BEAMS, the select shop that started as a 6.5-pyeong store in Tokyo's Harajuku, has turned 50. This year alone it has lined up more than 250 special-order and collaboration items, and in August it opened a store in Malibu, California, that trades only on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The company that once imported American goods is now carrying Japanese clothes into America.
1.On the 5th of this month, the first pieces BEAMS made with Stone Island went on the rails at its Harajuku store. One jacket: 242,000 yen. On the 11th and 12th, it raised a yagura stage on the plaza at Grand Green Osaka and threw a summer festival called "BEAMS 50祭". These are some of the events a select shop that opened in 1976 is running through next February to mark its 50th year.
2.A month earlier, on August 7, a store appeared on a coastal road in Malibu, California. It opens Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. A single-floor flagship of about 1,250 sq m is also in the works for Los Angeles, though president Yo Shitara admits one unexpected problem after another has pushed the plan back. Fifty years ago the first shop was called "American Life Shop BEAMS". It measured 6.5 pyeong, about 21.5 sq m.
3.The Harajuku store sits on the founding site. When it reopened on March 3, metal rivets were set into the floor at the back left of the ground level to trace the outline of the first shop. In 1976 BEAMS was one of several tenants in the building that stood here, and short of money, it chose a spot off the main street. At the entrance, four pillar screens now rise from the first floor to the second, and below a wooden shelf inside, BEAMS glows in orange neon.
4.The sound comes from Altec Lansing equipment built around 1976. The horn of a "The Voice of the Theatre" unit, the line known for cinema speakers, sits on a black base. In one cubby, a pair of roller skates with two small American flags stuck in them. American things like these were what filled the shelves of the first shop fifty years ago.
5.The founder was Shitara's father, who ran Shinko, a maker of corrugated cardboard boxes. When the 1975 oil shock sent paper prices soaring, he decided the business had no future as it stood and opened a clothing shop for young people, naming it BEAMS after the character for light, 光, in the company's name. The first shop stocked American goods that were hard to find anywhere except on US military bases or in Ameyoko. It even carried mousetraps, which, the story goes, never sold.
6.A select shop sells things other people make. The same item hangs in the shop next door, so prices get compared, and when one store cuts, the others follow. The answer BEAMS has built over 50 years is betsuchu (別注), the special order. It asks other brands to change a color, a fabric or a detail, and ends up with goods sold only at BEAMS. For the anniversary, more than 30 of its labels have prepared over 250 special-order and collaboration items.
7.The Stone Island collaboration starts from BEAMS's long-running "crazy pattern", where one garment is pieced together from different fabrics panel by panel. On top of that goes Stone Island's garment dyeing, which colors the piece whole after it has been sewn. Each fabric takes the dye differently, so a single garment breaks into several shades of olive. The Champion sweatshirt released at the March reopening was made in just 100 pieces, each with a serial number.
8.Who buys these things? Shitara says overseas tourists account for just over 20% of sales across all stores, and more than 75% on certain floors of BEAMS JAPAN, which carries only Japanese goods. Sales to American customers rose 30-40% in a year. A shop people once visited for American goods now draws Americans looking for Japanese goods that BEAMS has chosen.
9.Sales for the year to February 2025 were 91.4 billion yen (about KRW 850 billion), up 2.4% on the year before. It runs 175 stores, 21 of them overseas, with 2,300 employees. The target for the year to February 2027: 100 billion yen. As an unlisted company, it does not disclose profit.
10.The obvious comparison came out of BEAMS itself. In 1989 Osamu Shigematsu, the early store manager and buyer who helped build BEAMS, resigned together with about 30 managers and founded UNITED ARROWS. It is listed, so its numbers are public. For the year to March 2026 it posted sales of 164.6 billion yen and operating profit of 9.1 billion yen. The side that left is now 1.8 times larger by sales.
11.Apply UNITED ARROWS's 5.5% operating margin to BEAMS's sales and annual operating profit comes to around 5 billion yen (an estimate). That thin margin is what the special order protects. Goods that cannot be price-checked against the shop next door have little reason to be marked down at season's end, and less money is lost clearing leftover stock at a discount. A rack of imported brands bought wholesale does not have that option.
12.In America the math is different. The rule Shitara has laid out: open stores in Asia, go in through wholesale in Europe and America. In Los Angeles it tested demand with three pop-ups, and in 2025 it launched a North American online store. Opening the Malibu store three days a week, seven hours a day, keeps fixed costs small while it gauges customers. The planned 1,250 sq m flagship is 58 times the size of the first shop.
13.Shitara has described the Los Angeles opening as a company that began with a 6.5-pyeong American life shop returning home in triumph at 50. He calls the country that stocked the first shop's shelves home. This time, though, what goes over is not American goods but Japanese clothes that BEAMS has chosen and reworked. He will step down as president at the end of April 2027 and become chairman.
14.The jump in American spending in Tokyo has another side. If Americans are already flying in to shop, part of what a US store earns may simply be sales moving over from the Tokyo stores. Opening Malibu only on weekends and taking its time with the flagship looks like a way of measuring that share. From the outside, there is no telling which sales are new and which have merely moved.
15.A store that sold American goods out of 6.5 pyeong became a company selling 91.4 billion yen a year, and in its 50th year it took Japanese-reworked clothes to a weekend shop on the California coast. The rivets in the Harajuku floor mark that this very spot is where it started. In Korea, anyone hoping to keep an original store in the same place for decades runs first into the length of the lease. The renewal right under the Commercial Building Lease Protection Act runs to 10 years including the first contract, and after that it comes down to the relationship with the landlord or buying the building.