One of King Jim’s most representative products is “Pomera,” a digital memo for text input. This product was not born from market research or user surveys, but from the passion of one employee. The official X (formerly Twitter) account “Nakaninto”, which has 450,000 followers, was also started by just one employee. King Jim’s history of creating hits by believing in one person’s passion. We asked President Miyamoto about this style.
Part 1:
The convincing reason why King Jim produces hit products one after another
Become the first penguin
–The DNA of inventors flows through the company.
Miyamoto’s
“King File” was invented in 1954 by Eitaro Miyamoto, the company’s founder, and was a completely new file never seen before. If we go back to the origins of our company’s founding, we come to the “person list” and “inkan book” that Eitaro invented in the early Showa period.
In short, my grandfather was a “town inventor” who commercialized various ideas. I think he was like Dr. Nakamatsu.
There are many risks involved in being the first penguin to dive into the ocean. There may be a natural enemy, so there is a risk of losing your life. That’s why no one jumps in because of hesitation. However, the first penguin believes there is plenty of prey and dives in. Without fear of failure, we are working hard to turn new ideas into products.
–We are expanding our product categories through M&A. We carry a wide variety of items including cooking appliances, artificial flowers, and gloves.
Miyamoto:
I want to do everything, but I’ve particularly strengthened my focus on miscellaneous goods. King Jim is good at creating products that are made with great attention to detail and products that are convenient with just a few ideas.
We believe that if a product with a bright idea can be translated into King Jim’s quality, it will sell. In order to provide high quality, we established a subsidiary in Hong Kong in 2012 to ensure thorough quality control. This kind of know-how was cultivated during my time at Pomera.
I believe that all small items that are not too expensive are within our range, so if we find a good company, we would like to bring it into our group.
–We also did M&A with furniture manufacturers.
Miyamoto:
In 2014, we turned an online-only assembly furniture manufacturer called “Bon Furniture” into a group company. When you think of assembled furniture, you probably think of stores like IKEA and Nitori, but Bon Furniture only sells online and has no stores. Knockdown production completed and sold out. Since users assemble the product themselves, the overall volume of the product packaging can be reduced. You can achieve surprisingly low prices compared to general cheap furniture.
In the past, families lived together and the same house was passed down from generation to generation, so furniture was said to last a lifetime, but now the way families live has changed. The ideal living space changes with each event, such as moving or a child becoming independent. Furniture is not something you can inherit, but it is better to be able to choose from a wide variety of products at low prices so that you can use the best furniture at any given time. I am thinking about such a future.
I thought Pomera wouldn’t sell.
ーーThe fact that you entered Pomera 15 years ago was a true first penguin. Did you go into this with confidence that it would be a hit?
Miyamoto
: “I’d like to say that I was confident it would be a hit through thorough market research,” but that’s not the case. This is a product that was planned, proposed, and developed by one employee who had a strong desire to make this and want it for himself. Just like Tepra, executives at the time thought that Pomera would not sell.
Pomera was born at a time when the performance of computers was rapidly improving, and it became possible to complete work using just a laptop, and it did not have the ability to access the Internet. You can’t do anything other than just type in the characters. All of the executives who attended the development meeting were against it, but only one outside director, Professor Ichiro Innan of Keio University, said, “I’ve never seen such a wonderful product before.We should definitely try it.” ” he praised.
As a university professor, I often have the opportunity to type text for various papers, email responses, etc. I often want to easily save my ideas as a text file. Furthermore, since I spend a lot of time traveling overseas, I think I found Pomera attractive since it is small and lightweight and can be started up quickly and just input text.
In the 15 years since then, we have continued to make improvements based on customer feedback, and the functionality has steadily improved. It has a lot of fixed fans and has grown to be one of King Jim’s representative products.
Official SNS accounts are important assets
–This kind of accidental hit is probably because we know the market well through our office supply sales experience. By the way, King Jim’s official Twitter account (currently X) is often cited as a successful example of SNS marketing.
Miyamoto
: I’m happy. His Twitter account has over 450,000 followers. At that time, I personally tried using Twitter and thought it was interesting, so in 2010 I called a member of the public relations department and instructed him to open an account. He also told me to work on it seriously and not to do it as a gap between other duties.
Is it his job to write such tweets? He seemed confused, but I asked him to do a lot of things from the beginning. The first point is that you won’t be read if you only post promotional posts, so I want you to write about your daily tweets. I also asked them to write at least five posts a day, whether it’s good morning, if they’re hungry, or what they want to eat.
I also told them that I don’t care if there is criticism or flames. Since we are human beings, we are bound to have misunderstandings and misunderstandings. But there’s no need to be afraid of that. Isn’t it good because it becomes a hot topic even if it goes viral?
If you don’t have content that people want to see or read, they won’t follow you in the first place. I occasionally write about King Jim, but I wanted him to create a community where his followers could empathize by tweeting about his daily life, not from a corporate perspective, and he did a great job. The same person in charge is still working hard.
–There are 450,000 followers who sympathize with you. This is a great asset.
Miyamoto
: SNS is an extremely cost-effective measure. After all, it’s free, so there’s no reason not to use it. Even if you don’t rely on large advertising budgets such as TV commercials, you can get overwhelmingly good results if you can communicate that your product is a good product on social media.
There are 450,000 people pointing their arrows at accounts posted by people inside King Gym. Even if not everyone reads it, you can get your message across to these people for free. There’s no reason not to use it.
