It has been 25 years since our founding in 1997. The history of Rakuten tells the story of a road that has been traveled together, along with all of our users and merchants. As part of an ongoing project to commemorate our 25th anniversary, we are dialoguing directly with people who have a special connection with their Rakuten memories. This time, we are pleased to introduce Naoyuki Ide, President of Yoho Brewing Co.
Like Rakuten, Yoho Brewing was founded in 1997, and Ide has worked as a sales representative since the company's inception. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, but Yoho Brewing and Rakuten have a history of overcoming hardships together.
The same age as Rakuten.
Yoho Brewing, founded in 1997.
Rakuten: Yoho Brewing and Rakuten were both founded in 1997, the same year.
Naoyuki Ide: Yes. Yoshimichi Hoshino, the head of Hoshino Resorts, established the company in 1996 and started producing beer in 1997. Rakuten Ichiba opened in May 1997, right? Our company opened our store on Rakuten early on, in 1998.
Rakuten: You have been with us since the very beginning. Have you been personally involved in internet sales since then?
Naoyuki Ide: I was a sales rep, but I had nothing to do with internet sales. Hoshino, who was the external face of the company, was very ambitious. When Masatada Kobayashi, who was in charge of sales at Rakuten at the time, learned that we were going to start producing craft beer, he came to us for sales. Hoshino immediately decided to open a store on Rakuten Ichiba. In fact, I didn't know much about the internet and had no interest in it. It was Hoshino’s foresight, really.
Rakuten: What were your thoughts on online sales then?
Naoyuki Ide: At that time, we were in the midst of a local beer boom, and sales of Yona Yona Ale, released in July 1997, were exploding. I thought at the time that there was no need to go to the trouble of selling it on the internet when it was selling so well in supermarkets and liquor stores. I was traveling around and making sales, and meanwhile the guy in charge of our website was sitting at his desk doing whatever he was doing on his computer. I was like, "I'm busy over here, so why don't you stop messing around and help me?"
Rakuten: (Laughter)
Naoyuki Ide: However, by 1999, the local beer boom was over, and sales in the microbrewery industry as a whole began to decline after reaching their peak. Our company also continued to lose money, and people were quitting in droves. The employee in charge of our Rakuten Ichiba store also quit, and the store was left without anyone to look after it for a long time.
Rakuten: When did you start taking charge of online sales?
Naoyuki Ide: I started in 2004. By that time, beer sales had completely stopped and none of the liquor stores or supermarkets would carry our products. I had no choice but to turn to online sales to do something about the Rakuten Ichiba store, which had been closed. I learned for the first time that Yona Yona Ale, which I thought had completely stopped selling, was actually selling well on the internet.
Rakuten: What kind of customers were buying beer online at that time?
Naoyuki Ide: People who visit Karuizawa on vacation or for business drink Yona Yona Ale and think it’s delicious. Then, after they’ve returned to their hometown, they want to drink it again, but it’s not sold anywhere outside of Nagano Prefecture. So they search online and find that it is sold on Rakuten Ichiba, and buy it. That often seems to be the case.
We don't just sell products.
We build websites that entertain our customers.
Rakuten: What strategies have you developed for online sales?
Naoyuki Ide: At first, I had no idea what to do. I was standing there, completely clueless, when the salesperson at Rakuten, who was the rep working with our company, enthusiastically invited me to check out Rakuten University. We started up the same year as Rakuten, so to speak, but one of us was growing at a tremendous pace, and the other was a company that was about to go under. I felt that I had to reconsider my stance on the internet, which I hadn’t taken seriously up to that point, and that I had no choice but to rely on Rakuten. So I decided to follow that rep’s advice and went to Rakuten's office in Roppongi Hills every week to take a basic course at Rakuten University.
Rakuten: What did you learn at Rakuten University?
Naoyuki Ide: I learned how to make a top page and how to write a mail magazine. I created product pages and wrote mail magazines with a sense of excitement, trying to create a store that would convey the appeal of the products by putting into practice what I had learned. At that time, I was inspired to do something fun with the phrase, "Shopping is Entertainment!" For example, the "Yona Yona Ale Photo Exhibition" project. We asked people to bring a bottle of Yona Yona Ale with them when they went on a trip somewhere, take a picture of themselves with it, and send it to us. Many fans sent in photos of themselves in interesting situations, so we decided to have some fun with it, coming up with different awards, like the "most surprising" award and the "most moving" award, and posted them on the website. As a result, people who visited our website saw that we were doing something fun, and that got them interested in buying and trying Yona Yona Ale. This was an opportunity for me to confirm for myself that "shopping is entertainment," and so I became determined to put that concept into practice.
Rakuten: In addition to taking orders for products and other tasks, you also planned events. Wasn't that a lot of work?
Naoyuki Ide: At that time, our store only sold one product – Yona Yona Ale. Thanks to our limited scope, we were able to focus on other projects, but at the same time, we were worried about how little product variety we had. Another thing I learned at Rakuten University was that it is better to be handling a large number of different items. However, we only produced three different kinds of beer, under two brand names: Yona Yona Ale and Karuizawa Kogen Beer. And Karuizawa Kogen Beer was a local beer which was only available in Karuizawa, so Yona Yona Ale was the only one we were selling online. Our Rakuten rep and the lecturer at Rakuten University taught me that even if you’re only selling one product, it is possible to create gift sets of 10 or 15 bottles of that product. We also sold other products such as a trial set of two bottles for 500 yen with free shipping. I was shown how to increase the number and variety of items for sale by changing the way they’re packaged. We also started selling Yona Yona Ale gift sets for Father's Day. This was another suggestion from Rakuten, and it includes a set of several bottles, special packaging and a message card. In the past, the standard Father's Day gift was a necktie, but now more and more people give a bottle of Yona Yona Ale every Father's Day. The people at Rakuten gave us sound advice and even helped us by occasionally doing things like creating a planning page for us. They were very kind and worked with us to make our store a success.
Rakuten: Nowadays, Yoho Brewing stores have a wide variety of products. What are some of your most memorable products other than Yona Yona Ale?
Naoyuki Ide: The first is "English Old Sake," a beer that was aged for a long time and that we sold for 3,000 yen per bottle in 2005. This was beer which had missed its sell-by date, and had been left sitting in the tank for about two years. Typically beer brewing takes about a month, but when you age it for a long time, it ferments and becomes a very flavorful kind of beer called barley wine. After we announced it in our newsletter with the catchphrase "Miracle Beer" and created a project page for it, this beer sold out in less than a day. 200 more bottles of the limited edition were re-released and again sold out immediately. I was surprised at how quickly a high-priced beer could sell. The second was a black beer called "Tokyo Black," which was the second regular product we launched for the national market. From there, the company's own product lineup grew rapidly to its current lineup.
Setting my sights on the "Shop of the Year" award, and winning it.
Rakuten: You make it sound like you had no idea what you were doing, and yet you won the Shop of the Year award in 2007.
Naoyuki Ide: In 2005, I attended Rakuten's New Year's conference for the first time, and it inspired me. The Shop of the Year winners were being honored at that conference. When I saw the award-winners from the stores up on the stage, I really thought, "I want to be there too." So I set a goal: In one year, I would be an Orange Shop with monthly revenues of 10 million yen. In two years, I would be featured in Rakuten Dream, which is a magazine Rakuten publishes. In three years, I would be up on that stage. Our sales weren’t great at the time, but I was totally inspired. I wrote my goals on a piece of paper and put it on the wall, and almost all of them came true.
Rakuten: Did anything change after receiving the award?
Naoyuki Ide: I had more opportunities to communicate with other stores, and I began to engage in friendly competition with other highly motivated store managers. We gave each other advice and exchanged tips to help each other achieve our goals. This kind of lateral connection helped me to become more and more aware and motivated. Supermarkets and liquor stores, which had previously turned a blind eye to our sales efforts, began to work with us once they heard that our beer had a good reputation on the internet.
Rakuten: In 2007, you received the Shop of the Year award for the first time, and from there you went on to receive the award for 10 consecutive years. Your costumes at the award ceremonies also attracted a lot of attention, didn't they?
Naoyuki Ide: I tried to make the award ceremony more exciting every year by dressing up as an alien or wearing some kind of outlandish costume the way Sachiko Kobayashi does. We also did this thing called "The Bumpy Road to Tencho's Shop of the Year" on the Rakuten store page, and the fans seemed to enjoy it.
Sticking to "Shopping is Entertainment!"
A beer-centered entertainment business.
Rakuten: Do you have any goals you hope to achieve in the future?
Naoyuki Ide: I would like to change Japan’s beer culture. I think it would be great if people appreciated beer a little more.
Rakuten: How would you do that, specifically?
Naoyuki Ide: I want more people to have more of a casual attitude about trying craft beers. Instead of saying, “Ah, beer is beer,” maybe they’d say, "Today I'd like to have a Yona Yona Ale, or a barley wine, or maybe a black beer." I want to create a world where people think about and choose from a wide variety of beers like that.
Rakuten: I think Yoho Brewing's mission to bring people happiness through beer has something in common with Rakuten's mission to empower people and society through innovation.
Naoyuki Ide: We refer to our company as a beer-centered entertainment business – not a beer manufacturing company. We want to increase the number of happy people in the world, so we don’t just sell beer. We hold events and interact with our fans. If what we’re doing keeps getting bigger in Japan and then starts going global, I genuinely believe that one day we could win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Rakuten: That is a grand but wonderful goal.
Naoyuki Ide: I’m inspired by Rakuten, so my goals keep getting more grandiose. Everything is based on the spirit of "Shopping is Entertainment!" I will continue to plan more and more fun events, and I look forward to Rakuten’s continued support.
Naoyuki Ide. Born in Fukuoka Prefecture in 1967. After working for an electronics manufacturer and an advertising agency, he joined Yoho Brewing in 1997 as a sales representative when the company was founded. In 2004 he took over online sales with a focus on Rakuten Ichiba. In 2008 he became President and Representative Director. His nickname is Tencho. He is the author of the book "Pusyu: Yona Yona Ale, at Your Service. The Story of How a Silly but Interesting Strategy Turned Employees and Fans into a Team" (Toyo Keizai Inc.).
Ide says he shops exclusively on Rakuten Ichiba. He buys everything from daily necessities to accessories for his snowboarding hobby. He always checks Rakuten's Super Sale and has bought a lot of wine.
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