“Horizon” Campaign, Mongolia, poster, 2003.
MUJI is not “no design,” but more so an empty vessel. They imbue this emptiness to receive whatever vision the customer may have in mind, while not supporting any interpretation, but allowing all of them to exist equally. It allows MUJI’s products to have an infinite flexibility that accepts and adjusts to any purpose—not limiting the company to one target audience.
As Kenya Hara, Art Director at MUJI says,
“The essence of MUJI’s spirit is its ability to create one simple table about which many different people can say, “this table suits my lifestyle.” Its essence lies in acceptance, not assertion. The functions of a MUJI product are not scrupulously laid out for the user. Instead, the product fountains when acted upon by the user’s intention and purpose.”
—Kenya HARA, p.118, Muji: Morrison, Jasper, Fukasawa, Naoto, Hara, Kenya
This identity applies not only to their products, but also their advertising. The image above from their 2003 “Horizon” campaign embodies MUJI’s embodiment of the empty vessel. The parries of Mongolia is an extreme Visio of earth and mankind: “there is nothing, yet at the same time there is everything.” At MUJI, they measure “communication’s success not by how well a message was conveyed, but by how many different images it was able to accept.”
“MUJI is simple, but MUJI is not simple for the sake of minimalism as a style… MUJI has been called many things: low-consumption, inexpensive, simple, anonymous, natural. In our vision, MUJI is defined by none of the adjectives alone, but is in accordance with them all.”
—HARA, p.129