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Just in time for Valentine’s Day: Bouque.me helps Japanese couples finance weddings

Yukari Mitsuhashi Yukari Mitsuhashi
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Online wedding services are pretty hot these days. Websites like Loverly, a sort of Pinterest for weddings, and wedding-themed blogs like StyleMePretty are gaining in popularity. Even in Japan, it seems that couples are exploring one-of-a-kind weddings instead of more traditional ones which can sometimes be a little mundane. But there is still a big problem that has yet to be solved. Many couples are giving up on the idea of having a wedding due to financial reasons. That’s according to the folks at Bouque.me, who just released their service today, on Valentine’s day. Bouque.me is a product from Samurai Incubate, and is basically a tip collecting platform to financially assist couples planning to wed. In 2011, the amount of couples who got married numbered around 700,000. But among those couples, only 55,000 celebrated with a wedding ceremony. On Bouque.me, couples are able to collect tips from their friends on different social networks and through email as well. By creating your own wedding page on the site and sharing the URL, friends and acquaintances can get involved. People can tip as much money as they want and even add a personal note for the couple. Japanese people are often very…

bouque-me

Online wedding services are pretty hot these days. Websites like Loverly, a sort of Pinterest for weddings, and wedding-themed blogs like StyleMePretty are gaining in popularity. Even in Japan, it seems that couples are exploring one-of-a-kind weddings instead of more traditional ones which can sometimes be a little mundane. But there is still a big problem that has yet to be solved. Many couples are giving up on the idea of having a wedding due to financial reasons. That’s according to the folks at Bouque.me, who just released their service today, on Valentine’s day.

Bouque.me is a product from Samurai Incubate, and is basically a tip collecting platform to financially assist couples planning to wed. In 2011, the amount of couples who got married numbered around 700,000. But among those couples, only 55,000 celebrated with a wedding ceremony.

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On Bouque.me, couples are able to collect tips from their friends on different social networks and through email as well. By creating your own wedding page on the site and sharing the URL, friends and acquaintances can get involved. People can tip as much money as they want and even add a personal note for the couple.

Japanese people are often very careful about giving gifts, and it’s a very personal and important act. It will be interesting to see how people react to the very modern idea of giving money online. When I asked about this, a Samurai Incubate representative responded that the Bouque.me is more than just a money collecting platform. The site fosters communication between the couple and the giver, and it allows for friends who are unable to attend the wedding (maybe they live in a different area and can’t be there physically, for example) to get involved.

According to a recent survey on weddings, 58.2% of couples cite “expressing gratitude towards not just family, but also friends” as a big reason to have a wedding ceremony. Of those couples who gave up on having a wedding ceremony, 44% answered that they plan on having a wedding in the future. So there is a problem, but we’ll have to wait and see if Bouque.me is the answer people are looking for.

On a related note, it was just last week that we saw Yahoo Japan take a 10% stake in wedding site Minnano Wedding. That service has 1.1 million monthly visitors, as well as more than 200,000 posts about 5,000 wedding places in Japan.

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

Masaru Ikeda Masaru Ikeda
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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.  ↩

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