While Douglas was running errands in Downtown Vancouver, I decided to pop into the recently opened MUJI store on Robson Street.
Earlier in the fall of 2017, MUJI opened their first store in BC at Metropolis at Metrotown in Burnaby. In the first couple weeks, I walked by the store, since we live so close to see why my friends love the store so much. Because of the massive line-ups to get into the store, I decided to wait a few more days for the buzz to die down so I wouldn’t have to wait so long in line to pay.
How I heard about MUJI was through friends who have visited one of their 700 other stores around the world. For my birthday one year, my dear friend Kemuel picked up some simple, yet high quality stationery items as my gift from MUJI. I didn’t think too much about the brand, as in Japan, access and buying high quality stationery items was the standard.
Though I didn’t want to add more pens and paper to my already massive collection, I was curious to see to other aspects of MUJI like clothing basics and items for home decor and organization.
While I was deciding on what organic cotton mixed socks to pick-up, I saw a shelf of dress shirts all lined up by a large embroidery machine. Curious to see what it was, I found their personalization station in-store.
I asked if I was able to bring in other items other than MUJI products to embroider. I was informed in case there was a mistake made during the embroidery, it will be easy for the staff to choose from existing stock to fix their error.
I got really confused with the letter swatches. I thought originally that the capital and uppercase letters were only available in large size and that the lowercase letters were available in smaller sizes. I hope they will do new swatches that feature both upper and lowercase examples for all sizes.
For other items like notebooks, binders, acrylic organizers, instead of embroidery, you can choose different label sizes to print with their Epson Label Makers.
From the vast selection of clothing and accessories, I went with a cute dark blue terry cloth handkerchief to embroider. As part of the process, I went over to the cashier to pay for the handkerchief first then came back to the personalization station to choose embroidery patterns. Based on number of letters and shapes, it can range between $3 – $10 for embroidery.
Because I ordered my embroidery at a time between Christmas and Valentine’s Day, the order was ready for pick-up within a few days. On average it can take a few days, depending how busy it is.
Next time you’re in downtown Vancouver, MUJI is a nice option to pick-up something personalized as a lovely housewarming gift for a surprise for another occasion.
