MARCH 9, 2022There are a hundred ways to sell the same thing, each with its own unique value. For instance there are many spinoffs to the traditional sushi restaurant.
The many types of sushi restaurants each holds their own merit. The appropriate type can be decided based on factors like its location. If the location is somewhere with many office men and its shop space is narrow, standing sushi restaurant, great for single person diners, is the suitable choice. By removing chairs, more capacity for customers is created and standing urges faster eating-eventually leading to higher turntable rates.
I think it is a beautiful thing to find gaps and new opportunities from every aspect of a business. Today I would like to introduce 3 businesses that overcame such gaps in ingenious ways.
It’s not just the moment you put out the product but also how you bring in the raw materials, how you establish an outlet, gathering customers, serving customers: There can be innovation in many tiny details.
Bulletin provides the channels and benefits of traditional brick and mortar outlets to online brands. In other words, a select shop for online brands. Its not just dividing a retail space for sharing but also having the ability to rent by month.
To succeed as a retail store, location is imperative. In New York where land prices are sky high, the gap formed after one tenant moves out and before the next moves in is costly and wasteful for the landowners. Eyeing this problem, Bulletin developed a system to make full use of such retail spaces in short spans. They offer these spaces as pop-up store areas for online brands. Since landlords just want to fill up the space for the short gaps, they are willing to go for low prices even for those in expensive locations.
For the online brands, it helps overcome the lack of ways to test out the benefits of an actual retail space. Since it has a prime location, it is great for testing and being able to rent by month is convenient as well. It helps marketing wise to advertise these as pop-up stores. It also makes it possible to reach out to an unexpected and previously unreachable customer base.
Bulletin is like a retail version of WeWork that tactfully rode on the waves of the sharing economy trend.
Targeting women in their 30s, they were particular in the design of their outlet space-to the point of winning the ‘Good Design Award’ in 2015. They also put effort in their products, displaying fish species that you do not usually find in supermarkets. This spikes interest in fishes in consumers.
According to a research by the ministry in 2016, the Japanese fishing industry has been shrinking year after year, making it 24.7% smaller than a decade ago. In such waters, SakanaBacca developed a system to bring in fish stocks straight from the ports.
Usually when fishes go through wholesalers from the port, they go for a limited range of fish species that are widely popular and easy to sell. However by getting the fresh fish straight from the ports they can sell a wider range of fish types. The minor fish species that usually gets removed is given market value and revitalizes the market overall.
They call the logistics system for bringing in fish from the ports “Gyopochi”, making it available for other F&B restaurants as well. Currently they deal with 1500 types of sea stocks, wholesaling to over 10,000 registered shops(2018). Both Sakanabacca and Gyopochi take the important role of resolving issues with the fishing industry.
Established in the US in 2013, PillPack is a new kind of pharmaceutical service. With unprecedented growth rates, it achieved 1 billion USD in capital by 2017. As a system where medicine is delivered monthly to customers, it seems like a distant service to those who do not regularly consume medicine but data shows that '1 in 5 Americans consume more than 3 types of medicine daily', displaying the enormous scale of the market.
Beyond online orders of medicine, you can add on vitamins, renew insurance information and more. Upon registration, they confirm your prescription information. Rather than dumping huge amounts of medicine to the consumer, the company developed robots that pack the medicine automatically, reducing the labour needed for pharmacists.
The most impactful merit of PillPack is the dispenser they designed, where you can easily pull out medicine packs that you consume on 1 seating. The time, date and medicine are clearly shown on the label and this removes the risk of consuming the wrong medicine. In America, annual deaths from wrongful consumption of medicine is significant–thereby showing great value in the removal of the risk.
Especially in a society with ageing population like Japan, this is a service that would be very much appreciated. The current laws in Japan requires the pharmacists to personally handover the medicine to the consumer, proving a possible hurdle for such online pharmacies.
Case 03, PillPack, was acquired by Amazon for a reported US$753 million, further scaling the business in a huge way. Even if you do not change the things you sell, many innovations can occur in how you sell–By having a bird's eye view of the business process, changing and removing segments in creative ways. By focusing on the shape of commerce, one could possibly create the new PillPack or the new conveyor belt sushi. Future standards are designed with the innovations of today.