Beautytech Tokyo Vol.2
Beauty StartUps That Will Revolutionize Customer Experience
Last November 30th In Tokyo, I was thrilled to meet 100 hustlers who are in beauty/fashion/consumers spaces in Japan. This is the second time hosting beautytech Tokyo event after I’ve met Odile Roujol in San Francisco this year and this community she created has been expanding to 12 cities in the world such as NY, LA, Paris, Shanghai etc… Thanks to istyle Inc, we have successfully gathered 100 attendees including startups, founders and investors and here are the speakers we carefully chose for Beautytech Tokyo vol.2!
“Beauty StartUps That Will Revolutionize Customer Experience”
Session 1: A New Dimension of Personalization
Kenji Ota | CEO & Founder, CODE Meee Inc.
Yasuhiro Take | CEO & Founder, dricos, Inc
Yosuke Miyama| CEO & Founder, Sparty, Inc.,
[Moderator] Makiko Sato , — Senior Partner, iSGS Investment Works Inc.
Session 2: The Key to Reaching Gen Z
Yuri Matsui | Director & Co-Founder, AppBrew K,K.
Taku Watanabe | CEO & Founder, BitSter K.K.
Dei Mou | CEO & Founder, TRIBEAU K.K.
[Moderator] Kanako Inoue , — Portfolio Director D4V(VC arm of IDEO Tokyo)
Session 3:How to Transform Salon Business
Tomoyuki Kizaki | CEO & Founder, Requpo K.K.
Kunihiko Oba | CEO & Founder, GO TODAY SHAiRE SALON
Takeshi Ishiguro |COO & Co-Founder, Jocy K.K.
[ Moderator ]Akihiro Higashi , — Independent Investor
In this post, I’ll be just quickly introducing several service that caught my eyes since another editor team will publish more detail on the event soon this week.
The Key to Reaching Gen Z
For the theme of the Key to reaching Gen Z, we invited 3 different startups that target GenZ in Japan. The most interesting startup I’ve met was a cosmetic surgery app called “Tribeau”. As Korean is known for where most young generation takes cosmetics surgery, it’s becoming common in Japan, too.
Hair Salon business model is extremely changing and emerging
I moved to west coast 4.5 years ago so I almost forget how the Japanese market is like. Hosting Beautytech Tokyo means also a lot to me to learn the Japanese ecosystem and the difference with San Francisco. In Japan, Hair salon industry is also different from America and still an untapped and fragmented market. Most hair salons rely on the magazine and newspaper advertisement. Most customers make a reservation by a phone call. 3 different founders who run hair salon app/service talked about their own approach to these problems.
Another interesting point I found at the event is that I started to see our community in Tokyo is calling more investors who are interested in these spaces than I’ve seen before. As Odile said, BeautyTech revolution is under way, and it’s a global trend, I’ve been contacted by a lot of investors even though I’m usually based in San Francisco.
SHISEIDO Japan this year welcomed Masanobu Todome as a new chief strategy officer and he’s been involved in M&A, investment and finding the next innovation to lead SHISEIDO as a global brand.
I also met Go Fujita from MTG Ventures which is branched out by MTG Co.,Ltd. which sells innovative home-use beauty devices and made over $600M revenue this year.
MTG Co.,Ltd. launched about $48M first fund to invest in Beauty tech, wellness tech and food tech starting from a Japanese market, and Go is in charged of the CEO of MTG Ventures.
Beautytech is unfailingly taking Japanese innovators by storm! If I wasn’t a founder of my company, I’d definitely be a part of it. Well… that’s why I enjoy helping the community and hosting Beautytech event in Japan while I’m off work:)
