I gave a talk titled “New Services for Japanese Sake Beverages Using Digital Tools and Small-lot Airfreight Delivery” at the Consortium for Export Promotion of Japanese Sake Beverages organized by the National Tax Administration Agency.

Our company does not come from a trading company, logistics or liquor store background. Unfortunately, we do not have the hardware or distribution channels to take advantage of. Even so, we have thoroughly considered what we can do to deliver the charm of the region and its artisans, what we can do to create an infrastructure that allows sake breweries to make money as a business, and what we can do to help sake fans make money together, and have been working on service design. It was a necessary opportunity for me to ask myself these questions from various angles, reflect on them, and refine them (not in the past tense, but in the ongoing tense).

I have introduced the service that I have thought through to people who are experts in Japanese alcoholic beverages and who have a lot of experience in this field, and they all said in unison, “That’s impossible. I thought about it again, wondering if that was true. I explored the possibilities. In the process, we came up with a certain form, which I am sharing with you today. As a result, we have designed a service that comprehensively utilizes the Internet, digital tools, and logistics methods. Therefore, we asked the participants to do the following. We told them, “Please listen to what we have to say from the perspective of gathering information on the possibilities of discovering needs that cannot be covered by conventional approaches and how to respond to them.

We want to bring local power and craftsmanship to the world.

We are very close to release. We have been underground and concentrating on development, but we would like to go above ground and discuss its possibilities and development with various people.

The photos were taken by Saki Kimura, who also spoke as a lecturer, and JTB, the secretariat. Thank you very much.

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Thank you for your comments. I believe that those who design, operate, and manage services are always asking themselves what they can learn and utilize from “existing services” and what they can introduce into “new services” in order to improve their services. Today’s “new service to be introduced” will be tomorrow’s “past service that has been introduced. I always repeat this question to myself, but rather than the timing of the introduction or the newness of the service, I ask myself whether it is useful and whether it is generating social value/contribution value/business value. As we need to continue our business, what can we apply to the next step from the value that our existing services are generating, and what should we discard? I believe that those in charge of the Corona Disaster are faced with decisions every day that they have never experienced before. Me too. When e-book services began to be introduced, I think the operators of paper book services were troubled. I read e-books as well, but I have noticed the value that can only be experienced with paper books and use them differently. The book market fluctuates depending on the increase or decrease in the reading population, so I am not sure if the market itself has bottomed out or is shrinking, but I think the “choice of reading” has increased. I would like to contribute to the promotion of exports of Japanese alcoholic beverages in order to “increase opportunities for choice” and “discover unknown demand. I apologize for my lack of words and lack of organization.