intelligence magazine sits down with nanamica's Eiichiro Homma to talk about the brand's retrospective book, 2003-2017
intelligence magazine recently sat down with Eiichiro Homma, managing director of nanamica and The North Face Purple Label to talk about the new nanamica retrospective book which will be released to commemorate the label's 15th anniversary, his days before he got into fashion as well as what the future holds for the brand.
Check out a few excerpts and photos of the interview below and head over to intelligence to read the piece in full.
Do you come from a fashion or design background?
No, actually my major was Sociology and Psychology. Before I joined the industry, my interest was in things like organising events and promotions, but the company appointed me brand director for the design team. I was always interested in making people say ‘wow,’ essentially making people happy. There were very few technical clothing designers in Japan at that time, I learned a lot just through my own study and over time it improved, also my design team partner, she was older than me and she taught me a lot.
Where did the idea for the book come from?
With a lot of Japanese companies, space is an issue so we don’t keep full archives unlike the big brands in Italy who have warehouses to store their histories like museums. After a while we started to forget all those early pieces, the idea was originally to create the book for our tenth anniversary however we were incredibly busy at that time moving offices and opening the store. Books take a long time to make, years in fact so we eventually decided to do it for our fifteenth anniversary.
You asked me earlier about the difference between nanamica and North Face Purple. North Face has a really strong reputation around the world and a strong demand. Sometimes people recognise us as North Face Purple or North Face Japan, even my friends introduce me as Eiichiro from North Face when I’m abroad because that’s easy to understand and everyone knows the brand. So I was concerned with preserving the nanamica brand and establishing our separate identity. That was part of the motivation behind creating this book.
What’s next for nanamica?
We’ve been in the overseas market since 2010, we are stocked in 27 countries for this season, even more for Autumn/Winter. Our collection is getting bigger and bigger so we have to communicate the reality of the nanamica world to our global customer which means we should have a retail opportunity in North America or Europe, some kind of showroom rather than a store perhaps.
I’ll certainly be doing more travelling but you know, I don’t have any stress with work because my hobby and my job are combined, some people say that’s a crazy way to live but I really enjoy it.
