Edoten Co., Ltd.

Akemi Anazawa, Representative Director

Q. Please tell us about your company's business, especially your business overseas.

I was originally a system engineer, but I always wanted to do things on my own, so I established my own company in 2004. I started selling products online around 2009.

The products we sell are “jinbei”, “samue”, and “hanten”which are traditional Japanese clothing, and “setta”, traditional Japanese sandals.We add the patterns in the clothing on our own using a method called destaining, removing the color of the products, which gives the clothing a unique taste that cannot be achieved by printing the patterns on the fabric.

We first expanded our sales overseas in 2014, when we were invited by Amazon Japan to enter the U.S. market. It was right around the time when Amazon Japan was strengthening its cross-border e-commerce for overseas markets, and because I am always eager to try new things, our company was able to advance into the overseas markets fairly quickly. After we got the U.S. sales on track, we decided to try expanding to Europe, where we had been receiving orders for some time, starting with the U.K. We are now selling our products to five countries in Europe.

Regarding international sales, there are many expenses to consider such as shipping costs, VAT registration and VAT returns, and there is a risk of losing money if the products don't sell well. However, we were confident our products would sell well because they are niche.

Q. How did you choose us?

After we found out that we needed to register for VAT, we searched for information online, but there was very little information available, and we didn’t know what to do.

We were able to find OPTI by chance. Handling taxation is difficult because the rules change every year and we have limited time to deal with it ourselves, so I decided to ask a specialist to handle it for us.

While OPTI was taking care of our VAT registration and VAT returns in the UK, we had to get a VAT number in Germany as well, which OPTI handled smoothly.

Taxation is difficult, and there are many things that we cannot handle by ourselves. We are grateful to have OPTI’s help.

Q. What are your future aspirations for overseas business, and is there anything you would like to say to OPTI?

In terms of our products, we believe that we can sell more products to people overseas who have an interest in Japan. We would like to make more products and deliver them to more people. It's a very niche product, and it’s true we don't have much competition, but the problem we are facing now is high shipping costs because of COVID-19.

On the other hand, it is also true that there are more people accessing our site because of the pandemic. There has also been a change in what we sell, and face masks, which were requested by our customers, are selling very well. In order to sell our products to different countries, it is important to have product explanations in each country’s language, so we would like to put more effort into that and focus more on overseas sales.

It is said that e-commerce will continue to grow in the future due to the influence of the pandemic, and we believe that competition will intensify, including competition with resellers. From our experience of selling our products online, consumers seem to want to buy from professionals, so we will take advantage of our strength of having our own products and continue to sell them overseas. I look forward to the continued tax support from your company.