Uniqlock

International Japan-based clothing company Uniqlo has come up with a truly quirky, hip, creative and cool campaign and site with their Uniqlock concept. Click here to see it!

The website structure itself is innovative, but this is further accentuated if we are to remember what this is all for – to sell clothes. Uniqlo sells high-quality ‘basics’, like single-colour shirts, for example. But the site makes it seem so much more than that.

The user sees very little when they first enter the site: a perpetually running timer/clock (of the time in Tokyo, Japan), and a navigation tab in the left. What makes this site so cool is the fact that most elements and sections of the website is synchronized perfectly to the one second blips. The main page alternates between cuts from the clock to a large reel of full-screen videos of girls dancing. The cuts in between the timer and videos are synced precisely with the second blips, which are also synced with a hip music mix; all of this gives the site a playful, creative and cool impression.

This kind of hipness is taken further by bringing it back to what Uniqlo is all about – selling clothes. With a sparse and easy-to-navigate menu, the one that stands out for me is the one named ‘Cashmere Knits’ – because it’s the tab that has anything to do with clothing (implying that Uniqlo is going more for a brand culture/lifestyle than for a functional website that will sell its clothes). In this section there is a an array of photos in the top right that rotates every second like a clock. Every photo is then blown up to full screen for every second. The idea of dancing, music and time is brought out further because the photos are usually in sets of three or four, showing the same model doing a little dance in still captures.

I leave the site leaving quite convinced that that they’re making more of a statement about how hip they are, rather than try to sell clothes online with this website. Which is fine by me, because, like millions of other customers, I already know about Uniqlo and love their clothes already. =) And it’s interesting to see how they managed to work an entire website music track around a blip on every second. I even left the website on so I could work to it – you don’t get tired of hearing it. There’s something deadly hypnotic about it.