Leaving produce e-commerce for a maker-style D2C built on Kaiteki Oligo (2007)

What it means to walk out of a market that can be copied

The heart of this shift is that the company let go of something that was selling in order to move, deliberately, to the making side. The wakeari speciality-produce business drew attention when it opened and it was generating sales. Even so, Kinoshita weighed one thing heavily — that a business anyone can imitate does not last — and gave up the lightness of buying and reselling to take on the weight of designing and developing in-house. The launch of Kaiteki Oligo in 2007 can be read as a decision that put the question of whether an advantage could be made inimitable ahead of near-term revenue.

That said, the switch did not immediately bear large fruit. In the year to February 2011, when the exit was completed, standalone revenue was still only ¥739 million, and at the time of listing the company handled just five products. The pattern of compensating for small scale with density — raising the distinctiveness of each single product — only gains thickness as one product after another is made to land. The meaning of the choice to fold the founding business and move to the making side was confirmed not at the moment the near-term sales were surrendered, but afterwards, in the accumulated execution of building products that could not be copied.