Your Japanese customer is not your home customer: what one coffee appliance taught us

We found the brand at a trade show, watched the maker's pitch and believed in the product. We launched it on CAMPFIRE, one of Japan's crowdfunding platforms, and aimed it at people in their 20s. It made sense on paper.

It raised around ¥4M. Not a failure, but not what we expected either.

So my business partner, Ichikawa, did something many distributors skip. He sat down with the people who had actually bought it. They were not in their 20s. They were older.

We rebuilt the landing page and the ads around the people who were really buying, and sold through our own online store. It sold about ¥18M over the next three months, about 4.5 times the first campaign.

We never stopped talking to buyers. In one of those conversations, a customer said: "I don't know which beans to choose."

That one sentence became a collaboration with a barista, a pack of beans included in the box, and a subscription plan.

Something else surprised us. In about 30 interviews we have almost never met an angry complainer. What we hear is careful, almost caring feedback: this step in the manual was confusing, this accessory would help. People who take the time to tell you that are people who want to keep using your product.

1. Your Japanese customer is probably not your home-market customer. Age, use case and the reason to buy can all be different.
2. Treat the first launch as a test, not a verdict. A slow start usually points to the targeting or the message.
3. Ask your Japanese partner how many of your buyers they have talked to. If the answer is zero, they are moving stock, not building a market.

The same pattern shows up in other categories. For an overseas travel stroller we support, interviews with about ten Japanese parents changed the whole headline: what they wanted was one stroller they could use both for trips and for everyday shopping.