F.I.L. Hong Kong 1st Anniversary - Interview with Hiroki Nakamura

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In a shopping landscape originally altered by the arrival of a flagship Bape retailer approximately two years ago, the Hong Kong market has enjoyed an influx of some of Japan’s most popular labels as they create a powerful fashion community around the Central dstrict. A brand with unrivaled popularity in Hong Kong, Visvim founded its first F.I.L. outside of Japan one year ago. In a celebration of this occasion, we took the opportunity to interview Visvim founder Hiroki Nakamura regarding not only his insights on Hong Kong but also the future developments of F.I.L. around the world. Also included in this feature are first hand accounts of the Folk Bear Foot FBT Shaman and a patchwork Ballistic 20 liter pack set to release exclusively at F.I.L. Hong Kong.

Hello Hiroki, first off congratulations on F.I.L. Hong Kong’s 1st anniversary. Why did you choose Hong Kong as the location for your first flagship store outside of Japan.
We’ve always had very strong and loyal customer support in Hong Kong, so it was an easy decision for us to make F.I.L. Hong Kong our first international retail location. It is of the utmost importance for us to interact directly with our customers and provide them with the best possible service, and F.I.L. stores offer the most efficient vehicle by which to do this, so we were enthusiastic when the opportunity arose to transplant an F.I.L. to Hong Kong. We hope that Hong Kong customers are equally as happy to have us in HK as we are to be there.

What are your opinions of Hong Kong?
It is a very fast-moving and energetic city. It’s modern and contemporary, but offers hints and traces of very old Chinese culture and history. It’s interesting to see how traditional culture still has relevance and influence on present Hong Kong society.

How does Hong Kong compare with Tokyo?
Well, being Japanese I obviously feel more at home in Tokyo, but Hong Kong is a nice place to visit and explore. It seems very international; walking through the streets you see people from all over the world, speaking many different languages, and interacting with each other by finding the language of least resistance. And of course it’s always a pleasant surprise when some of them are wearing Visvim…

How does Hong Kong inspire you?
Of all the potentially inspiring places in Hong Kong, I always find myself most influenced by the brief glimpses of old Chinese culture. Hong Kong’s history as an international port and trading hub have made it an interesting hybrid of Cantonese and Chinese culture mixed with western culture, so just being in that environment, if even temporarily, is inspiring to me.

What are your favorite destinations in Hong Kong?
I have a few Hong Kong style dim sum restaurants that I always make a point of visiting when I’m in town, and of course F.I.L. is a destination…

What sort of products will you be releasing to mark this anniversary?
For the anniversary we’re releasing two special products: the FBT Bear Foot Shaman, which is from our FOLK collection, and a patchwork Ballistic 20 liter pack.

What is the concept behind these products?
The concept for these items hasn’t strayed from that of our other product, or from the ideas behind Visvim, but for our anniversary we wanted to release versions of a few products that have been special to us from previous seasons, and have remained special since their original release.

Do you have plans to open further stores in the United States and across the world?
We don’t have any plans at the moment but we’re always interested in opening more F.I.L. stores. As mentioned before, it’s very important for us to have good relationships with our customers and to communicate our product message effectively to them, so naturally opening F.I.L. stores would help achieve those goals. But we’re very happy with our present stores, so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the future…