Candy Japan 2014 Year in Review
candyjapan.com
candyjapan.com
- The service said that candy was shipped bi-monthly. I assumed it would come like every two weeks, but it always arrived quite simultaneous for me, a few days to a week later once a month.
- Maybe it's me, but the flavors often ranged from weird to inedible (like rose flavored candy)
- There is no way to re-order candy that I actually like. Actually, it's hard to even gather the name of the candy often enough in order to search for it.
- The cancel subscription link / process was hard to find on your page.
International mail is a bit unpredictable, even post office says the packages can take 2-4 weeks, so it is possible there could be overlap.
I try to balance between easy to eat and truly bizarre. Sorry you didn't like those rose flavored ones, but many people actually loved them. Taste preferences are so varied I can't hope to keep everyone happy. I would rather sometimes shock and sometimes dazzle instead of just keeping it safe.
Definitely looking into starting a shop in the future to re-order more of the good ones.
Cancel instructions are in the FAQ, they are complicated a bit because I don't have user accounts on the site (need to verify you have the subscription you are trying to cancel). Easiest way is to drop me an email and ask for cancel.
The Rose candies were a stand out memory, delicious!
This! I even contacted Bemmu about ordering some of them that I really liked, but the required quantities were a bit high and I had some trouble finding more people to order them with.
Rose flavored as in flavored with rose water[1]?
That's a fairly normal flavor in deserts and candies. Common as a primary flavor in Turkish Delight. Alton Brown demonstrates how to make your own in the episode where he makes baklava—one of the ones currently on Netflix in the US, I think. It's pretty much what you'd expect from the name.
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!
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.
Just signed up for a trial. Really looking forward to it. A couple of things: 1. The sign up process is SO EASY. Fantastic - wish other sites would make it so simple. Choose your level of service, pay, done. Fast and quick.
2. Email newsletter signup? Didn't notice one. Would be a great way to keep people who pay for gift subscriptions in the loop.
3. Provide a custom email for people who have bought a gift subscription. At the moment, it's just the link. If you provided a page or sample email that was like 'Hey, I've bought you a subscription to Candy Japan!!!! Here's what happens... etc etc' - I think it would make the impact of the gift greater.
What I called the newsletter is really just a description of the items that we send to subscribers when stuff is shipped to them.
Good idea about the explanation page for gift subscriptions.
http://www.wikihow.com/Buy-Wholesale
I know in Korea that some of the big "traditional" style markets have shop fronts that are only wholesalers and won't sell to regular customers. If there's an analog where you live you might want to hit those up. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there's a wholesale confectionary market of some sort that meets once a month or whatever.
My sister-in-law ran a small store for a few years and she'd go to a local convention center/stadium and buy all kinds of inventory at such places.
Having heard some stories of foreigners in Japan (cf: patio11 being interrogated as a bike thief for being 1/ a foreigner and 2/ on a bike), it is possible a local assistant may have more luck by seeming less 'suspicious'[1].
[1] Not quite the right word - 'less curiously and slightly unnervingly conspicuous' perhaps?
Unfortunately I had to cancel the subscription, though. This is because the frequency was just too high for me. Although I do love all the weird and funny types of candy, I'm not that much of a sweet tooth and some of the candies kept piling up! If 2015 also brings different types of subscription, I'll probably sign up again for once a month.
All the best!
If not... you should. :)
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 help justify your higher price.
Congrats on the good year!
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.
- Most services cost around $25 monthly.
- Candy Japan seems to offer the most frequent service, with almost all of the other options only offer monthly delivery.
- But Candy Japan also offers the smallest amount - 282 grams (141 grams * 2) compared to others who usually offer 1lb (450 grams) monthly.
Has anyone tried other subscription services? How do they compared to Candy Japan?
http://beejuboxes.com/box-list/japanese-snack-boxes/
After some comparison, looking at sample boxes, weighing pros & cons, I signed up for a taste box from TasteJapan, and I'm very excited to see what it's like!
Congrats on your success!
- The email you send out is great, but it often arrives well after I have received the package. One arrived a couple of days ago and I really want to wait on the email, but my willpower is usually no match for (possibly) delicious candy :/
- The email always goes to spam. Maybe check your DKIM settings or contact MailChimp? Or maybe it's just me? (Gmail / Google Apps)
- A small card with the name/photo/short description of each item would be great. If they were well designed and of decent quality I'd even collect them!
Congratulations in any case - it always cheers me up to see a niche business like this do well.
One anecdote: one of his shipments had quite a variety of candies. While other boxes were unopened by customs, this one had stickers all over it. Upon opening, I noticed that one of the candy boxes had been opened, which happened to be the one with candies that looked like white round pill-like things. I assume it was flagged as suspicious and a sample was taken. It had a sticker with the word 'food' (in Portuguese) written on it.
There are a few regulations regarding 'food' imports. I even expect to run into some trouble because of the regular deliveries. I suspect the amounts are small enough that it hasn't hit any triggers yet.
The biggest challenge is that many items are region bound or limited time sales, so practically we cannot get them. If I took the train to various prefectures in Japan and chatted with manufacturers, I could probably get even more variety going. I was thinking of starting a new tier (Candy Japan premium) for that, but still thinking about it.
It does take time to prepare the packages. First of all we don't know exactly how many subscribers we'll have until the last minute. Then we want to order an amount of items that best matches that count. That takes more time than if we pre-ordered. Then stuffing the boxes takes about 3 days. I think the post also takes an extra day for them to calculate all the postage for a pile of 1000 boxes. So yes there are currently some delays, but from the customer point of view they get something every 2 weeks, only the initial shipment being slow to arrive.
I did a "test run" with a subscription for my mother. She enjoyed it as a gift/novelty idea, but the quantity was too much for her... I am now considering (prompted by the post of some other customer in the thread) to get a subscription for my office. But ... one of the shippings to my mother included some crazy "hamburger facsimiles" that you had to prepare by mixing different powders, pouring in stamps, cooking in microwave and then cut up and assemble. While fun, this is impractical for office use, I'd prefer to be sure I get actual candies mostly (salted snacks would be ok, too, but anything involving such a preparation would be wasted on us).
Finally: I was really disappointed when you canceled the stationery project... I had at least three people who could get this as a gift (and possibly renew on their own after the first run).
What is the real quantity? All I could find is a photo of two empty envelopes from a distance and a single nicely done box of candies (what does it have to do with envelopes?).
(And this is not criticism about the service: it was me who had misjudged the situation - anyway she was happy about the idea, it is just that she prefers not to eat "too much" candies for health reasons).
I'll most certainly do a Show HN soon, just a couple of things to fix before. For instance the price is currently only listed in EUR, but if you prefer to be billed in USD just drop us an email saying so and we will bill you in USD ($25/month).
I don't understand the difference between the box from April 2014 and the size of "two standard Japanese envelopes".
Thanks for the good, clear write-up.
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.