Locondo is a shoes and fashion e-commerce service that allows consumers to ‘buy first and than choose.’ What that means is that consumers can try on items that they have bought and return things that don’t fit within 30 days, with a full money-back guarantee. The site opened back in Feburary of 2011 and has over 300,000 registered members. Locondo is backed by Rocket Internet, as well as Lead Capital Management and Itochu Technology Ventures.
Locondo can be described as a sort of ultimate e-commerce, providing its customers with free shipping, 30-day returns, next-day delivery, and even concierge service. The latter is available by both email and telephone, answering questions not only about how the site functions but also questions like what kind of shoes would be recommended to wear for a wedding. According to online fashion portal Fashionsnap, the return rate for orders is not as high as expected at 25%. Of those who buy, 30% of userscomes back to the site to buy more.
Five months after launch, Locondo added bags to its line up, and they currently account for roughly 15% to 20% of total sales. And now, the company has announced a partnership with Spanish brand Desigual, as well as its expansion into a wider range of fashion items. Desigual is a popular fashion brand in trendy locations like Harajuku in Tokyo or Shinsaibashi in Osaka.
Locondo will also be working with Cross Company, which runs well-known brands such as earth music & ecology. The company plans to acquire over 100 brands by this summer, and 1,000 by the year 2016.
All these moves by Locondo are not only attemps to enhance the user experience, but also to compete against its biggest competitor Javari, which is operated by internet giant Amazon. On the comparison site called EC Navi, Locondo has a rating of 89 points out of 100, where Javari has a rating of only 66 points. Locondo has reflected on its user feedback, including feedback on its ‘Easy Search’ which allows users to easily find what they are looking for through images.
In general, women in Japan seem to be more open to online shopping. At least that’s probably the case for women who use feature phones, shopping on popular and cheap fashion sites such as Yumetenbo. But on sites like this, girls buy only because items are unbelievably cheap. Locondo is taking another approach to making online shopping more accessible and affordable for many users, and giving them a way out in case they are disappointed.
This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Sapporo, Japan. You can read more of our reports from this event here. On day two of the Infinity Ventures Summit, we heard from three up-and-coming startups who related how they are taking on global markets. So far all of these companies have seen some success in global markets, but for all three that only came after lots of failure. The panelists included: John Lai Founder & CEO MixerBox Inc. Peter Yen, CEO, Pinkoi David Chen, CEO, Strikingly Moderator: Akio Tanaka, Co-founder & Managing Partner, Infinity Venture Partners The discussion started out with Peter, who explained that Taiwan-based Pinkoi has 65,000 unique products, 3,000 brands, and 8,000 designs. Most are from its home market of Taiwan (about 70%), but they are getting more from other countries. They plan to add more languages to their service to aid in their international growth. Interestingly, Peter had seven failed products before finally finding success with Pinkoi. And so far while their growth has been mostly organic, it has been very strong as you can see in the charts below. Pinkoi has 100,000 members, and saw $610,000 in total sales in…
This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Sapporo, Japan. You can read more of our reports from this event here.
On day two of the Infinity Ventures Summit, we heard from three up-and-coming startups who related how they are taking on global markets. So far all of these companies have seen some success in global markets, but for all three that only came after lots of failure. The panelists included:
The discussion started out with Peter, who explained that Taiwan-based Pinkoi has 65,000 unique products, 3,000 brands, and 8,000 designs. Most are from its home market of Taiwan (about 70%), but they are getting more from other countries. They plan to add more languages to their service to aid in their international growth.
Interestingly, Peter had seven failed products before finally finding success with Pinkoi. And so far while their growth has been mostly organic, it has been very strong as you can see in the charts below. Pinkoi has 100,000 members, and saw $610,000 in total sales in 2012. As you may have guessed, Pinkoi targets female users. And such cute services certainly have a global appeal.
John describes that his company had 10 failed products before Mixerbox. Japan is now its biggest user base, but it has been the number one music app in 13 countries. Their app tries to make it easy to create playlists and share them with friends, sort of like digitizing the mixed tape process.
You can also browse other people’s playlists and subscribe to those too. In the beginning he says there was lots of pressure to succeed, since he had left an established family business to branch out on his own. But he had faith that eventually he would hit the right product.
As for David, he relates starting out with Strikingly out of a messy room in San Francisco. They managed to run the startup in the early days on a meagre budget of $1,600 per month – and that included their rent. From those beginnings Strikingly emerged, a solution for creating simple mobile-first websites in a very easy way. David points to one of their users who is blind, but managed to create a website on the iPad using Strikingly.
David Chen, Strikingly
They have 40% monthly growth in revenue in the last eight months, with users in 178 countries. Their biggest user base is the US, but the second biggest market is Japan, without any localization efforts until now. So far there have been over 40,000 websites created on the platform to date. David tells about how they were first rejected from the Y-Combinator incubator, but managed to get in the second time. But their initial failures, he says, have been famously well-documented in publications like Forbes and The New York Times.
The common thread among these three entrepreneurs is persistence in the face of failure. And like most startups that eventually find wide-spread success, that experience becomes an asset. For Japanese startups, this willingness to take risks and fail is a good lesson to learn from.
This is part of our coverage of the startup LaunchPad event from the Infinitity Ventures Summit in Sapporo, Japan. To read about other startups who pitched, you can read our other reports here. Accounting startup CFO won the Infinity Ventures Launchpad event with Freee, its financial service for small business. But it was followed in second place by CocoPPa, a very clever service that lets you customize you iPhone icons and homescreen. While there are many services out there that let you do such customizations to your mobile, where CocoPPa is unique is that it offers a platform where users around the world can share and collaborate on these kind of designs. So for example, if a person in Japan creates a cute icon, someone on the other side of the world could create a wallpaper to match. This collaborative process is, I think, what sets it apart from other customization services. While you could make a design in practically any style you wish, it looks like many of the creations that users are submitting fall into the kawaii category. And as we have seen in the past, such Japan-made apps that offer cute services like this have great appeal…
Accounting startup CFO won the Infinity Ventures Launchpad event with Freee, its financial service for small business. But it was followed in second place by CocoPPa, a very clever service that lets you customize you iPhone icons and homescreen. While there are many services out there that let you do such customizations to your mobile, where CocoPPa is unique is that it offers a platform where users around the world can share and collaborate on these kind of designs.
So for example, if a person in Japan creates a cute icon, someone on the other side of the world could create a wallpaper to match. This collaborative process is, I think, what sets it apart from other customization services.
While you could make a design in practically any style you wish, it looks like many of the creations that users are submitting fall into the kawaii category. And as we have seen in the past, such Japan-made apps that offer cute services like this have great appeal with overseas users.
The service was originally launched last July, and since then they have seen over 7.5 million downloads, with half of those coming from the US. They have 1.35 million monthly active users, and are seeing impressive growth. The word-of-mouth buzz around CocoPPa is good, with users sharing their screen designs on social platforms like Pinterest and Instagram (for example, see screens from Pinterest user lindsayw72 below).
Back in April they released a web version, and and Android version of the service will be coming soon too. As for monetization, currently the startup depends on ad revenue, but they will be looking to other options as well in the future.
For more information, you can check out CocoPPa’s promo video below.
This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Sapporo, Japan. You can read more of our reports from this event here. On day two of the Infinity Ventures Summit there was a conversation discussing digital fabrication, featuring a distinguished lineup of panelists from here in Japan (pictured left to right above): Kinya Tagawa, CEO, takram design engineering Hiroya Tanaka, Associate Professor of Keio University & Founder of Fablab Japan. Shigeru Kobayashi, Associate Professor, Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences Nobuyuki ‘Nobi’ Hayashi, IT Journalist/Consultant Mr. Tagawa started off with some background information noting that the innovation cycle in manufacturing used to be very slow. But just as digital innovations have changed most industries, we’re finally also starting to see it seep into manufacturing. Tagawa noted the importance of Make Magazine and its contribution to growing the culture in this space. Manufacturing was once limited to professionals, but now it appeals to a far wider group. The emergence of the ‘maker’ overlaps the previously separate spheres of innovator, producer, and consumer. Kobayashi followed up with an explanation of how 3D printing is making it easy for people to experience things like data processing, scanning, and…
This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Sapporo, Japan. You can read more of our reports from this event here.
On day two of the Infinity Ventures Summit there was a conversation discussing digital fabrication, featuring a distinguished lineup of panelists from here in Japan (pictured left to right above):
Kinya Tagawa, CEO, takram design engineering
Hiroya Tanaka, Associate Professor of Keio University & Founder of Fablab Japan.
Shigeru Kobayashi, Associate Professor, Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences
Nobuyuki ‘Nobi’ Hayashi, IT Journalist/Consultant
Mr. Tagawa started off with some background information noting that the innovation cycle in manufacturing used to be very slow. But just as digital innovations have changed most industries, we’re finally also starting to see it seep into manufacturing. Tagawa noted the importance of Make Magazine and its contribution to growing the culture in this space. Manufacturing was once limited to professionals, but now it appeals to a far wider group. The emergence of the ‘maker’ overlaps the previously separate spheres of innovator, producer, and consumer.
Hisashi Imai’s nail clippers design (thingiverse)
Kobayashi followed up with an explanation of how 3D printing is making it easy for people to experience things like data processing, scanning, and fabrication. His organization holds workshops that teach these processes, and he notes that new digital fabrication tools like laser cutters make it a very accessible activity. He emphasized that traditional fabrication can co-exist in a sort of hybrid state with new methods like these. Kobayashi cited one example of a very simple but innovative design was Hisashi Imai cleverly designed nail clippers that allows people who may have limited mobility in one limb to use a nail clippers easily. Other designers can take such a design, and adjust the parameters to their own requirements.
Tanaka pointed out that there lots of fab labs around the world, now over 200 in total. He projects that in the future stationary stores could be places where you create your own stationary. Similarly, clothing shops could be a place where you implement your own designs. He adds that services that connects all the people and workshops doing great work in this space would be valued.
Nobi gave some fun examples of great makers like Osaka University’s Hiroshi Ishiguro, who has created some things that you’ve likely seen before, including the now famous android clone of himself. There’s also Maki Sugimoto who creates 3D scans of organs, and then can use those items to practice surgeries. Organs have a wet feeling to touch, so he is even trying to use 3D printers to reproduce this.
This is a space where I expect Japan is going to progress rapidly, given some of the creative things that we have already seen in these early stages. There are lots of mad scientists in this country, says Nobi, and they getting more involved in fab labs, helping Japan stand out in this space.
This is part of our coverage of the startup LaunchPad event from the Infinitity Ventures Summit in Sapporo, Japan. Back in March we featured cloud-based accounting solution Freee, which was just emerging from stealth mode at the time. The service was developed by Tokyo-based startup CFO, and was pitch at the Infinity Ventures Summit Launchpad competition by CEO Daisuke Sasaki. While the company isn’t going to win any awards for the names of their company or service, they did walk away proudly with the top prize from this startup competition in Sapporo. Freee offers n accounting solution for small and mid-size businesses who may not have so much accounting knowledge. It allows you to view your transaction statements on site, conveniently categorize and visualized. If you need to create invoices there is a function for that as well, with the capability to change status to ‘paid’ or ‘unpaid’ accordingly. It’s especially useful for self-employed people when they have to file their taxt reports. Sasaki says that Freee helps you do your taxes as much as 50 times faster, which is certainly a big plus. Regrettably, Japan is a little bit slow adopting cloud services, so the startup will have some…
Freee wins Launchpad event – CEO Daisuke Sasaki
This is part of our coverage of the startup LaunchPad event from the Infinitity Ventures Summit in Sapporo, Japan.
Back in March we featured cloud-based accounting solution Freee, which was just emerging from stealth mode at the time. The service was developed by Tokyo-based startup CFO, and was pitch at the Infinity Ventures Summit Launchpad competition by CEO Daisuke Sasaki. While the company isn’t going to win any awards for the names of their company or service, they did walk away proudly with the top prize from this startup competition in Sapporo.
Freee offers n accounting solution for small and mid-size businesses who may not have so much accounting knowledge. It allows you to view your transaction statements on site, conveniently categorize and visualized.
If you need to create invoices there is a function for that as well, with the capability to change status to ‘paid’ or ‘unpaid’ accordingly. It’s especially useful for self-employed people when they have to file their taxt reports. Sasaki says that Freee helps you do your taxes as much as 50 times faster, which is certainly a big plus.
Regrettably, Japan is a little bit slow adopting cloud services, so the startup will have some work to do in terms of bringing users on board. So among the users they have already won over, Sasaki figures that over 3300 accounting hours have already been saved.
See this story in Japanese. Below are selected excerpts from the original. This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Sapporo, Japan. You can read more of our reports from this event here. In this panel, CyberAgent CEO Susumu Fujita spoke with five young Japanese entrepreneurs to find out more about how they got to where they are today. Participants in the discussion included: Riki Kojima, CEO of Willgate (an SEO solution provider) Nobuhiro Ariyasu, CEO of Coach United (a private lesson provider) Shintaro Otake, the CEO of Tri-fort (social app and smartphone app developer) Kensuke Furukawa, the CEO of Nanapi (an archive of how-to and daily tips) Natsuko Shiraki, the CEO of Hasuna (jeweler) Startup strategies in the face of hardships Otake: I intended to take a radical approach in order to make it successful. I set a target that we surpass Facebook, and I learned that we need radical and rapid growth to reach that goal. Kojima: At the age of 20, my company was still two years old but employed too many people, even though I didn’t have much business experience at that time. With our 100 million yen funding ($1 million), I…
This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Sapporo, Japan. You can read more of our reports from this event here.
In this panel, CyberAgent CEO Susumu Fujita spoke with five young Japanese entrepreneurs to find out more about how they got to where they are today. Participants in the discussion included:
Riki Kojima, CEO of Willgate (an SEO solution provider)
Nobuhiro Ariyasu, CEO of Coach United (a private lesson provider)
Shintaro Otake, the CEO of Tri-fort (social app and smartphone app developer)
Kensuke Furukawa, the CEO of Nanapi (an archive of how-to and daily tips)
Natsuko Shiraki, the CEO of Hasuna (jeweler)
Startup strategies in the face of hardships
Otake: I intended to take a radical approach in order to make it successful. I set a target that we surpass Facebook, and I learned that we need radical and rapid growth to reach that goal.
Willgate’s CEO Riki Kojima
Kojima: At the age of 20, my company was still two years old but employed too many people, even though I didn’t have much business experience at that time. With our 100 million yen funding ($1 million), I hired 30 people but the company unexpectedly collapsed too soon. Subsequently I found a colleague’s chat post that mentioned ‘I shouldn’t work with this company.”
Fujita: What are the advantages and disadvantages of launching your business when attending school?
Kojima: I had no business experience, so that I couldn’t figure out what was the best approach. I was forced to take a roundabout route and fail repeatedly. I’m still young, so people tend to see me as an immature business person, but in fact this makes me better at feeling people’s pains.
Monetization and business strategies
Fujita to Furukawa: I frequently visit your blog, and I know you’re quite good at writing stories. You, the company’s president, often show up on the web. What is there to gain from that?
Nanapi CEO Kensuke Furukawa
Furukawa: If you’re running an internet service, you should be familiar with the space. But on the other hand, it was once pointed out at an important business appointment that I might have too much time to spare. Many employee applicants come to us through my blog. Compared to applicants we find through talent search services, they are highly motivated and bring much benefit to our business.
Fujita: For today’s business owners, your blogging strategy makes sense. Not only to help your hiring efforts, but it may also help you bring your vision and message to employees as well. But what’s your overall strategy behind Nanapi? Are you just focused on growing it without considering monetization? Do you plan to sell it off to other companies?
Furukawa: In order to monetize the service, we need to make it grow. We have 20 million monthly unique users, not yet sufficient for the monetization. In Japan, if you monetize an internet service, it should be among the top 50 sites in the country in terms of internet traffic. Some web media companies have succeeded to monetize, but my interest is in making big stuff.
Coach United CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu
Fujita: In my view, Cyta.jp (Coach United’s private lessons portal) is not very ‘Internettish’. How do you feel about it?
Ariyasu: No, our operations are not ‘Internettish’, as you say. For many online service providers, you typically send inquires to consumers to find out if they are satisfied with the customer experience. We actually use mystery shoppers to conduct surveys. In case that we can’t acquire users by e-mail marketing, sometimes even use telephone marketing.
Entrepreneurial culture in Japan
Fujita to Furukawa: Gradually we’re getting a culture where people admire exits. Do you plan to run your business independently without funding? Or are you interested in selling off?
Furukawa: We actually fundraised from Globis Venture Partners. In terms of our business model, our focus is on enlarging our media business. Selling off is a good option. But for now, we’d like to look at buying someone else’s service in order to enlarge our business.
I developed the Nanapi service because I couldn’t find any similar one. In our four-year experience since the launch, I eventually learned that it’s not so promising. Everyone wanted to have it but nobody actually did it, since it’s a bother.
Fujita: In Japan, entrepreneurs are generally not admired much. What do you think about this?
Furukawa: In my understanding, Japan is a country where we can easily launch a startup. We can also receive orders from big companies regardless of the size or maturity of the business. Compared to foreign countries, startup founders in Japan are relatively older, probably because we (generally) prefer to launch a business after getting work experience at a big company. For me, I’ve worked at Recruit for three years, which I think helps me do business more easily. If you are a student, people typically look down on you.
Kojima: When I failed in my business, I was bothered by the issues surrounding capitalization strategy and employment. I wanted more details about this information. I failed once but I bounced back even though I was immature. I hope our society can be tolerant of people who fail.
Ariyasu: Japan is heaven for entrepreneurs. Considering the huge amount of cash flow available in the market, the population of entrepreneurs going after that cash is extremely low. We need more success stories than we need government efforts to help entrepreneurship. If we get more billionaires, more people will get excited about entrepreneurship.
Fujita: Absolutely. If we have more success stories, that will certainly have an impact on people’s mindsets.
Tri-fort CEO Shintaro Otake
Otake finishes by asking Fujita a question: When are you planning to retire? What kind of people would you want to hand the company over to?
Fujita: To be honest, I’ve been always thinking [about] stepping down — when our business became profitable, when we completed the launch of Ameba (CyberAgent’s blog service). But the fact is, every time that we make an achievement, another new goal comes up.
For our media business especially, I was heavily involved in building it up. I did too much, and now I can’t really hand it over to someone else. (big laugh from the audience.)
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Rick Martin
Takeshi Hirano
