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Lonely on Valentine’s Day? In Japan, you can tweet and get chocolate from this girl

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With Valentine’s Day almost here, Tokyo-based startup Gift Kitchen is running a campaign that allows 10 people to win a chance to get “giri-choco” (or literally ‘obligation chocolate gifts’) from a cute model at the startup. To enter, you need to tweet inspiring love confessions along with the designated hashtag #わたしバレンタインに告白します, meaning “I confess on Valentine’s Day”. If you’re lucky enough to rank in the top ten in retweets, you can win [1]. Gift Kitchen was founded last September by Manabu Ogawa and Shunsuke Usui (both of whom previously worked at Yahoo Japan) with intentions to improving the art of gift giving. A Japanese gift market survey says, more than 45% of women have not bee happy with the gifts men give them. And likely many of those women end up making a trip to a pawn shop or they resell them on an auction site. Gift Kitchen tries to solve this issue by allowing gift givers to create an online catalog, from which the receiving side can then choose their gift. A variety of products presented in the service are mostly brought from Amazon.com using an API, so the startup doesn’t have to worry about logistics or inventory, but…

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With Valentine’s Day almost here, Tokyo-based startup Gift Kitchen is running a campaign that allows 10 people to win a chance to get “giri-choco” (or literally ‘obligation chocolate gifts’) from a cute model at the startup. To enter, you need to tweet inspiring love confessions along with the designated hashtag #わたしバレンタインに告白します, meaning “I confess on Valentine’s Day”. If you’re lucky enough to rank in the top ten in retweets, you can win [1].

confession-campaign

Gift Kitchen was founded last September by Manabu Ogawa and Shunsuke Usui (both of whom previously worked at Yahoo Japan) with intentions to improving the art of gift giving. A Japanese gift market survey says, more than 45% of women have not bee happy with the gifts men give them. And likely many of those women end up making a trip to a pawn shop or they resell them on an auction site.

Gift Kitchen tries to solve this issue by allowing gift givers to create an online catalog, from which the receiving side can then choose their gift. A variety of products presented in the service are mostly brought from Amazon.com using an API, so the startup doesn’t have to worry about logistics or inventory, but merely generate revenue from sending affiliate traffic to Amazon. (correction: Their revenue comes from a service commission that the sender will pay.) They are planning to launch a gift recommendation feature as well, and social media-based algorithms could be a solution they will look at.

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  1. Unlike in other countries, it is only women who give presents (mainly chocolates) to men on the holiday. Men will reciprocate on White Day a month later.  ↩