We asked Mr Endo, Ms Nakamura, Mr Kodama and Mr Sato about the prospects.
BAYCREW'S Co., Ltd. develops a wide range of lifestyle-related businesses, including an apparel business centred on many brands such as JOURNAL STANDARD and IENA, as well as a restaurant business, a furniture business and a fitness business.

The starting point is a 'manufacturing' perspective.

The company was founded in 1977 and is celebrating its 43rd anniversary. We deal not only in fashion but also in all aspects of lifestyle, including food and drink, furniture and fitness. Our starting point is the perspective of 'manufacturing'; this commitment makes us unique and proud of our company. Our apparel business currently has around 40 brands. Every employee is constantly aware of the perspective of 'manufacturing' based on social changes, such as our customers' particulars and thoughts. We continue to grow our business by creating products and services unique to the BAYCREWS GROUP that cannot be imitated elsewhere.

The key is to create an organisation that combines both a brand perspective and an e-commerce perspective.

Previously, the scale of sales via malls was large. However, given future growth in the digital sector, we needed to strengthen our e-commerce, which allows us to have a direct relationship with our customers. We have been working on two significant points to enhance our e-commerce. First, we have set up an organisation specialising in e-commerce and have been working on bringing it in-house. In the previous structure, each brand had its own e-commerce manager scattered around the company, and each of them absorbed and resolved e-commerce-related requests and issues, but it was not possible to carry out activities based on a unified standard. Therefore, we formed an e-commerce unit by bringing together partners (employees) with both a brand perspective and an e-commerce perspective. The strength of the current organisation is that the departments involved in e-commerce have a full complement of professionals with various views, including shop operations, digital marketing, UI/UX and engineers, which has been the most significant change that has led to growth. The second is data integration. We have been working to improve the customer experience and expand customer contact points by centrally managing various data in shops and e-commerce. Specifically, this involves integrating membership information, inventory and other data. For example, previously, there were separate systems for managing stock in e-commerce and shops. If a product were out of stock in one of them, it would lead to customer dissatisfaction, such as being unable to buy the product they wanted to buy because it was out of stock. By integrating stock, for example, we have been working to reduce opportunity losses by making it possible to order stock from the shop when stock on the e-commerce side is out of stock. We have grown to the extent that the current e-commerce sales rate is approximately 30%, and 78% of this is the company's e-commerce.

After all, People make good services

We survey our customers every six months to visualise issues and needs that are not visible from the figures. We are still facing many challenges, so we have set priorities among them and are working to achieve them. Among these, especially, size was an issue raised for some time. We’ve talked about developing the system in-house, but it was not possible to develop a function that would allow customers to compare sizes with products bought from other brands, so that was one of the factors behind the introduction of unisize. In addition, there are several size-related solutions on the market, but we considered it essential that many customers could use them, so we placed particular emphasis on the usage rate. Another deciding factor was the flexibility with which they responded to our requests. Good services ultimately result from people-to-people relationships, so I think the fact that we could communicate closely with unisize staff and receive their suggestions was also a deciding factor. The usage rate has exceeded 50% after the introduction of unisize, which has led to improvements in size issues. Our expectations for unisize are very high.

From omnichannel to unified commerce

Our strategy for the future is to go one step beyond omnichannel to unified commerce. As digital technology permeates our daily lives, we are working to enable customers to freely move between online and offline shopping without being conscious of the channel. For example, if a customer reads a product tag picked up in a shop via the Baycrew’s app and purchases online, the product will be delivered to the customer's home. That allows the customer to return home empty-handed. In addition, to reproduce the same kind of customer service as in shops, we have introduced web customer service tools to realise individually-optimised real-time customer service. Customer satisfaction is higher for customers who cross-use the shop and e-commerce. The average purchase price per unit for cross-users is 4.3 times higher than those who buy exclusively from the e-commerce site, and four times higher than those who buy solely from the shop. We hope to continue to grow our business based on the know-how we have developed so far.