. These activities include building various schemes, possibly together with other companies, for widely collecting items that customers no longer wear for redistribution to people in need, reusing new collected items to make new clothes in a similar fashion to our recycled down ranges that we started selling in 2020, and recycling collected garments into different materials.
Uniqlo Ariake project
Course: Marketing (AB1501)
University: Nanyang Technological University
- Discover more from:
