The best optical shop in the world
In 2015 MIDO launched an award for the outlet that provides the best shopping experience: the BESTORE Award. The stores taking part are selected by an international jury composed of sector leaders, trendsetters and marketing experts.The winner of the 2017 edition was Globe Specs of Tokyo, Japan. Second place went to Brillen-Q-Uartier of Graz, Austria, and third place to the Les Lunettes de Marius optical center of Lyon, France. Globe Specs is described in the words of its owner, Tetsuya Okada.When and why did you start your adventure with your shop?Before starting my own company in 1998, I worked for 2 major Japanese optical retail companies. Both of these companies are more authentic and traditional type of optician where the company provide very high quality of service optically or as the seeing device to solve the patients’ issues. On the other hand, they were not providing happiness or fashion elements of the eyewear. Throughout my carrier in 2 former retail companies, I was working at their NY branch and also was in charge for business negothiation with European brands. I came to know quite many American and European eyewear brands during this period, which gradually bred my passion inside of me, which was to introduce these brands to the Japanese market. Additonally, I had oberserved different design culture and reference differing so much from one country to the other. So I also began to wish to introduce these differnt ways of wearing the eyewear and the cultures to expand the design perceptoion possibilities in Japan. So I started Globe Specs to achieve 2 permanent goals.One is to provide maximum comfort and clear vision considerino eyeglasses as the funcitional gear. The other important element is to provide uncomparable joy and happiness of wearing eyewear by providing wide variety of fashion possibilities and supporting to build up most preferable personal statement for every one of our customers.Which is the philosophy of your store?As mentioned above, most important philosophy of my store is to provide maximum satisfaction of shopping the eyewear. This will be realized by achieving 2 goals. Providing maximum functional quality by solving the visual issues of our customers, as well as to provide maximum joy of wearing eyewear by supporting to provide most fashionable design or supportin our customers to realize the most preferable personal statement.Which are the main architectural features of your shops?Most eyecatching feature of my store is the antique furnitures I collected from many different places all over the world (NYC, Portland (Oregon USA), Philladelphia (USA), Paris, Vienna, London and Tokyo). The entrance door is from NYC Rockfeller Center from 1950’s. Even the small accesorries like MAD magazine is the collector’s item from 1970’s. Macintosh vacuum amplifier plays warm tone of good old jazz music. All these mix culation of attactive vintage furnitures and accesorries create incomparable shopping circumstance. What means for your to be the winner of the 2017 BESTORE Award?When I started Globe Specs I wished to breed my store to the best optical store in the world some day. This will not be realized by the number of branches nor the amount of turnover. My goal was to extablish most ideal shopping evironment to provide maximum reliability in technical and optical aspect and to offer most fun and enjoyable eyewear design suggestion. Without the BESTORE Award, I was only able to measure my accomplishment by the compliments and comments from our clients. But BESTORE Award clearly announced that my store is providing the most unique shopping atmosphere based on extraordinally ideas, interior design, display and the brand selection. So this authoritative award selection by the objective assessment by international panel of experts just makes me so happy and proud of what I have established at my new store.Will you celebrate this award?It is our 20th anniversary this year. So, we just celebrated our 20th Anniversary and the winning of BESTORE Award on April 11th. I will attach some photographs from our celebration party, togher with our store photographs.
