Report: Uniqlo E-Commerce Launching in October

By Emily Gyben 04/24/12 at 04:00 PM

Uniqlo new fifth avenue store

Photo courtesy of Uniqlo

The triple escalator in Uniqlo's 5th Avenue store.

Zara’s finally doing it. Club Monaco’s doing it. Even Mischa Barton has her own e-commerce site these days. So why isn’t Uniqlo offering online shopping yet?

According to Ad Age, clicking to buy the Japanese retail giant’s wares might be a reality sooner than we think: the site has reportedly obtained an internal Uniqlo document that plots the debut of e-commerce this fall.

The document is still searching for an agency to build the so-called “digital flagship,” but the timeline estimates that the site would be ready to go live on October 15. Uniqlo, however, is denying the report.

"We continue to explore the possibility of launching e-commerce. However, at this time, we are a long way away from confirming when specifically this will happen in the U.S.," said brand spokeswoman Mary Lawton in a statement to Ad Age. "As we have said in the past, when we launch e-commerce in the U.S. we want to be sure it will benefit our customers, and currently we do not have a plan that meets that expectation."

When FashionEtc talked to Uniqlo U.S. CEO Shin Odake last October for the retailer’s New York flagship opening, the exec said they’d take their time rolling out e-commerce.

“We get a lot of requests from the customer, but we’re not ready,” he said. “We have e-commerce in Japan and in a couple of other countries. We think the U.S. has the potential to be even bigger than other countries, so we need a management team. We want to hire a CEO to run the e-commerce team. Once we’re ready, we want to do it as soon as possible.”

Could it be ready in October? Until then, there's always Suddenlee...