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Candy Japan 2014 Year in Review

candyjapan.com

11–20 of 68 posts

Re: Candy Japan 2014 Year in Review

#11

I still love this idea Bemmu. One suggestion - I think you should invest in design and copywriting for the homepage. What you're selling is an emotional experience but it isn't being presented that way. To Americans like me, Japan is mysterious and fun. I actually don't WANT to see what the box looks like. If you play up the mystery more, it becomes less of a transaction and more of a emotional experience which will…

Thanks for the suggestion. Do you have some example of a site that would in your mind be closer to how Candy Japan should be?

Re: Candy Japan 2014 Year in Review

#12

Congrats Bemmu - I love the 'overnight success story' that was 2014. In my experience, businesses tend to grow in jumps with a plateau in between and it looks like 2014 was that sort of year (as a deserved reward for the years of platform investment you had made). Best of luck getting over that 1,000 item milestone and then the next big jump beyond!

If I could just keep at 1000, that would be great success. I think if somehow the site doubled again, it would become possible to even hire full-time help.

Interestingly not all sweets makers are that interested in selling in bulk. My approach seems to need some tweaking. Currently I would just send an email like "hey I'd like to buy 1000 of these cute candies you make, how much would it be?". But instead of a price, I just get "we don't sell wholesale". It's strange to me as I would imagine they would be happy to sell more of their product, but apparently a more gentle approach is called for here. My first hire would likely be someone who is really good at this, unless I can somehow turn into that person myself during this year.

Re: Candy Japan 2014 Year in Review

#15
post #6

Free idea (worth as much as it costs!): You could franchise in other countries. Candy Korea, Candy Taiwan, that sort of thing. Thanks for the good, clear write-up.

Thanks.

I tried launching one site called Pen Japan. But what I realized is that any time I considered putting in some effort to promote Pen Japan, I was better off putting that effort into promoting Candy Japan instead. If I look for bloggers to reach out to or write guest posts, I can't justify doing it for the new site when I would much rather promote the existing one.

Why would I prefer promoting existing one? Two reasons: running two sites is almost twice the work. Why launch a new site and promote that, when I could instead push the existing site? Secondly, there are some minor scale benefits when shipping a lot of the same item. You can get a better margin when buying 1000 pieces of the same item vs. 500 pieces of two different items. So it makes sense to push hard on just one direction.

If the sites were somehow less related, but with some synergy benefits, then that would make sense. For example if I launched a buy-and-ship reshipping service where customers can request any item they want from Japan which I then go out to buy and ship to them. It would make sense to promote that, because the avenues to promote it would be different enough not to compete against Candy Japan. It would also make sense in that those services could be cross-sold, so that is something I might consider. But not really wanting to start a "Candy X" where X is just some other country.

Re: Candy Japan 2014 Year in Review

#16
post #12

Congrats Bemmu - I love the 'overnight success story' that was 2014. In my experience, businesses tend to grow in jumps with a plateau in between and it looks like 2014 was that sort of year (as a deserved reward for the years of platform investment you had made). Best of luck getting over that 1,000 item milestone and then the next big jump beyond!

If I could just keep at 1000, that would be great success. I think if somehow the site doubled again, it would become possible to even hire full-time help. Interestingly not all sweets makers are that interested in selling in bulk. My approach seems to need some tweaking. Currently I would just send an email like "hey I'd like to buy 1000 of these cute candies you make, how much would it be?". But instead of a price,…

Explain what you do. Tell them it's a one-off. A lot of small manufacturing businesses would be happy to do a one time bulk order but don't want to (or can't) scale their business to a size that lets them do large orders regularly. You'll still get a lot of people saying no because some people see bulk orders as compromising quality, but you'll get some successes too.

Re: Candy Japan 2014 Year in Review

#19
post #14
post #6

Free idea (worth as much as it costs!): You could franchise in other countries. Candy Korea, Candy Taiwan, that sort of thing. Thanks for the good, clear write-up.

[deleted]

Why would people pay a franchise fee to Candy Japan to start Candy $country?

To access a way to promote to Candy Japan's customers, who are a group of people already proven to be interested in buying candy from other countries.

EDIT: Added a quote to give context after the parent deleted their post. I hate it when they do that.

Re: Candy Japan 2014 Year in Review

#20
post #11

I still love this idea Bemmu. One suggestion - I think you should invest in design and copywriting for the homepage. What you're selling is an emotional experience but it isn't being presented that way. To Americans like me, Japan is mysterious and fun. I actually don't WANT to see what the box looks like. If you play up the mystery more, it becomes less of a transaction and more of a emotional experience which will…

Thanks for the suggestion. Do you have some example of a site that would in your mind be closer to how Candy Japan should be?

Sure, I think there's a couple ways you could go:

Maybe you play off Japanese cartoons, with characters like this: http://drbl.in/bTYf

Or maybe you could have loud and over the top illustrations of the candy like this, but 10 times louder http://drbl.in/kgdq

Since your product is candy, I would go for the playful/quirky/over-the-top aspects of Japanese culture. Lots of fun color and illustrations. As opposed to the traditional, serious, craft focused parts of the culture.

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