The Story of “minne”: How a Latecomer Rocketed to the Top of the e-Retail Market for Handmade Goods
“Analog warmth” is the secret of minne’s success, says founder Masayuki Abe
by Tatsuro Negishi
In Japan today, the market for handmade items, knitting, and other hobby crafts is booming. Total market volume has been estimated at 69.8 billion yen, and in recent years all eyes have turned to the online “consumer-to-consumer” (CtoC) market — an e-commerce marketplace that lets makers and buyers arrange direct purchases with each other. The number of Japanese CtoC sites first took off around 2010, and that frenetic growth continues today, helping to raise the profile of “one-of-a-kind” homemade pieces and empowering consumers who want to buy order-made items custom designed for their tastes.
Operated by GMO Pepabo, minne is a CtoC site launched in 2012. Currently, the site sits at the top of the highly competitive e-market for Japanese handmades, with 140,000 registered product makers and 1,540,000 registered items as of August 20. Specializing in accessories, the site sells everything from clothing to furniture, alongside fabric and an endless array of other items.
minne’s users are mostly students and homemakers, aged between their twenties and forties. Around ninety percent of users are women, many of whom create their products during breaks between housework and childrearing responsibilities. From this group, a few “star” artists have already emerged who are earning over a million yen a month through the site.
But how has minne, a relative latecomer to the handmade game, been able to tap so deeply into Japan’s hidden demand for craft products, and how did it leap to the top of the market so quickly? How did the company come into being, and what kind of future is it building?
We talked to site founder Masayuki Abe — known online as “Xavier of minne” after Francis Xavier, a Jesuit missionary who helped spread Christianity throughout Japan — to learn how minne’s influence spread so quickly.
A simple service, designed for people who live in the analog world
Abe-san works for GMO Pepabo, a company that, since its founding, has striven to develop services that “help support creative people.” In 2011, the company circulated an internal memo soliciting ideas for new service projects. Abe-san had loved going to flea markets and craft fairs for as long he could remember, so he took the memo as an opportunity to propose the minne concept. “I took something I loved and combined it with something I thought people were looking for — that was how the project got started,” he says.
“There’s a lot you can’t find out just by doing a web search for handmade artists or their work, so I thought if there were a specialized site for handmades, it might do a better job of satisfying people’s curiosity. More than anything, I just wanted to provide support that would help my favorite artists get noticed.”
Until recently, the main distribution channel for handmades had been the “craft towns” operated in different regions around Japan. But obviously, that method can only share charming new products with people who actually live in those areas. By using the web to distribute handmade goods, Abe-san believed he could build a community where far more people would see them, and where more people would be inspired to buy and sell more things.
By 2012, there were already twenty or thirty sites competing in the handmade market. How were consumers supposed to distinguish between them, and how could Abe-san make his own site stand out? He decided he would create a simple service where anyone could register anything they’d made.
“With an online shop, it’s important to get people talking about you — to have a crowd — so the first thing I did was try to increase the number of products we had. Obviously, the best way to increase the number of products is to get as many people posting items on your site as possible. But when I looked at the handmade sites that were active back then, it seemed like their interfaces were all very complicated. A lot of handmade artists don’t use the internet regularly, so I decided minne should have a simple interface that would make it easy for that kind of artist to register and start selling.”
“But I also worried that I might not get any response, even with a down-to-earth interface designed for people who spend most of their time in the analog world,” Abe-san says. To lower the hurdle even more for his users, Abe-san set up a system that allowed them to register as many items as they wanted free of charge, and that only charged a service fee when items were actually sold. He set the service fee at 10%, the lowest industry standard.
In addition, he set up a number of support functions to help drive sales, including a feature that posted exceptional items to the site’s front page and e-mail newsletter. A lover of handmades himself, Abe-san has even experimented with giving direct advice to artists, sharing his impressions and recommending that they use a certain fabric or a certain color.
You might say he’s taken an “analog” approach to selling analog items — one that values face-to-face interaction between real people. Through communication with artists and the regular sales events minne offers, Abe-san says he wants his users to feel like there’s a real person behind minne, one who values their work as highly as he values his own.
“minne stars” and customers who come looking for things they can’t get anywhere else
As artists gathered to the site and the number of items started to rise, minne’s sales started to go up too. The site’s lineup of “things you can’t get anywhere else” started to attract attention, and people flocked to the site to see what was on sale. Before long, a number of hit products started to emerge.
One product that attracted a lot of attention was “Look at the Baby!” (“Uchi no Ko ha Mita,”) an item whose artist agreed to make earrings out of pictures of buyers’ pets for ¥2,600. Another big seller was “Illusion Mapping” (“Mōso Mapping,”) a t-shirt with a giant rip, bra, and cleavage printed on the front (¥3,780). These items started generating buzz on social media, and before long a bona fide “minne movement” had begun.
As the site’s following has continued to grow, more and more handcraft makers, self-published authors, and small-scale designers have turned their hobbies into new careers. Thanks to minne, a number of people have been able to make “world debuts” as full-fledged artists.
The site has also helped facilitate energetic new creative partnerships, such as the young artist who does ceramics painting on “Hakata Ningyō,” a traditional style of doll that has been made in Kyushu for centuries. Projects like these original Hakata Ningyō show how users can reimagine the charm of traditional art forms whose heritage is far removed from contemporary Japanese life. In the minne community, artists have been able share insights on a common theme and have set to work introducing “new traditions” to the world.
minne’s “Handmade Awards,” launched in collaboration with another company that works to promote specialized handcraft shops around Japan, drew over 13,000 entries. Real-world handmade events have flourished too, held in famous department stores and major exhibition halls. In 2014, a person-to-person sales event held in Tokyo’s “CLASKA” exhibition space drew over 1,000 participants, many of them parent-and-child teams. As Abe-san stood in the crowd, watching minne’s popular artists line up and seeing their products fly out of the hall almost as soon as they went on display, he felt he “had finally seen the reality of how big our impact has been.”
Teaching the world to love handmades
As the site continues raising its profile through TV commercials and web ads, new users have stayed on the rise. In March 2014, two years after the site launched, minne became the Number One handmade community in Japan by number of artists. That September, it reached Number One in total products.
Yet even now, with users and profits skyrocketing, Abe-san coolly assesses the reality he faces, saying “the handmade market still hasn’t finished growing.”
“It’s easier than it used to be to get your hands on fabric, and the number of people who are making their own products has gone up. Technologies are advancing, and it’s even become possible to learn things like resin processing that used to be specialized skills. Today, I think we’ve finally reached a point where the kind of people who have been making things for years but who don’t use the internet very much are able to sell the things they make. I want to keep growing minne the old-fashioned way — by getting more and more buyers to say ‘I can trust this place to give me a quality product’ and getting more and more artists to say ‘I’ll sell my work on minne because it’s minne.””
In a web culture where authors can be almost invisible, minne has dared to build a service based on what Abe-san calls “analog warmth” — a sense of closeness and familiarity internet users rarely get to feel. Looking ahead, Abe-san says minne won’t stop at handcraft work, and that his goal is “to build a marketplace where any kind of homemade item can find a buyer.” The mission of “Xavier of minne,” it seems, has just begun.
(photo: Daisuke Hayata translation: Jay Walker)
Originally published at ignition.co.
