Case Study｜Erizen Co.

It's not 'the end of the sale', but rather the transmission of Japanese culture through experience.

ーPlease tell us about your company's business.

We are a company specializing in kimono and kimono accessories, founded in Tensho 12, two years after the Honnoji Incident.
Under our corporate philosophy of "Shosho," we have set forth our mission to "transmit the culture of wearing kimonos" in order to conduct business in a truthful and correct manner.
As customers have fewer and fewer opportunities to wear kimonos, we want to help them feel the "beauty of harmony" and enrich their hearts through kimonos, and we emphasize the importance of "experiencing" the actual items.

As the number of kimono stores is decreasing, we recognize that our major role is not to "sell and sell," but to help people enjoy kimonos for a long time and to promote Japanese culture.   

Because we are a company that has been in business since the 1500s, every 'contact with customers' is an asset.

ーPlease tell us about the background behind the introduction of UPWARD.

We have had many customers since our establishment, but as a company we have not been able to organize our important customer information. Most of the information was in the personal memories of the sales staff or written down in a way that was easy for each person to write down, and we did not have a system in place to consolidate and accumulate the information company-wide.
Including inquiries other than purchases... "I found my grandmother's kimono, but it is a little moldy, so I want to know how to take care of it..." These kinds of inquiries are the basis of our business, so accumulating information on customer touchpointon a daily basis was an urgent issue.
In addition to visits, phone calls, and letters, we now have a wider variety of points of contact with our customers, including inquiries via e-mail, LINE, website, and Instgram DMs. We feel that we must accumulate and pass on this information as a company in order to maintain long-lasting relationships with our customers.

We searched for a tool that would allow us to properly accumulate information and also allow easy reporting from smartphones so that even veteran employees could handle it easily, and we came across UPWARD. Since we also conduct outside sales activities using sales vehicles on a daily basis, the fact that customer information is linked to a map was also a great match for us.

The UPWARD map visualizes customer information and how much time has passed since the last proposal, and is used by our sales staff to plan their daily activities.
Due to the nature of our business, we have a very long relationship with our customers. Once a customer does business with us, 20 years later, the kimono may be re-tailored for the customer's daughter and worn again.
Therefore, we want to make regular proposals to customers whom we have not seen for a while or with whom we have not been able to communicate, and we think that we should logmake sure that we know how long there has been a lapse in contact.

It is also very important to make it easy to establish contacts with customers in various locations in order to efficiently provide value to customers with a limited number of people.
By utilizing a system such as UPWARD, we can establish contact with customers at the appropriate time. After all, as the saying goes, "God is in the details," and we believe that you cannot truly convey the appeal of an actual product unless you touch and feel it on your skin. Therefore, we would like to stick to the point of having you touch and actually see our products until the very end.

We also place great importance on "human communication," in which we respond to our customers' requests by imagining what they might enjoy if they could see something like this, based on our past relationships with them.
By accumulating more information on our customers through these activities, we expect to increase the quantity and quality of our contacts with them.
Recently, we are gradually beginning to see that our daily activities are leading to positive results, and we are beginning to hear more positive comments such as, "Let's go around to these customers next time.  

IT systems are indispensable to continue conveying essential qualities such as 'long-lasting' and 'deep'

One style of business development is to create potential customers "shallowly and widely," but we believe that our stance is based on "deeply and for a long time.
Our sales staff who have supported our stores since the end of World War II tell us that they have customers who have been with them for more than 50 years, or five generations. We would like to pass on the know-how and ideas of these veterans as an important corporate resource.
To this end, we would like to accumulate information in a form that can be properly passed on to the future, and to create a foundation on which we can make proposals that will make our customers more satisfied, and a system that will create a medical record of our customers, which we would like to advance in a higher gear now that a generational change is imminent. I believe that this will be an important asset for the store in the future.

Also, our customers are very diverse and have many different kinds of expertise. What one salesperson has heard could be beneficial information for other customers. In this aspect, we want to be able to share the know-how and key events that we hear about with everyone.
Then, no matter how excellent the system is, it is meaningless if it is not used onsite, no matter how many excellent functions it has. The fact that veteran employees can use the system from their mobile devices without any problems and that it can steadily collect information from the field was a major reason why we selected UPWARD.

Our wish to incorporate "tradition" and "aesthetics" into our customers' daily lives by wearing kimonos cannot be fulfilled by one-way imposition or forcing. I believe that the kimono will become more and more obsolete unless there is someone like the salesperson I mentioned earlier, who has been with the customer for five generations, who can gently make suggestions to the customer at the right time and in the right lifestyle.
Rather than simply spreading the kimono to a large number of people in a broad and shallow way, I believe that the most important thing in preserving the culture is to make maximum use of IT systems such as UPWARD to communicate the appeal of kimono to each and every customer at the right time.
It is said that distribution will change in the future, and there is a trend for manufacturers to sell directly to customers. However, we believe that kimono requires a "human service" that is more than just buying a product.
It takes time and costs money, of course, but we feel that we should steadily provide more personalized proposals and heartfelt assistance to our customers while utilizing IT to promote kimono culture.  

ーWhat is your vision for the future?

No matter where you look in the world, you will not find such advanced and sophisticated dyeing and weaving techniques.
As sustainability and sustainability is drawing attention around the world, the kimono is very well thought of. I believe that if we can properly preserve this technology and culture, the kimono will surely be in the limelight again in the near future.
However, kimonos are becoming far removed from our daily lives.
In such a situation, we will communicate that the true value of kimono lies in this. While maintaining contact with our customers, we are able to ensure the value of kimono. We feel very strongly that we want to be and continue to be such a store.
It is true that the market size of the kimono industry is decreasing year by year, but our vision is to continue to convey the charm of kimono to Japan and to the world, even if we are one of the last shops to do so.
As a tactic to achieve this, we would like to be the first to select and utilize user-friendly tools such as UPWARD.