Starbucks Japan and and wander Team Up on a 22-Piece Collection Built for Coffee in the Mountains

Starbucks Japan and outdoor label and wander are releasing their first collaboration on September 9: twenty-two pieces built around coffee, hiking, and starry skies.

Starbucks Japan is sending its coffee cups up a mountain. The company is releasing its first collide with outdoor label and wander on September 9, a 22-piece collection called “a wander in the stars” that trades the usual mug-and-tumbler playbook for insulated hiking bottles, technical jackets, and a bag built for actual trail use. It’s not the first time the chain has partnered with an outdoor brand in Japan, but it’s a notably bigger swing than its past attempts at the category.

scope

The collection’s concept centers on a simple image: coffee in hand, looking up at a night sky, letting your thoughts wander freely. Starbucks Coffee Japan has said the idea grew out of the company looking at what coffee means beyond the daily commute, and finding a natural overlap with and wander’s own philosophy of living alongside nature rather than escaping into it occasionally. The pitch, as the two brands frame it, is aimed less at serious alpinists than at people who work hard and rarely make time to step away from the city, with the collection meant to nudge them toward carrying a cup of coffee somewhere greener, even if that’s only a park at the edge of town rather than an actual peak.

Every piece in the lineup carries some combination of a starry sky motif and the two brands’ logos, along with and wander’s signature reflective detailing, which is meant to double as a genuine safety feature on evening walks rather than a purely decorative touch. It’s a design choice that runs through nearly the entire collection rather than being reserved for one hero item, showing up on stitching, prints, and woven tape across bottles, bags and apparel alike, which is part of why the collection reads as a genuine joint product line rather than an outdoor label’s logo dropped onto a set of standard Starbucks merchandise. The collaboration is exclusive to Starbucks in Japan: and wander has confirmed the pieces won’t be sold through its own stores or usual retail channels, only through Starbucks’ own online store.

A close-up of a hand pouring hot tea from a dark, speckled thermos into a small black cup, with a softly blurred, warm background.

It’s also a considerably larger commitment than the last time Starbucks Japan tried something similar. Back in 2019, the company partnered with Niigata-based outdoor manufacturer Snow Peak on a pair of small collide drops, a stacking mug and system bottle in October followed by a blanket rug and multipurpose tote in November, sold exclusively through the flagship Starbucks Reserve Roastery Tokyo and limited to a handful of SKUs each round. The and wander collection is both wider in scope, spanning apparel, bags, and bottles rather than just drinkware, and considerably more accessible, launching nationwide through Starbucks’ main online store rather than a single flagship location.

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Two bottles anchor the collection, and both are built for actual outdoor use rather than desk duty. The and wander + STARBUCKS Stainless Mountain Bottle, priced at ¥7,200 for a 500ml navy version, is a vacuum-insulated bottle made in partnership with Thermos, wrapped in original starry sky artwork and designed specifically for mountain conditions. It comes with an attached cup, keeps drinks above 77°C for six hours or below 10°C for six hours, and weighs roughly 280 grams, with a wide-enough mouth for easy pouring and a body ring designed to be usable while wearing gloves. A shock-absorbing base and leakproof seal round out the specs.

The and wander + STARBUCKS Stainless ToGo Bottle, priced at ¥5,700 for 473ml, takes a different approach, borrowing the silhouette of Starbucks’ own paper cup rather than a traditional flask shape. It comes in two colorways: a navy version printed with the same starry sky motif across its full body, and a simpler, solid beige version, both carrying and wander’s brand message printed on the back. Like the Mountain Bottle, it’s vacuum-insulated stainless steel with a wide mouth built for easy cleaning and for dropping ice in directly.

apparel

The rest of the lineup leans further into and wander’s own catalog than a typical Starbucks merchandise drop usually does. The Nylon Taffeta Hoodie Jacket, priced at ¥40,700 and available in navy or ivory, is a lightweight, water-repellent outer layer woven from a high-density taffeta using nylon filament and nylon spun yarns, with reflective stitching worked in for nighttime visibility and a chest patch combining the Starbucks Siren logo with and wander’s HIKING CLUB branding. The hood’s interior carries a starry sky print done in reflective ink, a detail meant to be seen rather than just felt.

Underneath that sits the Air Jersey Pullover at ¥30,800, offered in navy and off-white, and the Pocket T-Shirt at ¥17,600, in the same two colorways, built around and wander’s signature carabiner-equipped chest pocket, a detail carried over from the brand’s regular collections rather than invented for this drop. Three Jacquard Tape Caps, priced at ¥12,100 each in navy, off-white, and dark yellow, use tape woven with both brands’ names, a design element repeated across several accessories in the collection. Wool socks in navy or orange run ¥4,500, and a single bandana with reflective print detailing is priced at ¥3,300.

 

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For carrying everything, the collection includes a Jacquard Tape Bottle Holder at ¥9,900, built from the same original woven tape as the caps and reinforced with bar-tack stitching, sized to fit either of the two collaboration bottles and bundled with a mesh pouch. The and wander + STARBUCKS Sil Daypack, priced at ¥22,000 in navy or greige, is an 18-liter lightweight pack rated for everything from daily errands to lightweight mountain use, built from an abrasion and tear-resistant, silicone-coated fabric and designed to pack down into its own internal pocket when not in use. A smaller Sil Sacoche, at ¥11,000 in camel or greige, rounds out the bag options for anyone who wants the collaboration’s branding without the full pack.

Taken together, the roughly twenty SKUs across bottles, apparel, and bags cover most of and wander’s usual product categories, which is part of what separates this from a typical logo-slapped merch tie-in. Nearly every piece uses fabric or construction techniques and wander already builds into its regular collections, from the taffeta weave on the jacket to the silicone-coated Sil fabric on the bags, rather than a simplified version made specifically to be cheaper or easier to produce at Starbucks’ retail scale.

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Ahead of the September 9 launch, Starbucks and and wander previewed the collection with a walking event on August 25, built around and wander’s own community initiative, HIKING CLUB. Starting from the Starbucks store inside Ueno Onshi Park, roughly ten HIKING CLUB members and hiking-adjacent influencers walked from Ueno Park to the Asakusa area, treated less as a promotional photo walk than as a small demonstration of the collection’s actual premise: that a change of scenery doesn’t require leaving the city, just stepping slightly outside your usual route through it. Starbucks framed the walk as an early, literal version of the “wander” the collection’s name refers to, coffee in hand, moving through a familiar part of Tokyo slowly enough to notice something new in it.

The route itself was a deliberate choice. Ueno and Asakusa sit only a few kilometers apart and are both heavily trafficked, tourist-familiar parts of central Tokyo, not the kind of remote trailhead a typical outdoor brand campaign would use. That was presumably the point: rather than staging the walk somewhere genuinely wild to sell a fantasy of escape, Starbucks and and wander used two of the city’s most walked, most photographed neighborhoods to make the case that the collection’s premise works just as well on a Tuesday afternoon errand as it does on an actual weekend hike.

A view down the Nakamise shopping street in Asakusa, Tokyo, lined with traditional stalls leading towards the Senso-ji temple in the distance.

who

and wander was founded in 2011 by Keita Ikeuchi and Mihoko Mori, two designers who met while working together at Issey Miyake before starting their own label around a fairly specific idea: that fashion in the mountains should feel as considered as fashion in the city, rather than treated as a separate, purely functional category. That premise has carried the brand from a small Tokyo outdoor label into one of the more internationally recognized names to come out of Japan’s technical-wear scene over the past decade and a half, with past collaborations including Barbour, adidas TERREX, and Gramicci, and a Tokyo Fashion Award win in 2016. Alongside its main apparel and gear lines, and wander also runs HIKING CLUB, the community group behind the pre-launch walking event, built around group hikes that treat the destination as secondary to the experience of moving slowly through a season.

The partnership marks and wander’s first collaboration with a coffee brand, and one of the more mainstream retail partnerships the label has taken on to date. Where past collaborations mostly reached existing outdoor and fashion audiences through specialty retailers, this one lands through a channel and wander doesn’t typically use at all: a nationwide coffee chain’s own online store, open to anyone with a Starbucks account rather than and wander’s usual customer base. That difference in distribution is arguably the more significant story here than the products themselves. and wander’s own retail footprint, even internationally, still runs through a relatively small set of flagship stores and boutique stockists; Starbucks’ Japan business runs well over a thousand stores and one of the country’s highest-traffic e-commerce operations for a retailer its size, giving this collaboration a reach and wander’s own channels alone couldn’t offer, even at a price point well above what most Starbucks merchandise usually carries.

how

The full collection goes on sale September 9 exclusively through Starbucks’ official online store, with sales continuing until items sell out rather than running for a fixed window. Starbucks has said the store is expected to open around 6:00 a.m. Japan time on launch day, though it’s warned that timing could shift. Given the likely demand, the retailer has built in a virtual waiting room for the launch, automatically queuing shoppers during high-traffic periods and processing them in order rather than on a strict first-come basis for anyone already waiting before the store opens. On launch day only, purchases are capped at one of each item per checkout, a limit Starbucks has used before on high-demand collaboration drops. Sold-out items may become available again later without further notice, so Starbucks has directed shoppers to keep checking product pages directly rather than assuming a sellout is final.

A separate digital Starbucks Card tied to the collection is also planned for release around the same 6:00 a.m. window on September 9, sold through Starbucks’ digital gift card site rather than the main online store. Beyond the online storefront, and wander has confirmed explicitly that the collection won’t be available through its own retail channels at all, which makes this one of the rarer cases of a fashion label handing a launch entirely over to a partner brand’s own sales infrastructure rather than splitting it across both companies’ stores.

That arrangement puts the bulk of the demand-management problem squarely on Starbucks’ own online store, a system built primarily to sell coffee and seasonal drinkware rather than limited-run technical apparel with the kind of resale interest and wander’s name alone tends to generate among sneaker and streetwear audiences in Japan. Whether the one-per-item cap and waiting room hold up under that pressure will likely become clear within the first few minutes of the September 9 launch, which is generally the window in which Japan’s most anticipated collaboration drops either sell out cleanly or run into the site errors and queue backlogs that have become a familiar part of high-demand release mornings.