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SUB CATEGORY :
INNOVATIVE COMMERCE
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COMPANY ENTERING :
HAKUHODO INC., TOKYO
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TITLE :
EASY TO WEAR, JUST FOR YOU.
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BRAND :
KIYASUKU
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ADVERTISER :
CO-WARDROBE
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AGENCY :
HAKUHODO KETTLE INC., TOKYO/HAKUHODO INC., TOKYO
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EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR :
MASANOBU HINO
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CREATIVE DIRECTOR :
DAIJIRO TOMIKU
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ART DIRECTOR :
KOGA SHIMURA
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PR AGENCY :
HAKUHODO KETTLE INC., TOKYO
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PR DIRECTOR :
MASANOBU HINO
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CAMPAIGN SUMMARY :
People who are physically challenged because of disability or illness cannot select clothes they want to wear. They have been forced to consider wearability over personal preference when deciding what to wear each day. KIYASUKU has launched as the world’s first online service created to solve this inconvenience, and it alters ready-made clothes to make them easier to wear and sends them back to users.
The world is becoming more inclusive, yet there are still many such unaddressed problems that people are generally unaware of. KIYASUKU is just one of that. This service has gotten people talking in Japan and has won Japan's largest design award and advertising award. It has raised awareness of everyone’s right to wear what they want, regardless of their physical disabilities, and the option of altering clothes for that purpose.
We believe that dressing up is an important part of well-being. However, there is no welfare support because it does not affect the continuation of life, and general repair shops do not deal with such special processing. Our mission is to give everyone a daily life where they can wear the clothes they want to wear.
To do the job, we have organized a team of mothers with disabled children who have a special knack for altering clothes. They are named CAST. By gathering CAST’s skills into the team, we have made it possible to provide one-to-one support for all types of physical disabilities. KIYASUKU allows moms all over Japan to take orders, fix them, and ship them back from the comfort of their own homes.
KIYASUKU also created new jobs for moms who were unable to go out to work because of their own child’s care needs.
※ KIYASUKU is Japanese word that means "easy to wear" and "feel free to ask".
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THE BRIEF :
People who are physically challenged because of disability or illness are forced to consider wearability over personal preference when deciding what to wear each day. This problem was first identified by Teppei Maeda, who worked at an apparel company. He interviewed 800 disabled individuals and their family members about their clothing concerns. Their disabilities took many different forms: inability to move the fingers or turn over in bed, being confined to a wheelchair, always having to wear a brace. Their family members would improvise by modifying clothes or looking for off-the-shelf items that were easy to wear. KIYASUKU’s goal is to design a sustainable way of enabling everyone to wear what they want all the time.
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THE STRATEGY :
KIYASUKU has decided to enable people with any kind of physical disability to wear what they want all the time. That could not be done by producing a specific brand of clothing with specific features. Instead, we concluded that a business model was required capable of providing alterations matching the specific disability, one-to-one.
Several apparel brands had worked on clothing lines for the disabled. But producing a certain quantity designed for a specific disability did not make economic sense, and such clothes failed to catch on. They were too expensive or not the right size.
Ordinary alteration services did not do special off-menu alterations for the disabled, or charged extra if they did. So who would provide such alterations one-to-one? The answer was found in Teppei Maeda’s interviews with 800 people.
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THE EXECUTION/THE EXECUTION & CRAFT :
Some mothers with disabled children would alter clothes they wanted to dress their children in, or that their children wanted to wear, to make them wearable for their children. They had a special knack for modifying clothes, and they wanted to make that skill available to others in the same position. We organized 12 such mothers into what we called the “cast”* and drew up a menu of 15 alterations especially in demand among the disabled community.
We thus launched the world’s first online service of its kind. Mothers caring for their own child at home alter clothes for others in the same position and send them back. (In providing alterations one-to-one, it is vital to be able to imagine how a disabled person gets changed.) Orders are placed and precise directions given entirely online. For the first time, this service addresses a problem that society has failed to deal with, while creating work for mothers that they can feel passionate about.
*“Cast” (Kiyasut in Japanese) means the people who underpin KIYASUKU. It also means the characters who appear in the story of the clothing’s owner.
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THE RESULT :
KIYASUKU has made waves in Japan by deploying the world’s first service of its kind. It has gained a growing following by fostering awareness of an overlooked issue: the freedom of the disabled to wear what they like, and the option of altering their clothes for that purpose.
KIYASUKU started small on a shoestring budget in March 2022. Unable to raise money for advertising, it generated publicity by approaching the media. It has been covered by many of Japan’s biggest media outlets.It has also won several top design prizes in Japan, further enhancing its reputation. It still only gets a modest 20 to 30 orders a month, but the repeat rate among actual users of the service is an impressive 50%, and orders are steadily climbing.
We do not consider this an issue for KIYASUKU to address alone. Rather, we hope to usher in an era when all players in the fashion field think of and act on it. We are now raising funds to grow KIYASUKU into a platform for developing the CAST into a stronger community. The aim is to increase orders to a thousand per month.
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