Lcafe pitches new products for young Japanese

The Lcafe appears no different than any cozy café in Tokyo's Shibuya district, and is popular with trendy young people.

But, Lcafe is getting business savvy and pitching new products to affluent and influential young Japanese women.

It's called a marketing café, a first of its kind in Japan. Sample Lab Ltd opened the Lcafe last month as a way to reach Japanese women in their 20s and 30s with information about new products.

At Lcafe, customers must register via mobile phone and provide personal information including age, birthday and marital status in order to become a member. They can, however, use a nickname and needn't give their exact address.

Once registered, the customers get tokens based on the amount of food or drink they ordered. Those tokens are then brought to a brightly lit "sample bar" where customers redeem the tokens for samples. After being open less than two months, the café has more than 2,000 registered members.

Recently at Lcafe there were eight companies offering samples of products.