From juice vending machines to commercial ice machines — and a direct-sales network (1965)

Who sells a product no one wants, and who repairs it

What sits at the centre of this decision is less the swap of one product for another than the fact that Hoshizaki chose the product and the way of selling it at the same time. A machine that makes ice had no buyers in the Japan of that day. With no buyers, there was no reason a distributor would move it. That Hoshizaki took to calling on restaurants one by one was not the pursuit of an efficient channel; it was the reverse side of having no demand except what the company created for itself. The result was that it acquired two things as a single asset — the ice machine, and a sales company that carried selling and servicing together.

That arrangement was not unconditionally strong, however. A structure that entrusts judgement to firms rooted in their own regions produces agility close to the customer and, at the same time, creates ground head office cannot see. The problem that surfaced at a sales subsidiary in 2018 can be read as that underside appearing half a century later. Whether a mechanism built to sell through a market that did not exist still works in the same shape once the market has matured — the question Hoshizaki has carried to this day lies on the line extended from the choice made in 1965.