speaker-1: It’s very similar to what you did with the Vogue and something that keeps coming up with them. It’s just like once you get one, it makes it easier to get the others, and then you repurpose that content, never stop talking about it because your new your newest customer didn’t know you were featured in Vogue, and that social proof might be the thing that drives them to make the purchase to try the product. Honesty Commerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start. Grow and scale an online business today. Honest ECommerce is proudly produced by Electric Eye, a Shopify Plus partner helping e-commerce brands sell more with strategic design and development. Visit electriqueye.io for more information. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest E-Commerce Today. I’m welcome to the show. Kodai Takayashi. He comes to us as the CEO of Silk the Rich USA. It is the US arm of a Japanese hair care brand. Kodai, welcome to the show. Yeah,

speaker-0: Hey Chase.

speaker-1: it’s great to see you. We were just talking about it. We met a year ago at Shop Talk in Chicago. You were just at the shop talk in Nashville, literally yesterday as of recording. Yeah. but yeah, let’s let’s kind of dive in here. Now, could you talk a bit about Silk the Rich and the types of products you and the team are bringing to market?

speaker-0: Sure. So Silks Rich is a Japanese hair care product, mostly doing shampoo, conditioner, hair care product, and body care products using a look liquid silk inside the every single product, which is our like a unique point. We sew like a liquid silk from the fabric silk in Japan, mix it and then infuse it into the product we have. and sell it over twenty countries now, making around twenty five million dollars annually. this is our fourth year, and get ready to expand to the US.

speaker-1: Absolutely. Yeah. And I met you, I believe, right before you expanded. Maybe it was right around the same time. Yes. how did you guys plan I’ve we’ve always talked about brands that are in America looking to branch into other markets? You had already launched, you were already finding success in obviously in Japan. what what would you say was most frustrating or difficult about breaking the product in the US market.

speaker-0: Chase a lot of things I can talk about. So, first of all, by myself, I I was I have never been to the States and it’s the first time for me to stay in stay in the US. So culture is a whole new thing. So how people buy things, how people find the things, how people want to see the products, especially in beauty, is totally different. So I met a lot of people here in LA and learned from them. And yeah. So it’s like life as a work kind of thing in the States now.

speaker-1: You had found success in obviously the Japanese market and you’re like, Well, this playbook just is not working here in America and it was kinda you had to throw down throw that out the window and start over.

speaker-0: Yes, hundred percent. So after two years we hit like ten million dollars in revenue in Japan, so we expanded to Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, over over like ten countries, including Middle East. So we’re ready to go, but in the States we’re starting from zero, no team members and no revenue for sure. So yeah, everything is starting from zero last year. It’s been a year.

speaker-1: far. Obviously, I feel like the transition from the Japanese market into these similar markets o over on the other side of the world, did those work a lot better than this expansion into the states just because of similar demographics and cultures?

speaker-0: I feel so ’cause other marketing Asia is pretty small compared to the states. But states has like fifty countries, I can say. So

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: right now we focus on California, New York, Seattle, especially me like West Coast and Hawaii. But when we think about expounding to the other states in the retail, we have to think about like the strategy again, I guess, because there are so diverse people there and we have to reconsider how we talk to them, communicate them.

speaker-1: Yeah, and you guys aren’t just, you know, selling on your dot com. You’re also selling on some of these other marketplaces, including Amazon. you were you had a magazine feature, and obviously you saw some success from that from Amazon. you wanna talk a bit about that? Yeah.

speaker-0: So last December after launching Amazon, we were featured on Vogue as the best Japanese shampoo and conditioners. That was so sudden. That was no paid ads. That was like organic editorial post from Vogue. So I gave away some shampoo to the editor in LA and she literally liked our product and they she posted about us into Vogue. And then the next day after the publishing, I saw the tipping and Amazon. I saw the really like good growth. And that that growth didn’t go like go down, did that didn’t drop actually. So it stayed a little bit. We pushed a lot more about we featured it here and including other magazines, then we could make, you know, the kind of momentum in Amazon. And we used that creative into D two C and Shopify and generated more sales and subscribers in there. So yeah, last December we could make a really good momentum.

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speaker-0: Posted after wake up, yeah.

speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. So you you had no warning, you’re like, no. But also it’s always fun to to to see that and then to scramble to make things work. Yeah.

speaker-0: I think so. So it’s not only about magazine works well, but our team worked really hard to how can we maintain this revenue or even like make it grow even more with that fact. So we did a lot of things, including magazine. we were featured in CBS and then Fox News and a lot of things. But if we didn’t do anything with the team, this revenue is going up and down. maybe. But we try to keep it keep a momentum with those features.

speaker-1: Yeah. We’ve had a a a lot of brands on here talk about how they got that initial traction for the brand through like earned media, you know, so PR features, editorials, very similar to what you did with the Vogue and something that keeps coming up with them. It’s just like once you get one, it makes it easier to get the others, and then you repurpose that content, never stop talking about it because your new your newest customer. didn’t know you were featured in Vogue, and that social proof might be the thing that drives them to make the purchase to try the product. you know, so it again, some of these people listening to the show, here’s another example, Cod Eyes and his team. They got featured and they repurposed it a bunch, and it’s still helping them make more sales.

speaker-0: Yeah, I bet.

speaker-1: Now, you found that success and and it was off. A lot of it was through Amazon, but you’re also looking to you you you have to your feet in both worlds. You’ve got Amazon, then you’ve got the s the Shopify dot com. I know that you kind of spent some time streamlining kind of the funnel and and experimenting with landing pages for the the kind of dot com experience. Can you walk us through that thought process and how things worked or didn’t work?

speaker-0: So we launched over Shopify pretty late after Amazon. We launched after after the Vogue feature. We basically launched. And I mean, even before Vogue we had a website, but it didn’t have any conversion. It’s not any, but it’s like we didn’t push any ads. So we saw really small like conversions, even though we pushed a lot of ads in there. the conference like a CAC was really high and expensive and I thought it doesn’t make sense. The RY RYC it doesn’t make sense. So I stopped it and posted after the vote feature we pushed it again with the creative. And then it made our like compression rate really like really high, like you said, three times more. And then even more after that, after all the efforts of our teams. And through those journeys, after launching D2C channel, we can see how like people behave and we can get more customer information. Because for Amazon, it’s so hard to get the information of customers, but in D2C channel, we can see what they like or how they find our product, we can ask them questions, we can send the email. So we found like small community kind of thing, after vote feature. So through those community, we can get a good feedbacks about the product and we can change how we communicate with the customers and potential customers. So I feel like making the communities after the vogue is like makes sense for us now.

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speaker-0: So in global scale, we have 70 employees, mainly heavily in Japan, but in the States we only have like three or four. they are like part-timers actually. So I’m the CEO, but some people are in charge of social media is one of them, then sales and shipping and admin and me. So it’s basically four of us. But we heavily utilizing AI and stuff recently, especially AI agent. you know, we see like Muse and Dots coming up. So we try to utilize those agents too. But I personally using AI and I let my team members use AI to whatever they can use AI. So that makes our work really efficient and we can really focus on what only we can do. So that’s what structure.

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speaker-0: So you mean service provider for sure, like OpenAI?

speaker-1: building a website, right? Yeah. there some someone’s or basically the agencies y are using AI and brands are hiring agencies. what

speaker-0: Okay.

speaker-1: you are some people I have had conversations where folks are like, You should not be charging that anymore because AI makes it easier. That’s what they say. I have my own answer, but

speaker-0: Interesting. I feel like, you know, it all depends on brand owners, right? Or even CMO decides whether they’re gonna use agency or they’re gonna do in-house. And recently I feel like even our company doing a lot of things in-house because of AI. So some brands which can utilize AI gonna more get into like in-house team with AI. There are service providers which can utilize AI for sure because they are professional and they have to understand how brands think about because if the brand figure out the way to utilize AI into their work, brands don’t have reason to, you know, work with service providers, right? So I think it’s more important for brands and service providers to to talk more. They to talk more about how we can work together, even with AI, and in through those conversation. I feel like there’s some there there might be some opportunities for discounting or you know, we can we should discuss more about that.

speaker-1: Yeah. I think that some stuff perhaps, but it it it it’s also it’s just a tool. and it’s I I like to make the comparison to it’s like, well, AI can tell you how to build a house. Why aren’t you building your own house? Right. It’s it it’s it still takes people with skill and experience and strategy to harness a tool to do it the right way. And I actually am almost on the opposite side of things where I’m like, we should actually be charging more. because we’re harnessing AI because the speed to market and the speed to value that you are getting having experts on top of these cutting edge technologies we’re building things faster with less bugs, with more specific functionality to the end customers’ needs, i.e. your customers’ needs as a brand. you know, I I I feel like that is the power of AI to get things that are, you know, we’re Everything is getting less templated and cookie cutter and it’s getting more specific because AI is allowing us to build towards these specific use cases of all of your little customer avatars. Like I think that’s the power of AI. Yeah.

speaker-0: I agree with you in terms of agency service providers have to understand AI more than ever and they have to deeply understand how they can utilize AI to brands. Right? So yeah, I agree with you in that.

speaker-1: Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven’t. We’re releasing interviews like this every week, so don’t miss out. Now back to the interview. Is there anything I didn’t ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience today? So

speaker-0: After a year, we are heavily on like online selling right now because I don’t wanna expand too much to retail stores without any awareness of the brand. But we’re selling on in fifty locations, mainly in West Coast from Seattle to San Diego, heavily in LA because I’m located there and Hawaii. But towards the end of the year we’re gonna open more doors. including the main major retailers in the states. And so I feel like after seeing all the data on Amazon or D2C or we started TikTok shop recently. I feel like we can start expanding more in retail, but to going to go expanding to retail took really long time, over a year for me. So it was a long long process. Yes.

speaker-1: Yeah, I think that especially for somebody, you know, I don’t know if we really specifically said it. You got to the States in twenty twenty four and you had you didn’t know anybody here. It’s not like you had you’ve been here before and you had a big, big network. So you got here roughly, you know, a little over two years ago and you had to build this network out and find these wholesale partners while, you know, juggling everything else, launching the Amazon, launching the the Shopify, TikTok shop. so a lot of hats that you are wearing and obviously AI helping you manage that stuff. but yeah, it it’s at this point you guys I guess you could argue that Silk the Rich is is now omnichannel. I that was a that was a big term five years ago.

speaker-0: Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah, we can say that. I mean, we’re s we’re already selling in fifty locations. I mean, fifty is really small in terms of like thousands of stores in the in Japan. Twelve we are selling in twelve thousand stores globally. So compared compared to that, fifty is small, but still we can get some data like POS, which store it’s selling better than other stores, and what kind of customers are purchasing. So we gather the data and connecting the data with Shopify and compare those data and we can like deepen down into our target customers more than ever. So it’s good good to do both, I guess.

speaker-1: Absolutely. You can learn from everywhere. Now, if I’m listening to this podcast and I’m curious to learn more about the product, and maybe I even want to try the product, where should I go? What should I do? Yeah.

speaker-0: You can just search Silks Rich online and you can get the best deal in the Y2C channel, I guess. So if you have any concerns about like freezy hair or like, you know, if freezy hair is the best concern, biggest concern of our customers, because if if you like injure somewhere on the street and when you go to hospital, doctor is gonna use a silk strings to cure you. And that strengths get into yourself because it’s silk is the most closest protein structure to human beings. So silk has to be closer to you, to human beings, and we are utilizing that silk into beauty product.

speaker-1: Awesome. We’ll make sure to link to that in the show notes. Kodai, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

speaker-0: Thank you, Chase.