We featured Japanese flash sales e-commerce startup Monoco recently when they announced they had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Fuji Startup Ventures. At the time it was mentioned that Monoco would be launching its Monoco Showroom in Shibuya, so we were delighted to receive an invite to swing by the opening this past Friday. The company sells items from designers around the world, their new showroom is a place where you can see some of them on display. But it also doubles as an office, and considering the beautiful furnishings there you’d be hard pressed to find a nicer place to work.
Many of our readers may already be aware that Monoco was previously known as Flutterscape. I had a chance to speak to Monoco co-founder and CTO, Ari Awan, about that transition. He explains that the process was anything but simple:
We started Flutterscape in February of 2011, but in February of last year we figured it wasn’t working. User growth was ok, but transactions and revenue were not growing. It was really hard to raise funds at the time, so we really had to figure out something.
Flutterscape used a C2C model that let indie designers and makers export their products abroad. But this market turned out to be not especially big. Ari says one of their advisers introduced him to Fab as a possible model, and given that they had so many designers already, maybe they could go in a B2C direction.
Two weeks of sales for Monoco were the same as Flutterscape’s sales for a year.
Of course, business is rarely that simple. Ari says that he brought the idea to the board and they just didn’t want to do it. While Ari is not a particularly tall guy, he does give the distinct impression of being someone you don’t want to mess with. That turned out to be the case here, as what happens next is truly badass:
I asked our people to come in to the office on on the weekends. I said we have to do something or else we’ll go bankrupt. We started working on Monoco secretly, building it two weeks. We started selling things but no one knew it was us. Two weeks of sales for Monoco were the same as Flutterscape’s sales for a year.
From there, selling the transition to Monoco to the board was obviously not a hard sell. The site now has 87,000 members in total, with the average user falling in the 25 to 40 demographic. They have over 1100 partner designers, the vast majority (about 1000) located outside Japan. This means that many of the 50,000 items Monoco has on sale are not otherwise available for purchase in Japan, making it a great destination for design-minded consumers on the lookout for something extra special. There are now over 50,000 items available for purchase, with the most popular ones being in the categories of fashion accessories, t-shirts, posters and art, and smartphones accessories.
The Monoco event was attended by lots of folks from the design industry [1], and both Ari and CEO Takehiro Kakiyama addressed the crowd on Friday night. Ari spoke to the company’s mission statement, and what he hopes Monoco can do for the design community in general.
Monoco CTO, Ari Awan
There are some who see us as a threat disrupting traditional design retail and the supply chain. Yes definitely we cause some disruption but I think what we are trying to do is to disrupt people’s perception of design.
I think the more people talk about design the better awareness there is. And the more awareness that is spread about design, then the bigger the pie is for everyone in the industry.
Stay tuned to see how they do in fulfilling their mission. Given their progress to date, I wouldn’t bet against them.
You can find more pictures from the event below, including many of the design pieces that were spotlighted at the showroom.
CEO Takehiro Kakiyama
I’ve never seen so many scarves worn indoors before! ↩
See the original story in Japanese. Docomo Innovation Village, the incubation initiative of Japan’s NTT Docomo, hosted a demo day event on Thursday, showcasing startups graduating from the first batch of its incubation program. The event invited a number of guest speakers and judges including Docomo president Kaoru Kato, 500 Startups’ partner George Kellerman, and Skype co-founder/Atomico partner Niklas Zennström. Presenters were the six startups that qualified for the first batch back in April. It has been interesting to see how they have evolved over the past several months. Based on the qualification by the telco’s employees and the initiative’s mentors, grand prize and the ‘best stretch’ awards were presented to two out of the participating six startups. The award winner will receive a trip to Silicon Valley including a visit to 500 startups’ incubation office. Grand prize winner: Pairy ¶ Pitched by Toshimasa Takahashi, Pairy is a mobile app for couples that lets them to look back on the events they shared together. According to a survey, more than 40% of all couples in Japan look history back to see what they have talked about as far as a month back on social media. But it’s not easy to…
Docomo Innovation Village, the incubation initiative of Japan’s NTT Docomo, hosted a demo day event on Thursday, showcasing startups graduating from the first batch of its incubation program. The event invited a number of guest speakers and judges including Docomo president Kaoru Kato, 500 Startups’ partner George Kellerman, and Skype co-founder/Atomico partner Niklas Zennström.
Presenters were the six startups that qualified for the first batch back in April. It has been interesting to see how they have evolved over the past several months.
Based on the qualification by the telco’s employees and the initiative’s mentors, grand prize and the ‘best stretch’ awards were presented to two out of the participating six startups. The award winner will receive a trip to Silicon Valley including a visit to 500 startups’ incubation office.
Pitched by Toshimasa Takahashi, Pairy is a mobile app for couples that lets them to look back on the events they shared together. According to a survey, more than 40% of all couples in Japan look history back to see what they have talked about as far as a month back on social media. But it’s not easy to retrieve your interactions from all the messages you’ve exchanged with other people. Pairy is designed specifically for interactions within couples, with the intention of eliminating this searching process.
To date the startup has acquired 120,000 users, which rose by 156% three months ago when it joined the incubation program. The service’s main userbase is people in their 20s. It has 6 million monthly pageviews and there are 50,000 ‘date spots’ registered.
Their users are growing by 120% a month without any massive promotional activities, and they expect it to reach one million and become the top apps of its kind by October of 2014. The startup is planning to monetize by adding three functions: photobook creation, premium service, and advertising. It’s now looking to raise 60 million yen ($600,000) from potential investors, with plans to launch another app for couples to use after they get married.
Presented by Hokuto Inoue, Coromo allows you to change your smartphone homescreen to suit any occasion: work, leisure, or home — all using a NFC card. If you install the app, you can create your own home screen with HTML5 as well.
The startup recognizes that a home screen is something that you see more than any other apps or screen. It is planning to partner with conferences or venues and provide them with this solution that can show event updates to their attendees. According to Inoue, it has been decided that this year’s Tokyo Motor Show will provide updates to their attendees using the platform. When you leave the event venue, you will be sent to the platform’s e-commerce site, the Coromo Store, in the app. This helps user retention and B2C-based monetization. Even if smartphones are replaced by wearable devices in the future, there will be still potential in the business since the concept of homescreens will remain.
DecoAlbum is a mobile app that allows users to decorate and share photos. Readers may recall that we interviewed them back in May. To date the app has 2 million users, almost double what it was before joining the incubation program. 70% of users are from outside Japan, although Japan and Thailand represent the biggest userbases.
The company recently unveiled a mobile app called Drawchat, which lets users to exchange hand-drawn images using Facebook’s messaging feature. They plan to keep introducing apps using Facebook APIs, and they hope to reach 10 million downloads by 2014.
FunPicty is a set of funny photo apps, available for both iOS and Android. Most funny photo decoration apps are usually short-lived. For developers, it’s tough to see how to prolong the life of such apps. So the startup put a bunch of these apps together in a single app, thus creating a platform where users can share funny apps.
To date it has seen 5 million downloads and acquired 300,000 monthly active users. The company expects this will reach 1 million users by 2014. The service was pitched by Kou Honna, of Soda.
Kumitasu is an app for people with a food allergy, helping you buy allergy-free ingredients from e-commerce sites by specifying what allergen ingredients are contained in a food product. The idea was pitched by Mayu Ishikawa of Willmore.
In Japan, 14.2% of households have children with a food allergy, and at schools many children have to be served with allergy-free meals at lunch. So now it has become an unavoidable issue for the entire community. The startup received help from 30 housewives and developed a database with ingredients for more than 40,000 food products available on the Japanese market. Users can easily find a cookie product, for example, which contains no egg.
The company expects to generate annual sales of 1.5 billion yen ($15 million) in the next three years through subscription-based business models and affiliates traffic to partner e-commerce sites like Lotte, D Shopping, Mogumogu, and Radish-boya. The startup is also planning to sell allergy-focused ingredient data to food distributors, and hopes to introduce a mobile app by the end of this year. Their upcoming features recipes for allergy-free meals, premium services that helps users find allergy-free menu at restaurants, and additional features for diabetics and others with dietary-restrictions
The startup just launched their service but is exploring a series A funding with hopes to acquire 500,000 users in a year and 3 million users in three years.
Nanovel was developed by Takashi Asami, who previously worked as a film producer. In the past, he established a project to gather story ideas for the theme “Can a 10-minute story impress people?” Building on this, his colleague subsequently made a film titled La Maison en Petits Cubes (The House of Small Cubes) and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2009.
Inspired by the concept, Asami developed a platform where people can subscribe to novels comprised of less than 2,000 Japanese characters. These short novels are written by 50 professionals, including high profile script writers and copywriters, and users can read up to 16 different novels a month for free. Their user retention rate a remarkably high as 68.5%.
We will be keeping our eyes on how these startups can evolve the local startup scene by speaking with them as often as we can. Docomo Innovation Ventures is now inviting applicants for the second batch of the incubation program here.
See the original story in Japanese. Interest marketing is a Tokyo-based startup focused on social media marketing for brands. The startup announced today that it has raised 150 million yen (approximately $1.5 million) from Japanese investment firm Nissay Capital. The total amount of funds in this round is assumed to exceed 200 million yen ($2 million), as it expects to receive additional funding from other VC firms next month. The startup introduced a social media promotion tool called Kolor back in March. Based on requests from advertisers, this service shows you ads in the form of missions to be completed. When you finish a mission, you will be able to receive a reward that can be later be redeemed for discounts or products at partnering merchants. In the six months since its launch in March, the startup has acquired 40 advertisers and the service’s iOS app has seen 40,000 downloads. According to the company, its main userbase is males in their 30s who are relatively familiar with digital services. Kolor has two primary aspect: it is a tool to improve recognition for brands, and an O2O tool for merchants to invite potential customers to their physical tools. In the first…
The Interest Marketing team. CEO Hikari Sakai is in front.
Interest marketing is a Tokyo-based startup focused on social media marketing for brands. The startup announced today that it has raised 150 million yen (approximately $1.5 million) from Japanese investment firm Nissay Capital. The total amount of funds in this round is assumed to exceed 200 million yen ($2 million), as it expects to receive additional funding from other VC firms next month.
The startup introduced a social media promotion tool called Kolor back in March. Based on requests from advertisers, this service shows you ads in the form of missions to be completed. When you finish a mission, you will be able to receive a reward that can be later be redeemed for discounts or products at partnering merchants. In the six months since its launch in March, the startup has acquired 40 advertisers and the service’s iOS app has seen 40,000 downloads. According to the company, its main userbase is males in their 30s who are relatively familiar with digital services.
Kolor has two primary aspect: it is a tool to improve recognition for brands, and an O2O tool for merchants to invite potential customers to their physical tools. In the first sector, the service’s competitors include Monipla (by Allied Architects), Crocos (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2012), and Fantastics (by Gaiax).
Kolor
So how can the startup expand its business in such a fiercely competitive arena? I asked Sakai about his future plan.
The more interesting missions (ads) we can present on Kolor, the more users we can acquire. So that it’s all about getting as many interesting missions as we can from our advertisers. We need to keep motivating advertisers to use the platform. When we offer a mission to our users on the platform, we pay attention to see what segments of the userbase the advertiser should specifically target.
The current version of Kolor is only integrated with Facebook, but the startup aspires to enhance the service further, developing a social media promotion tool that requires no social media integration.
On a related note, Interest Marketing acquired fellow startup company Appoi earlier this month. Appoi was founded by Hikari Sakai (also the head of Interest Marketing) and has been providing a calendar view service for sharing entertainment event updates with other users. He tells us why he merged these two companies prior to the funding.
Appoi was founded back in February of 2012 for [serving] the US market, and subsequently we started providing its white label service to major Japanese entertainment businesses such as E-plus (online box office) and Avex (music company). I’ve been running Interest Marketing as a startup focused on developing new services like Kolor. Coinciding this latest funding, we needed to focus our resources to a company. That’s why I had our two companies merge.
Transferring engineers over from Appoi, Interest Marketing is now about a 30-people team. Back in August, the startup partnered with Japanese credit card company Credit Saison and online reward program NetMile, which will help them accelerate user acquisition growth.
While B2C-focused social media tools are on the decline, the B2B2C field has great potential to expand further. In Sakai’s words, Japanese businesses’ usage of social media is not yet mature and still has much room to be cultivated.
Last week I had a chance to speak with Tokyo-based Creww.me, a company here in Japan that has been working to improve local startup scene. Creww does a number of things, such as matching third party corporate clients with startups who might be able to meet their needs in some way. They also are building a database of Japanese startups, which we certainly think is a worthwhile task. Creww also features a Creww Marketplace where startups can find services that might be useful to them, sort of in the same fashion as AnyPerk. I met with CEO Sorato Ijichi and public relations manager Kozue Ishii, and the pair revealed to me that Creww had just raised $1.2 million in series A funding from Nippon TV (the official announcement is today), and they will be using those funds to further grow their business, especially their marketplace. Creww also plans to translate its database into five languages in order to help make Japanese companies more visible globally, especially outside of Asia. Creww plans to translate its startup database into 5 languages. They’ll be hiring new staff, including engineers and marketers, and they also mentioned that a play for Asia will be on…
Last week I had a chance to speak with Tokyo-based Creww.me, a company here in Japan that has been working to improve local startup scene. Creww does a number of things, such as matching third party corporate clients with startups who might be able to meet their needs in some way. They also are building a database of Japanese startups, which we certainly think is a worthwhile task. Creww also features a Creww Marketplace where startups can find services that might be useful to them, sort of in the same fashion as AnyPerk.
I met with CEO Sorato Ijichi and public relations manager Kozue Ishii, and the pair revealed to me that Creww had just raised $1.2 million in series A funding from Nippon TV (the official announcement is today), and they will be using those funds to further grow their business, especially their marketplace. Creww also plans to translate its database into five languages in order to help make Japanese companies more visible globally, especially outside of Asia.
Creww plans to translate its startup database into 5 languages.
They’ll be hiring new staff, including engineers and marketers, and they also mentioned that a play for Asia will be on the horizon. The team will be moving into a new office very soon too, and we hope to show you what that looks like after we get a chance to visit.
I’m told that Creww worked with Nippon TV back in May of this year as a part of their startup collaboration program. The television company, as part of its 60th anniversary, had looking for a startup to collaborate with, and they received more than 60 proposals from registered Creww startups. Subsequently more than 10 of those visited the Nippon TV office, and currently some of those are being considered to be put into use in Nippon TV’s business.
Creww was established back in August of 2012. They share many of the same goals and values of us here at SD Japan, so we hope they too can continue to help build the local startup scene as they have been doing thus far.
The purikura photo app ‘Decopic’ is one of the many apps that has won hearts of young ‘kawaii-hunters’ in Japan (‘kawaii’ meaning ‘cute’ in Japanese). Readers may recall that we previously put this app on our popular list of Japan’s Cutest Mobile Apps. Community Factory, the company behind the app, has just announced that it has reached the impressive milestone of 30 million downloads worldwide. That’s a whopping 20 million downloads in the span of about a year, since it was acquired by Yahoo Japan back in last September. In addition to Decopic, the company released six more apps this year alone. Our ultimate goal is to take over our user’s homescreen with our apps. Community factory describes Decopic (available on both iOS and Android) as “so cute that it makes you happy just to have it.” It’s super easy to use with no need for instructions. Many users of the app are from Asia such as Korea, Taiwan, China, and Thailand. There is a growing fan base in these countries, especially a strong community in Taiwan. According to Ryosuke Matusmoto, the CEO of Community Factory, many of their apps are downloaded by users outside of Japan even when only…
The Community Factory team, creators of Decopic (photo appropriately decorated with Decopic!)
The purikura photo app ‘Decopic’ is one of the many apps that has won hearts of young ‘kawaii-hunters’ in Japan (‘kawaii’ meaning ‘cute’ in Japanese). Readers may recall that we previously put this app on our popular list of Japan’s Cutest Mobile Apps. Community Factory, the company behind the app, has just announced that it has reached the impressive milestone of 30 million downloads worldwide. That’s a whopping 20 million downloads in the span of about a year, since it was acquired by Yahoo Japan back in last September. In addition to Decopic, the company released six more apps this year alone.
Our ultimate goal is to take over our user’s homescreen with our apps.
Community factory describes Decopic (available on both iOS and Android) as “so cute that it makes you happy just to have it.” It’s super easy to use with no need for instructions.
Many users of the app are from Asia such as Korea, Taiwan, China, and Thailand. There is a growing fan base in these countries, especially a strong community in Taiwan.
According to Ryosuke Matusmoto, the CEO of Community Factory, many of their apps are downloaded by users outside of Japan even when only provided in Japanese. This is likely due to their simple user interface which effectively removes the language barrier. All the apps share the common qualities of being cute as well as offering many fun designs within one application, so users of one app by Community Factory are likely to download another.
Ryosuke elaborates on the recent milestone:
In addition to our growing user base in Asia, we saw younger Japanese girls, as young as middle school downloading our app. They probably got their first mobile phone, which is now almost always a smartphone and not a feature phone. We continue to focus on girls, and how much of their mobile time we can take up. We released six new apps this year, and plan to develop more in different categories. Our ultimate goal is to take over our user’s homescreen with our apps.
Decopic reaches out to many female users, and then other apps such as calendar or battery-efficiency apps provide utilities that enhances the app’s retention. Their collage app Petapic had five million downloads after eight months of its release, and Petat Calendar had one million downloads as of May of this year.
If you’re even remotely interested in the up-and-coming field of 3D printing and digital fabrication, chances are you’ve probably already seen some of the work done at FabCafe Tokyo. Operated by the folks at Loftworks, FabCafe hosts various community workshops, including a really fun one back on Valentine’s Day where participants could print 3D representations of their heads in chocolate. You may also recall this clever laser-etched 360-degree book we featured earlier in the year. And this week the cafe played host to an Air Shoudou event, where attendees could try doing traditional Japanese calligraphy in the air with their hands, and the characters would be shown on a big screen using a system equipped with a Kinect camera. As the user leans forward to write (as pictured below), the camera measures the distance between the hip and the hand. The bigger the distance, the stronger the weight of your brushstroke. So where does the fabrication come in? The system actually records the character you draw as well, and it can then be printed in various forms. The folks at FabCafe made the activity into a fun competition, posting the characters on a wall and then voting on a winner….
If you’re even remotely interested in the up-and-coming field of 3D printing and digital fabrication, chances are you’ve probably already seen some of the work done at FabCafe Tokyo.
Operated by the folks at Loftworks, FabCafe hosts various community workshops, including a really fun one back on Valentine’s Day where participants could print 3D representations of their heads in chocolate. You may also recall this clever laser-etched 360-degree book we featured earlier in the year.
And this week the cafe played host to an Air Shoudou event, where attendees could try doing traditional Japanese calligraphy in the air with their hands, and the characters would be shown on a big screen using a system equipped with a Kinect camera. As the user leans forward to write (as pictured below), the camera measures the distance between the hip and the hand. The bigger the distance, the stronger the weight of your brushstroke.
So where does the fabrication come in? The system actually records the character you draw as well, and it can then be printed in various forms. The folks at FabCafe made the activity into a fun competition, posting the characters on a wall and then voting on a winner. And then in true FabCafe fashion, they printed prizes for the winners, including one on a sake bottle using a laser etching system they have on site. I had mine printed on a masu box (see right) [1].
This is one of those really great creative projects that beautifully illustrates how Japan can fuse tradition and technology to do something entirely new and wonderful. We look forward to lots more fun stuff like this from FabCafe (see their 3D Snap & Touch workshops for starters), and we hope if you’re in the neighborhood that you check them out as well.
It’s missing a few strokes as the 60-second time limit ran out before I could finish. It was still lots of fun! ↩
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
Yukari Mitsuhashi
