Because we were a small company with no money, name recognition, or experience at the time, we pursued a very careful approach to every detail.

We made every effort to devise ways to achieve customer satisfaction. We made and enclosed a handmade guidebook that advises on the best way to eat each product, we also sent an email to inform customers of their billing number every time we sent out an item, as is now common practice at other companies. We built up a lot of know-how through hard work and dedication in this way.

As a result, our Hokkaido’s specialty product website became popular little by little, and our sales and name recognition improved.
This track record was recognized, and we even won the Japan Online Shopping Award,
which is considered to be the Academy Award of the online shopping industry in Japan.

We became so well known in the online shopping industry that it was said that everyone knew about us. More and more people started to admire our website and wanted to join our company, and we started to attract the best and brightest staff.

I was delighted that we were finally on track and looking to get bigger and bigger.
But that joy was short-lived. The number of mail-order websites of specialties from Hokkaido rapidly increased along with the explosive spread of online shopping at that time.

In fact, there emerged more than 500 companies,
and a number of websites looked exactly like our well-known website.

They not only copied the design of our websites, but even the content of the follow-up emails and the design of the message cards enclosed in the products looked exactly the same.
Customers who hadn’t seen our website before couldn’t tell which one was the original.
Our sales that had just started to rise soon hit a plateau and then gradually declined.

I knew that we had to do something about it and make the next move.

From there, we launched a variety of new businesses.
One of them was a website for non-standard product gourmet. We stocked and sold at a low-price non-standard product gourmet food that looks bad, but tastes fine, such as crabs with broken legs, broken cod roe, and rice crackers broken during the manufacturing process.

As Japan was undergoing a recession at that time following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the website attracted the attention of the media as a leading example of smart consumption techniques.

In one year, the business was featured more than 30 times on all sorts of TV programs, from hard-hitting documentaries to variety shows, such as Gaia No Yoake and Minomonta No Asa Zuba! , triggering a nationwide non-standard product gourmet boom.

In those days, we had TV interviews almost every week, and it was such a bizarre situation, having a TV cameraman in the office every day.

Although I thought we were going to make it this time, it didn’t take long to realize that this was not the case.
Ultimately, this business model was imitated as we became famous. Although our website was the only one like it that was out there before it was featured on TV, a year later, there were dozens of non-standard product gourmet websites, including some of the biggest companies.

As a result, our growth soon hit a plateau again, and then gradually declined.