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Women's World

By Susan Thorne

The developers of Tokyo’s Venus Fort wanted their project to resemble the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Retailers have long recognized that women are the real power shoppers of this world. Now a shopping center in Tokyo is banking on that idea, and is concentrating explicitly and exclusively on the female shopper.

This summer, the Tokyo-based Mori Building Co. opened the doors of Venus Fort, a 125,000-square-meter (1,345,500-square-foot), four-story enclosed center with a women-only theme. The central mall interior is decorated to give the illusion of being in an open-air gallery with arched arcades on either side. The ceiling is painted with clouds and sky and the lighting changes at different times of day. A large mural based on the famous Botticelli Venus ties the decor to the female-shopper concept.

Fashion, accessories, beauty products and restaurants are the dominant merchandise categories among the 160 tenants, which tend toward an upmarket price point. Customers can buy a wig, go to a spa or consult a makeover specialist; and several shops are open until midnight. While Japanese retailers are in the majority, a number of Western names are represented on storefronts, mainly fashion retailers such as Polo Ralph Lauren, Jean Paul Gaultier, Benetton, Naf Naf (a French apparel chain), Calvin Klein and DKNY.

The feminine perspective is reflected in an abundance of baby changing facilities and baby beds, powder rooms and the Venus Restroom, billed as Japan’s largest ladies’ bathroom at 400 square meters. “This space solves the frustration from waiting in line,” the center’s brochure comments.

Venus Fort is located in Odaiba, an area of several hundred acres near the Tokyo waterfront that is being developed as an entertainment zone. Promotional literature describes the center as “A Theme Park for Women,” and in fact it has an adjacent first-floor amusement complex with bowling, a game center, karaoke, a car showroom, a Ferris wheel and live music hall. Mori originally contemplated development of the site as a more traditional amusement theme park, explains Nobuhiko Fujimoto, manager of the brand promotion department at Venus Fort. “Then we got the idea of running a theme-park style shopping mall that focused on women 20 to 30 years old, who are always interested in shopping. We are the first ones to develop this kind of shopping center in Japan.” Venus Fort has gone further than most Japanese shopping centers in creating a total shopping environment, Fujimoto said, instead of merely focusing on sales and property development. Shoppers “can feel like they are in a street in Southern Europe in the 17th to 18th centuries,” he said. “They experience an atmosphere that is totally different from that of their daily lives. We want our customers to enjoy being in the mall, not just doing shopping, which is just a small part.”

He quipped that the women-only moniker is not to be taken too seriously. “We don’t refuse to let men enter the building!”

The opening of Venus Fort points up some facts about the demographics of shopping in Japan. “Women have a stronger role as patrons of shopping centers than in the U.S.,” said Masaji Miura, senior manager of the Japan Council of Shopping Centers (JCSC),Tokyo. Eighty percent of married women take responsibility for the household economy, he indicated, while single women also have considerable spending clout. Young unmarried career women have particularly strong purchasing power because they tend to live at home with their parents, Miura said, giving them more disposable income than many young businessmen. Much of that disposable income goes toward shopping, entertainment, travel and dining out, he explained. Employment opportunities for women continue to increase in Japan, Miura pointed out, so this is a trend that is likely to persist.

Bold design

Ron Lavoie, managing director of RTKL International in Tokyo, has visited Venus Fort and gives the center a thumbs-up for bold and assertive store and storefront design plus an interesting tenant mix. “There is great appeal to the female shopper,” he said. “In general, this mall will appeal to women, but there are a fair number of men there, too — accompanying their girlfriends, I suppose. They can hit the restaurants and watch people, as I did.”

The merchandise mix is cutting edge for Japan, he noted, and the mall design itself is also very innovative.

“It’s added a breath of fresh air.” Lavoie suggests that Venus Fort may show greater attention to design than many Japanese malls because a developer rather than a retailer is behind the project. Retailers (who develop many of Japan’s centers) tend to be more conservative and preoccupied with cost-cutting, he said, but there are indications that more future projects could be in the hands of private developers. He said he feels that Venus Fort’s arrival on the scene may signal the start of more creative shopping center design in Japan in the future.

“There are some very interesting projects in the pipeline. In another year or two, you will see some innovative centers,” he said.

Japan may be reaching a stage (similar to an earlier phase in the U.S. shopping center industry’s evolution) in which intensified competition between malls leads to more imaginative use of design to set centers apart, Lavoie speculated.

For those who detect a striking resemblance in the decor to The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, that similarity is not coincidental. Los Angeles-based Dougall Design & Associates, theme designers for The Forum Shops, was commissioned to design Venus Fort’s neoclassical interior. Terry Douglas of Dougall Design explains that the developers of Venus Fort had seen The Forum Shops and wanted something similar, but the Japanese center is based on 18th and 19th century architecture rather than the Roman-era elements of The Forum Shops. There is another U.S. connection through Moonlight Mouldings of Los Angeles, which produced the various columns, railings and customized furnishings for Venus Fort’s Palladian-inspired decor. The prefabricated castings were made in the United States and shipped to Tokyo.

Mori Building Co. statistics show that so far, the daily average on weekdays has been 50,000 visitors, with 100,000 on Saturdays and Sundays, or roughly 1.8 million visitors for one month. According to the JCSC, 75% of visitors have been women, with the 20- to 30-year-old age group heavily represented.