News Audemars Piguet opened its new boutique on the first two floors of a ten-storey building in Tokyo’s high-profile Ginza district.
This boutique provides an ideal showcase for the brand’s timepieces, with the rest of the building housing other Audemars Piguet operations, including customer service, offices and a VIP suite on the top floor.
Renowned architect and designer Yasumichi Morita created a bold façade to highlight the building’s distinctive structure, drawing on interlacing motifs that reflect a blend of simplicity and refinement, inspired by the manual wind mechanism of an AP watch, symbolizing the brand’s experience and expertise. The designer also incorporated the concept of the Andon lantern, a traditional form of Japanese lighting, which throws a shadow of the watch’s mechanism across the façade, enhancing the outstanding overall image of the building. Yasumichi Morita is one of Japan’s top designers, and is currently going from strength to strength in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Malaysia and New York. He attended the opening with his fiancee, Mao Daichi.
On July 11, Jasmine Audemars, President of the Audemars Piguet Board of Directors, Georges-Henri Meylan, CEO of Audemars Piguet, and Go Mugino, Representative Director & CEO of Audemars Piguet Japan, greeted friends and brand partners for an exclusive evening pre-launch party. Guests were given the chance to be the first to discover the new AP building, enjoy the strains of wonderful operatic pieces and take part in a traditional Japanese ceremony. The ribbon-cutting ceremony on July 12 was attended by representatives from the government and press.
Praising this latest achievement, Georges-Henri Meylan underlined just what the Japanese market means to the brand: "We began working with Japan after the Second World War through a local representative. Then, on February 1, 2005, we created the subsidiary Audemars Piguet Japan. Japan is now one of the top five markets around the world and is the second largest market in Asia - just behind Hong Kong – and still has great potential. This new boutique will give us an ideal showcase to highlight a complete collection of AP timepieces along with all the latest innovations. The Ginza distrwict has always been a key area for those passionate about watchmaking, which makes it the perfect place to enhance our reputation and project our values of tradition, excellence and innovation."
September 04, 2007
