The Second Design

A UNIQLO SUPIMA cotton T-shirt costs ¥1,990 in Japan. Under the same product code it sells for ฿490 in Bangkok and Rp199,000 in Jakarta: in yen, about a fifth above the Japanese price in one city and about a tenth below it in the other. In both countries the seller is a joint venture of Fast Retailing and Mitsubishi Corporation, and it decided where the shirt would sit in each. Because the code is the same, anyone can check that decision.

A KINTO Travel Tumbler costs ¥3,520 in Japan and ฿1,280 in Bangkok, about 1.7 times the Japanese price. KINTO did not set that price; its Thai distributor did. In Singapore a different distributor sets a different one. In neither country can anyone say when the brand arrived.

Both objects were designed with care in Japan. What differs is whether anyone designed them again where they landed. The shirt was. The tumbler was not.

A position is designed again where it lands

A product is designed once. A position has to be designed again every time it crosses a border. If nobody designs it, it is set by accident.

By position I mean the relationship an object forms with what surrounds it on a shelf in a particular city: what it is compared with, which tier it sits in and what that tier is called, where it is sold, and how long its price is held. Only someone standing in the destination can decide these.

What the research showed

Over a month I researched how Japanese brands are sold in Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore. I went looking for failures and found none. What I found was a quieter problem.

The size of the price gap decided nothing. Hachiban Ramen sells below its Japanese price and Royce' at close to three times it, and both hold their positions.

What decided was how the brand arrived. The brands that are mass-market in Japan all entered with an operator: a joint venture, a franchise, a subsidiary of their own. That operator can tell you when the brand opened, how many stores it has, and why the price is what it is. Most of the brands that are premium in Japan entered through distributors and importers, and nobody in the market can answer the same questions. The exception is HOSHINOYA Bali, which the brand runs and prices itself.

I have come to think of this as the difference between being present and being merely available. The mass brands are present. Most of the premium brands are only available.

The irony is that the brands that put the most design into the object have had the least design put into their position.

In Bangkok, the second design was done by Thai companies

Where a Japanese brand holds a premium position in Bangkok, it was a Thai company that built it.

Ootoya is an everyday set-meal chain in Japan. In Thailand it is run by Central Restaurants Group, and Central created OOTOYA TOKUSEN: a new name, a flagship at CentralWorld, and a premium shabu brand beside it. A Thai company rebuilt a mass-market Japanese brand as a premium one.

Noble Restaurant, which runs Mo-Mo-Paradise in Thailand, built a Gold tier of its own above the standard all-you-can-eat course. Its price has not moved in five years. When Bangkok's suki chains started cutting prices, Noble said publicly that it would not follow. Building a tier is design. So is refusing to move it.

Hachiban went the other way. Its Thai joint venture prices below Japan and says plainly that it is neither a special-occasion meal nor a premium restaurant worth queuing for. It has kept expanding for more than thirty years. Deciding not to be premium is also a way of designing a position.

Neither TOKUSEN nor Gold came from a head office in Japan. Thai operators know how to design tiers. Bangkok has that skill.

A premium brand arrives without a base

The mass brands arrived with a base: a set meal, an all-you-can-eat course, a T-shirt worn every day. Their second design was a tier added on top of something already understood.

A premium brand has no such base. It arrives as a top with nothing beneath it. On a Bangkok shelf, KINTO's tumbler sits between everyday tumblers and a more expensive one. It costs twice the cheapest, and nothing on the shelf explains why.

The same problem appears elsewhere in other forms. Balmuda in Singapore has no store and no tier, and each retailer sells the toaster at a different price. Zojirushi's official rice cookers in Vietnam carry model codes that do not exist in Japan, so their price cannot even be compared with home.

Naoto Fukasawa describes the designer's work with the word 輪郭, outline: the environment asks for the form, and the designer traces the line between the object and its surroundings. When the environment changes, the outline changes, even if the object does not. I think of the second design as tracing that line again in a new environment. For a premium object, what needs tracing is not the object itself but what sits below and around it. The restraint stays. The context has to be built.

Restraint may not travel without its context

Kenya Hara describes MUJI with the phrase これでいい, "this will do": sufficiency raised to a standard, the counterpart of これがいい, "this is the one I want." Sufficiency only reads when there is desire around it.

From this I hold a hypothesis. In Tokyo, plainness, quietness and the absence of claim read as quality, because the surrounding shelves are full of objects of desire to be sufficient against. On a shelf that signals premium in other ways, the same restraint can read as cold, cheap or unfinished.

The counter-cases

The strongest counter-case is Balmuda in Singapore. It has no store, no tier and no party who loses if the price slips, yet its toaster has stayed at more than twice the Japanese price for about three years. If it is still at that price in 2028, a premium position can hold without a second design.

MUJI in Thailand is a counter-case from the other side. It has an operator in the market and the largest MUJI flagship in Southeast Asia, yet it has cut prices year after year, aiming for parity with Japan. A second design does not only push a brand up. What the operators share is that someone in the market decides.

Royce' shows that a distributor can do it too. Its sole distributor sells through premium grocers, has raised the price, and has held the position for fifteen years. So the line does not run between distributor and operator. It runs between cases where someone in the market decides the position and cases where nobody does.

Where the second design is decided

The first design is finished in Japan, and much of it is very good. The second design is done where the object lands, by whoever is standing there, or it is not done at all. In Bangkok, Thai companies have done it well, but only for brands that were mass-market at home.

I went looking for failures. What I found was work nobody has picked up. The design problem is not in Tokyo. It is on the shelf where the object lands.

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