Hello! My name is Kigawa, and I work for Bi Natural and Milobina.

Today, I would like to talk about how a company called Bi Natural started with the store name Aromatic Life Magic Soap and ended up launching the current brand (store name) Milobina, which led to its birth. The story up to.

Click here for previous stories.

The beginning is aromatic life magic soap
Until it becomes beautiful and natural
Beautiful Natural Milobina Birth Eve-1

Last time, we talked about how the vice president decided to wield a big machete in order to cut off the source of the illness that is causing the exhaustion of beautiful naturals.

At that time, I was the sole manager and president of the store, deciding everything from new products to sales methods and sale content.

I didn't know that the vice president was calculating profits, albeit only roughly. Because he doesn't always show his face...

Until then, my father, who was the chairman, was in charge of accounting, but he was a very rough-and-ready person and had an optimistic personality, so he was not able to grasp the problems with my sales method. did not. In fact, let's do more! That momentum.

One day, while I was making an event calendar, the vice president quietly said to me,

"Why do you give discounts? No discounts."

"Huh? You can't sell it without a discount!"

"You're confident in the product's power, right?"

"Of course I do!"

“Then we need to change the way we sell!”

"Eh, that's it...I would like to get a bigger discount."

"Also, we need to lower the president's salary."

"picture?"

Well, after that, we had quite a long battle between my strong father and me and the vice president, but thanks to his firm opinion and the rational persuasion of Satsuki, an old staff member with a background in science, I gradually We stopped the method of attracting customers with excessive events,

I fixed the page little by little in my free time, and gradually I was able to calm down and think about various things. In addition, the profits that would otherwise have been lost through sales can now be used to focus on developing new products.

Surprisingly, when we had a bang-bang sale and were an orange store (that's what Rakuten calls a store with monthly sales of over 10 million yen), when our sales literally halved, our profits were halved. , some months have a lot of profit...!

However, although sales did not increase and the aircraft remained low-flying, it did not decline any further, and reviews no longer received harsh criticism.

However, sales did not come back that easily, and they still haven't. The number of rival stores has also increased significantly.

However, I am happy that the number of new customers has increased, as I think that the store has become a little easier to understand.

I'm sure some people don't like hearing the word "sales" being called out over and over again, but employee salaries, new initiatives, and the search for new products are all done with the profits from sales. Sales are very important for a store. Securing profits is very important for achieving a sustainable state.

I finally understood this after being taken around by the vice president and being scolded by various people.I had never studied management, so I was really inexperienced.

While I was doing this, my beloved father passed away from cancer. I had been doing well until recently, but three weeks after I was admitted to the hospital, I started having trouble breathing.

I think my last job was when I gave a speech as chairman in front of everyone at the opening party for our business partners after the shipping center was built.

I loved my father, and he always protected me. I was so sad, lost, and overwhelmed with anxiety that I didn't know if I would ever really recover. But...life force is amazing, isn't it?

This gave me the opportunity to become independent.

I can no longer manage my business by pandering to my father. I'm divorced and want my children to go to college. I don't want to give up my house either!

After this, I started thinking about what I could do to further promote reforms with the vice president. However, it is difficult to change something that has been done for many years.

So, let's get back to the topic of sales, but sales are also an indicator of how well we are accepted by our customers and how useful Bi-Natural is.

When that happens, I feel very lonely...

One month, while suffering from declining sales, we managed to carry out structural reforms and thought we were somehow on the upswing, but suddenly sales dropped by 30%!

Since then, no customers have come to our store at all...especially new customers!

Ma-zu-i~~~~! ! !

There was a clear reason why sales were half of what they were last time, and although I was nervous, I was able to find a way to deal with it. But this time, I don't know the cause. This is not something to panic about!

After a while, I finally found out that Rakuten Market's search algorithm had changed dramatically. was.

Bi-Natural carefully selects its products, so each product has a high review rating. At the time, if you wanted to rank high in searches, you could get a high score if you had a high review rating, which was advantageous.

However, after a certain day, review ratings were hardly taken into consideration, and instead, products that were selling at that time began to be displayed at the top.

If they had been selling as hard as they used to, they might have been able to keep their top rankings, but Bi-Natural, which had changed to a calmer sales strategy, was doing quite a bit of damage. I felt angry, but I had no choice but to give in to Rakuten Market's pushiness...

Ah, online shops are so impermanent...

In the end, we ended up incurring a huge deficit that year, and from the following year I had no choice but to take another drastic action by cutting my salary and that of the vice president in half. Unable to pay, he ended up taking out numerous educational loans.

In such a situation, we cannot afford to reduce the salaries and benefits of our staff, and there are also social conditions that are quite difficult for small companies, such as paid holidays, increased hourly wages, and participation in social insurance.

Until then, Bi Natural was a family-run business without a paid leave system, but this helped to reduce the naivety of being a family-run business and strengthen our skills.

Bi-Natural was a typical type of company that would go bankrupt, as Calbee's president once said, ``warm but lukewarm.''

Bi-Natural is a company that has been criticized by customers, attacked by shopping malls, and criticized by its staff, and has gradually been trained.

There was some anger and conflict, but it was all a very important process.

Regarding store management, we contracted with a new and reliable consultant, and after thinking about ways to improve search and make pages easier to understand, we finally started to see an increase in new customers.

Rakuten Market has also implemented a number of measures to attract new customers to Rakuten Market, and I believe that the increase in new customers is due to these efforts.

Wow, I thought I might finally be able to breathe a little bit, but that wasn't the case at Rakuten Market. I was naive!

Read more here!