遡る事三年前でしょうか？
海外で働いてたRyo君をTCBに迎え入れようと決めた時、彼に話した事。
既にTCBには世界中からジーンズ好きが購入しに来てくれてる。
needsとwantsの関係で購入したいと思ってる方に販売することは身振り手振りでも出来ますよね？
皆さんも海外旅行に行った時、ボディランゲージで買い物をしてると思います。
でも私がRyo君に求めた事は、海外の人にジーンズの事をもっと伝えたいとお願いしました。
例えば日本の90年代から続くジーンズって洗う洗わない？論争や生機デニムによるShrink to fitや何故児島で作ってるの？とか日本人同士だと雑談レベルで話してる事を伝えたい！って彼にお願いした記憶が有ります。

そして一緒に働き出して、これから！って時にコロナが始まって彼の英語をお店で聞く事は殆ど無かったんだけど、先日久しぶりにカナダからお客さんがTCBに来てくれて買い物を楽しんでくれてました。
今日現在コロナは波の如く増えたり減ったりで予断を許さない状況なんだけど、私にとっても久しぶりの風景で嬉しくなったので記念撮影をさせて頂きました。早くコスモポリタンな店に戻って欲しいです。
それにしても50’sJKが似合いすぎでした。笑

It was about 3 years ago when I decided to have Ryo as our new member. I remember having told him things like below before his joining. TCB have many overseas customers and have many overseas customers visiting our shop too. As long as those customers come to Kojima all the way from foreign countries, they are willing to buy our jeans so that I could barely manage the communication and the customer service at shop. I guess the majority of Japanese have a similar experience but whey we do shopping in a foreign country, we get by mainly with broken English and body language. I do too. Looking back at my own shopping experience in overseas countries, I can’t remember a lot about it maybe because I’m not even sure if I could understand what people told me at shops!

But I wanted Ryo to convey to our overseas customers more of the Japanese denim culture which I could not communicate with my skills. For instance, it’s been still an argument among denim lovers whether you should wash jeans often or not, Why Kojima to make jeans, what the sanforizing process really is and what its possible effect on fades could be, etc

After the virus pandemic, we rarely had any overseas customers and I had not heard Ryo speaking English with customers for a while but we had a Canadian customer, Brandon, for the first time in the past 3 years the other day. He kindly told me that it’s quite rare in Japan to be able to have good customer service in English and he seemed he enjoyed the shopping experience very much, which made me happy.
(Hajime was really doubting if I (translator) can still speak and communicate in English)

The denim tux style on Brandon looks so cool that I asked him to be a model of today! I took some pictures of him wearing our Wrangler tux with some Japanese traditional background, which I’ll show on the next blog!

Thanks again, Brandon for coming to our shop! Now you can prove to your wife and kids that you are a model!