Check out Refinery 29′s “Massive Online Shopping Guide” – they’ve picked out the best sites. In case you need guidance what comes to shopping ;)

The web stores are divided into five sections: affordable multibrand, boutique, high-end multibrand, discount and department store.

I was familiar with most of the sites but got to know some new ones also, for example Otte, Oak NYC and Aloha Rag.

Good weekend & good shopping!

I keep finding new brands often when reading magazines. Magazines like NY Times, Elle, Financial Times, Vogue, Monocle etc. I get interested, sometimes solely because of the brand name. In this case, “Bitching and Junkfood” somehow made an impression. Next step, Google.

“Established in 2009, bitchingandjunkfood.com online store and blog was launched by Bitchy girls Kath and Marion with a love of niche designer labels and vintage fashion.”

About the previous post: I originally went to the design webstore to find a perfect table lamp. I found it. Hopefully will see AJ table lamp on my desk soon…  The black one is definitely my favorite.

The new lamp colors were launched early 2010 (petroleum, red, sand, yellow and light blue). AJ Light was designed by Arne Jacobsen (1957) and manufactured by Louis Poulsen for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen.

It’s brand new and looking good. I haven’t ordered anything yet so I really can’t say how the shop actually works.

I’d say this one is perfect for shopping for example Christmas gifts. There’s a wide range of products not only covering the expensive designer items but introducing surprisingly broad amount of small and affordable things.

Emerson Made is an American (NYC) fashion brand. They provide clothing and accessories (and soon also shoes). The website looks like an old fashioned scrapbook! I like the personal touch, it’s so personal that the owner/main designer Emerson does most of the modeling herself (photos taken by her husband).

All the Emerson Made accessories are hand-dyed and hand-stitched, which makes each of them unique. Their online presence communicates that value so well by being also unique and looking self-made. Simple as that. I must have that huge pale blue flower, definitely…

“EmersonMade is a company that believes in celebrating the uniqueness of the individual, the joy of being alive and all the smallness that makes up the Big Beautiful.”

Swedish Hasbeens is a brand created in the 70′s. Sweden is the country of origin. Without a doubt, these fundamentals already tell (to us Finns at least), about an instant success.

The shoes became a real hit by the time Sarah Jessica Parker was seen wearing them. And the rest is history.

The funniest thing: I spent hours, hours and hours to get the shoe model and color I wanted. Sold out everywhere, especially the model I wanted. After hours, I finally gave up and lowered myself into checking the store info in the website. There it was: www.sisukas.net

An online store located in Espoo, Finland. About 10 km’s from where I live – and I truly had browsed through a mind-blowing amount of online stores all over. I registered into sisukas.net, found the perfect pair (amazing, the whole world was out of those shoes…) and got it delivered in couple of days. The Sisukas.net site really isn’t a crown jewel of web design or anything near that, but their customer service is brilliant, fast and reliable. What do you know.

Swedish Hasbeens has now launched their Winter/Autumn 2010 collection, looks good, of course.

First impression: Ssense.com is a breathtakingly beautiful webstore. It looks like a high-end fashion or design magazine, the only difference being the lack of ads. Perfect, sleek, stylish. Well, I really enjoy aesthetics, in case I didn’t make myself clear already..
The News-section is surprisingly interesting, providing articles on Architecture & Design, Art & Culture, Collections (fashion collections available in Ssense.com)  and Film. There’s also a Lookbook, of course. Photographers is about incredible fashion photography – I enjoyed this the most. Publications leads you to awesome magazines, previews, books… I need to get that Industrie -magazine, at least.

Take the news -section as a warm-up, the real content is better. A webstore that is so simple that you can actually concentrate fully on shopping and checking out stuff, without wasting a second on trying to figure out how to find something, waiting something to load or thinking how this and that works. This is a rare experience, I tell you, and I surf the web (= fashion) a lot.

Highly recommended. BTW, don’t, in any circumstances, skip the sales-section. 

Isn’t it the most frustrating situation when you would really like to like something, and they just won’t let you? I have visited the Muji store in the US, know something about their product range and philosophy. The unique thing about the brand is that Muji products are never visibly branded. As they say: “The value of the Muji product is in what it is, not in who it is designed by”. “Mujirushi Ryohin”, as Muji was originally known, means “no brand quality goods”.

Since all those nice, affordable every-day-things aren’t available in Finland where I live, I was happy to check out their webstore.

I went directly to muji.com assuming that it would lead to an online store. Nothing happened: all I got was a blank page. Then through Google I found muji.us, but that site of course serves only the US and Canada. Finally I found my way to muji.eu,  which turned out to be the right destination.

Muji.com

I found out that muji.com actually has content – the site just loads really slowly (from Japan, I guess?). Using a progress bar would be recommended. I’m willing to wait, if it’s somehow communicated, if it’s worth waiting and if there’s something interesting to see.

With or without the progress bar, it still takes awfully long to see the main page. Muji.com is a Flash site with two main “functionalities”: a Play Muji blog widget and Muji Rhythm. I still don’t know what the blog widget is, since I didn’t have the time to just sit and wait (it takes more than one hour to download). If someone manages to check out the widget, please let me know.

Muji Rhythm was a lot faster (but still, slow). I think this one looks like how I would imagine the brand look and feel online. It also reminded me of the successful online campaigns from another cool Japanese brand, Uniqlo.

Local Muji Sites

A significant contributing factor to total messyness is having several websites (muji.eu, muji.com, muji.us, muji.net, muji.es… ) Please use one address that just leads to the right place. I want to go to muji.com, and believe me, most of your other clients want to do that also. Of course a company in global business has country- or continent-specific organizations, logistics, personnel, product range, banking, CRM databases and all that. I just don’t want to know anything about it, I really couldn’t care any less.

Muji Online Stores

The Muji product range, brick-and-mortar stores and physical catalog are all very plain and stylish, as well as the packaging and the overall design concept. What happened when building the online store? The online stores are country/continent–specific and all of them are different. The similarity they have is that they’re plain ugly and illogical. It’s very non-intuitive, forcing you to try out many different things before finding what you’re looking for. The design and the overall look is basically from the 90’s, and did I say it’s ugly?

The anti-climax of the online experience was when I ordered their newsletter. I got a confirmation email (plain text) saying: “Newsletter subscription success” – and nothing else.

Conclusion

I think the worst thing with Muji’s online presence is that the execution of the online store(s) is so bad, it’s diametrically opposite to their stated brand philosophy. From Muji’s 2009-2010 catalog:

“Muji products came into being in the early 1980’s as a result of a new mood, calling for a return to simplicity in daily life. As life gets more complex, the need for simple lifestyle solutions becomes all the more necessary. To find these, look no further than Muji.”