iQON's monthly user visits have surpassed one million. Sales have increased 150-200% compared to the previous month, and the company is currently adding more than 10,000 users per month. In this second part, we discuss iQON's position relative to other companies and its future strategy.


--Users have been very positive, but what are your future B2B strategies?

We want iQON to be the "starting point" in the fashion purchasing process. In the fashion world, there are already many so-called "shopping points" (endpoints), such as brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce sites like Amazon, Rakuten, and Zozotown. However, many consumers don't know what clothes they want to wear or how to coordinate them, and as mentioned earlier, they have less time to spend on fashion, making it difficult to reach the end point. There are a variety of approaches to attract customers, or "starting points," and it seems there is no definitive answer yet. With iQON, we want to design a "starting point" that leads to the "endpoint," creating a situation where people first visit iQON when they want to buy something. Some e-commerce sites are generating over 10 million yen in sales through iQON in a single month, and sales are progressing smoothly. However, in a survey of iQON users, 73% said they have never purchased anything through iQON. Meanwhile, 87% of users said iQON helps them discover new fashion items. We believe this suggests that customers discover the fashion items they want to purchase in the online space called iQON and then purchase them offline. Currently, iQON only connects online e-commerce sites. By extending this to offline locations, we believe we can further expand our business.

--Have you ever considered starting your own e-commerce business?

No, we've never considered doing it. To begin with, we don't have the know-how, and since it's a scalable business, it would be difficult to become number one in the marketplace, considering inventory management, logistics, and product procurement. iQON simply provides fashion information, attracts customers, and drives them to e-commerce shops and physical stores. We hope to leverage our affiliate and media advertising business there as strengths. In the future, we hope to provide the so-called big data accumulated in iQON to retailers and collaborate in some way.

--How exactly?

We are currently devising and developing a solution service that links store product information with data accumulated in iQON, such as user interests, preferences, and behavioral history, to guide users to stores. This solution notifies iQON users while they are out and about that a nearby store has clothes they "liked," aiming to encourage them to visit the store. Unlike electronics, trying on clothes in-store is crucial. We believe that smartphone apps can demonstrate their unique power in the field of O2O (online to offline), which uses smartphone location information to guide users to real stores.

Next time, we will consider the impact of the rise of social media on fashion and delve deeper into iQON's true goals.