Case Studies

A family-owned Italian house making handmade charm jewellery, strong in tourist-facing retail at home and deliberately niche. Japan rewards exactly that kind of provenance and craft, but the doors that sell it — department-store concessions, hotel boutiques, designer stores — open through relationships and warm introduction rather than cold approach. The house also needed a defensible read on Japanese demand before committing spend, and any first move had to be timed around the summer break and the September trade-show window.

The group runs several café brands and had prioritised the US and Australia, with a master franchise already trading in one of them. Japan was attractive, but the entry model was unresolved: a master franchise preserves menu control and lets them train staff abroad, while a JV brings capital they would otherwise fund themselves. Picking wrong is expensive and slow to undo — deals of this kind typically take six to twelve months to close in Japan.

Akioto

2024–ongoingAchieved

Professional Audio Hardware

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Launching a professional audio hardware brand means building everything before a single unit ships — factories, supply chain, QA pipelines, multi-region warehousing, customer service, software, licensing, tax compliance, and product roadmap. Most early-stage hardware companies outsource half of this and lose on margin or quality. The alternative is bringing it all in-house, which demands unusual depth of capability across both hardware and software.

A luxury watch maison in the Tudor / Grand Seiko tier — deep catalog across entry mechanical, core collection, and flagship pieces — needed to reach the next generation of enthusiasts and collectors without diluting the brand or burning budget on traditional prestige campaigns. Horology culture is being rewritten in real time on short-form — wrist shots, movement reveals, heritage storytelling — but the half-life of a single post is days, not months. Winning there demands consistent output, testing velocity, and ownership of the distribution.

A European mobile studio wanted to validate whether their F2P simulation game could find traction in Japan before committing to a full launch. The target — women aged 18-35 in Tokyo and Osaka — is one of the most competitive segments on Japanese stores, dominated by entrenched local titles with deep cultural resonance.

A European publisher wanted to lift Japan sales for a medieval fantasy RPG targeting unmarried men aged 18-45 — a large but crowded Japanese gamer segment where prior localization efforts had failed to generate measurable buzz. The game needed both awareness and conversion in one coordinated push.

A European studio was launching the sequel to a popular city-building title in Japan, targeting city-building enthusiasts aged 25-45 with a focus on returning players from the first game. Sequels live or die on launch visibility inside the existing fan base — a missed launch window is hard to recover.