Eiichiro Homma

Eiichiro Homma (本間永一郎) is the founder and president of nanamica, the Tokyo label that cuts sailing and outdoor technical fabric as everyday clothing. He is also, less widely understood, the designer behind The North Face Purple Label, the collection whose tag reads "Made possible by nanamica." Purple Label is routinely mistaken for an in-house North Face diffusion line designed by The North Face's own studio. It is not. It is a Japan-market collection conceived, planned and designed by nanamica, produced and sold under a Japan-only licence held by Goldwin, the company that distributes The North Face in Japan. (nippon.com; GO OUT WEB)

The confusion is understandable — the garments carry The North Face's own trademark, not nanamica's, and for most of the line's history nothing on the tag disambiguated the two. Homma's authorship of Purple Label predates nanamica itself: he developed the concept while still an employee of Goldwin, years before nanamica existed as a company. (Proper Magazine)

Origins: from the northern coast to the Tokyo surf scene

Homma was born in Akita Prefecture in 1960 and raised in Tokyo, although published accounts say little else about his childhood. At university he read sociology and psychology, surfed through his student years in Tokyo and skied in winter. His relationship with the sea and mountains therefore began as a participant's, well before outdoor clothing became his profession. (idealvinci; Proper Magazine; Heddels)

He graduated in 1982 and joined Goldwin, the Japanese sportswear manufacturer and distributor, straight from university. His first posting was in the marketing department; he then moved into product planning and, eventually, brand management for Helly Hansen, the Norwegian marine-wear brand Goldwin licenses and produces for the Japanese market. He remained at Goldwin for close to two decades, working across marketing, merchandising and design for technical outdoor and sailing clothing. (Oceans; Heddels)

From Helly Hansen to a purple tag

That long run inside Goldwin's outdoor and marine divisions is where both halves of Homma's later career begin. Around 2001, while still a Goldwin employee, he proposed a Japan-exclusive line that would take The North Face's classic American silhouettes and rework them with a sharper, more urban fit and finer materials — outdoor technical clothing built to be worn as everyday clothing, not only on a mountain. Searching The North Face's archive for a way to mark the new line, he found a purple woven tag originally used on a women's project from the 1980s and adopted it as the collection's identifier. Purple Label's name and signature tag both come directly from that discovery. (Proper Magazine)

Homma has described the years of technical research behind that proposal in blunt terms: at Helly Hansen he handled "merchandising, planning and design, all specifically for sailing clothing," and came to understand outdoor gear's functional details — seam sealing, fabric behaviour in wet weather, the mechanics of a waterproof-breathable membrane — well enough to design around them rather than merely spec them. (sabukaru)

Goldwin has manufactured and distributed the Norwegian sailing and workwear brand Helly Hansen under licence in Japan since the 1970s. As its brand manager, Homma adapted marine-grade foul-weather gear for Japanese customers who might never set foot on a boat. Purple Label later applied the same translation to The North Face's mountaineering archive, while nanamica carried it into an independent wardrobe: specialised equipment made convincing in ordinary life. (Oceans; sabukaru)

nanamica: utility, sport and a house of seven seas

Homma founded nanamica in 2003 with his colleague Takashi Imaki (今木高司), launching it around the same time Purple Label reached retail. The name is built from three Japanese syllables — nana (seven), mi (sea), ka (house) — "house of the seven seas," a name chosen for its plainness about what the founders actually cared about. (Oceans; Couverture and the Garbstore)

nanamica's stated keywords are "UTILITY" and "SPORTS": a deliberate mixing of fashion and function pitched, in the brand's own description, as "standard wear for the current age" with a neutral design sensibility that avoids gendering or dating the clothes. (nanamica; idealvinci) Homma has framed the founding principle more personally: "if we do not wish to wear them ourselves, we will not make them." (Heddels)

nanamica also carries a guiding phrase, "One Ocean, All Lands," which the brand credits to Bruce McIntyre — founder of the New Zealand outdoor brand Macpac, and Homma's brother-in-law — coined while the two looked out over the water at Shōnan, the Tokyo-area coastline where Homma sails. It is offered less as marketing copy than as a literal statement of the brand's outlook: the same technical clothing developed for a boat or a mountain should work, without translation, in a city on the other side of the world. (nanamica)

GORE-TEX and the vocabulary of technical cloth

Homma's design vocabulary is built from performance textiles rather than silhouette invention. GORE-TEX, the waterproof-breathable membrane that lets water vapour escape a garment while blocking liquid water from entering it, runs through both nanamica and Purple Label; nanamica has worked directly with Gore's Japanese operation to develop a cotton-faced version of the fabric, pairing GORE-TEX's membrane with a natural-fibre face cloth rather than the synthetic shells the material is usually paired with. Other recurring materials in the range include PERTEX, CORDURA, ALPHADRY and KODENSHI down insulation, alongside nanamica's own loopwheel jersey — a heavy, low-tension jersey knit on old-pattern circular looms that run far slower than modern knitting machinery, producing a denser, less stretched fabric than most contemporary cotton jersey. (nanamica; Couverture and the Garbstore)

The underlying question, as Homma has put it, is why technical performance clothing should be visually or socially confined to outdoor use at all: "Why couldn't a GORE-TEX jacket pair with loafers and wool trousers?" (Proper Magazine) That is the same idea Purple Label applies to The North Face's own archive — sport and utility read, deliberately, as tradition. Homma has also stated a durability-first view of sustainability that runs through both labels: "the most sustainable element of what we do is to make garments that someone can wear for years and years." (Proper Magazine)

Reading and dating the work: nanamica versus Purple Label

Three separate bodies of work now carry Homma's design hand, and resale listings frequently conflate them: nanamica's own mainline; The North Face Purple Label; and nanamica's collaborations with outside brands and studios, including the textile house NOMA t.d., whose hand-drawn floral motifs were adapted into two Purple Label prints — FLORAL CAMOUFLAGE and FLORAL PATCHWORK — released through nanamica's directly operated stores from 11 April 2025. (nanamica)

The clearest identifier for Purple Label is the tag itself. According to GO OUT WEB, the words "Made possible by nanamica" were added to the Purple Label tag roughly five years before the outlet's 2022 profile — placing the change at approximately 2017. An older Purple Label garment, from before that change, will carry The North Face's own branding with no visible reference to nanamica at all, which is precisely why the relationship is so often missed by buyers working from the label alone. (GO OUT WEB)

Purple Label pieces are also Japan-market exclusives: they are not distributed through The North Face's ordinary wholesale or e-commerce channels outside Japan, so a Purple Label garment found abroad has necessarily been imported or resold rather than sourced from a regional North Face line. Mainline North Face product — the black-and-orange logo gear sold internationally — is designed in-house by The North Face and Goldwin's own teams and carries no connection to Homma or nanamica at all; the two should never be treated as the same design lineage simply because both trace back to Goldwin's Japan operation. (nippon.com)

As of September 2026, Homma continues to lead both nanamica and The North Face Purple Label, with no reported change in either role. (nanamica)

Why the split authorship matters

Treating nanamica and Purple Label as a single undifferentiated "Homma output" is the more forgivable error; treating Purple Label as The North Face's own creative decision is the one that actually misreads the object in hand. A Purple Label mountain parka is a nanamica design choice about which parts of a 1970s or 1980s North Face silhouette to keep literal and which to update, made by a design office with no formal reporting line into The North Face's American or European studios. Reading the garment as evidence of what The North Face itself was doing in a given season — its house aesthetic, its own archive decisions — attributes the choice to the wrong studio. The distinction is exactly the kind of fact interviews carry and casual listings do not: none of the retail copy on a Purple Label tag says "designed by nanamica" in so many words even after 2017; the credit line reads only "Made possible by nanamica." (GO OUT WEB; Proper Magazine)

References

• Oceans. "ナナミカ代表が語るその成り立ち「スポーツ服のニュートラルな要素を全肯定しました」." Oceans. Accessed September 2026.
• nippon.com. "日本版ノース・フェイスの実力とは：「高機能タウンユース」で本家・米国越え." nippon.com. Accessed September 2026.
• GO OUT WEB. "【ブランドピックアップ〜THE NORTH FACE PURPLE LABEL〜】もうひとつの"ノース"の顔を、アーバンアウトドアに落とし込んだ。" GO OUT WEB, 2022.
• idealvinci. "nanamicaはどのようなブランド？歴史や特徴を解説." idealvinci. Accessed September 2026.
• "Nanamica's eternal voyage." Proper Magazine. Accessed September 2026.
• "An Interview with Eiichiro Homma, the Designer Behind Nanamica and The North Face Purple Label." Heddels, November 2018.
• Intelligence. "nanamica's Eiichiro Homma Recounts His Distinguished Career in New Interview." Hypebeast, 10 October 2017.
• "From nanamica To The World: Meet Eiichiro Homma." sabukaru. Accessed September 2026.
• nanamica. "About." nanamica New York. Accessed September 2026.
• nanamica. "THE NORTH FACE Purple Label / Textile Design by NOMA t.d." nanamica.com, 2025.
• "Interview With Eiichiro Homma From nanamica." Couverture and the Garbstore. Accessed September 2026.