Hero Interview: Albion Co., Ltd. — "Commerce Operations Born from a Customer-Loving Team's Service Mindset"

Our representative Kurose spoke with Mr. Takayuki Sakakibara of Albion Co., Ltd. — home to renowned brands such as ANNA SUI and Paul & Joe — about building their EC sites on Shopify. Discover the key to serving customers with genuine care and passion.

Kurose: First, could you tell us about the EC sites you currently operate?

We started with building the ANNA SUI site, and now we operate three sites including Paul & Joe and Infiorare.

Kurose: What led you to adopt Shopify for building each of those EC sites?

When we first started talking about launching an EC site for ANNA SUI, our internal discussion was to build the system completely from scratch. Around that time, the president of ANNA SUI Japan introduced us to StoreHero, and after looking into it a bit, I came to feel that learning Shopify would serve us better than building from scratch. Actually getting to see and use Shopify made a lot of things click for me, and looking back, the idea of building everything from scratch feels almost alarming. We started with zero knowledge of EC — I literally didn't know what "fulfillment" meant — but StoreHero patiently guided us every step of the way. Through understanding how products get from us to the customer's hands, we grasped the very foundation of EC business. I cannot thank StoreHero enough.

Kurose: True — that somewhat hands-on, build-it-yourself phase was actually great for developing a holistic understanding. How has actually running the EC business been?

Albion is a company that places great importance on customer service, and I think there was at least some lingering perception internally that EC was a channel that neglected that personal touch. But after going through the experience ourselves, one of the biggest discoveries was realizing how deeply a customer-first service mindset matters at every stage — from the moment a customer places an order to when the product arrives in their hands — just as it does in a physical store. Thanks to the support from StoreHero, the fact that I handled everything on my own at the beginning allowed me to truly feel that customer service is essential in EC as well, and I was able to understand the key points that matter most to us within the EC workflow. Before we started, I was planning to hire experienced EC professionals — I even met with some very impressive candidates — but by getting hands-on with the site myself, I developed the understanding and judgment to know what was truly needed. If I had immediately brought in various agencies without doing it myself, I might have built the team exactly as advised and ended up with a bloated structure.

Kurose: From a business standpoint, getting bogged down in unnecessary things is a real risk, so being able to avoid that is a great outcome.

Your operations team has been growing gradually — do you have any tips for training new members?

First and foremost, passion matters.

As I mentioned, we initially tried to recruit people with EC experience. But what we really needed were people with deep love and knowledge of our brands and products, so we brought in beauty advisors and marketing professionals from within the company.

Simply telling someone "it's easy" doesn't help much if they've never touched it — they'll still find it daunting. Many worry, "What if I break something in the EC system?" So the key is to encourage them to just start touching it. I show them a manual I created and have them work independently for about half a day. Surprisingly, they tend to enjoy it and pick things up remarkably fast.

Kurose: What aspects do people with no prior experience find enjoyable?

Our EC staff are beauty advisors and marketing professionals who genuinely love our products and brands. There's real joy in creating product introduction pages, and I think they feel a sense of happiness when products they helped showcase get purchased through pages or landing pages they built.

Kurose: So their background as beauty advisors gave them a unique strength!

Our members truly love the products, and equally, they love our customers — so being close to the customer was also an important part of it.

In terms of operations, we start new members by having them handle customer inquiry emails. Responding to inquiries gives them a real sense of closeness to the customer, and answering those inquiries requires looking at the admin panel. Once they understand what to look for in the admin, they naturally want to know more. They become curious about how product pages work, what landing pages are for — and from there, expanding their practical skills by saying "okay, next try building an LP" happened very naturally. Now, the team members build all the LPs, and I don't even get to touch them anymore (laughs). The team has grown to the point where they only ask me questions when something truly difficult comes up.

Kurose: That's remarkable. In the early days, I was walking you through how to use a page builder app while we built LPs together — thinking back, that's incredible growth.

Thinking about those days makes me feel both grateful and a little embarrassed. Back then I thought it was better to templatize LPs, but in practice, creating fresh ones each time has its own advantages — like keeping the look and feel fresh. Now five of us in the company, including me, can all work on the site, which gives us redundancy, and we can discuss different perspectives and approaches in response to directions from the marketing team. The team's skills have already surpassed mine, so I want to keep studying and give back to the members.

Kurose: That's right — you'll need to keep evolving too, Sakakibara-san!

Up until now I've been pitching straight fastballs, but I think I need to start adding some curveballs. The growth meetings StoreHero holds with us regularly are packed with seeds of learning and inspiration.

Kurose: Speaking of growth — you were studying HTML on your own at one point, weren't you?

Yes. I wanted to properly understand how things work — to be able to look at something and think, "ah, so this is how it works." Being able to learn that is one of the gifts of having met StoreHero. They can be a bit "Spartan" sometimes (laughs). One day they're patiently explaining everything in ten different ways, and the next they'll say something in just two words. You feel like you probably shouldn't ask, so you start researching things on your own — and honestly, that's how they trained me. COO Sasatani-san is cool-headed and composed, and there's a real depth to them. Being around StoreHero made me feel like I need to keep learning more myself.

Kurose: Thank you for saying that. We've been supporting you with the belief that the merchant's own growth is essential to the growth of the EC and commerce business, so that means a lot to us.

One distinctive feature of Albion is that you have physical stores in addition to your EC sites. As a company that values personal service, how do you see the role of EC? How do you think about the division of responsibilities?

Even before COVID, we had been preparing online as one of our branding and distribution channels. As I read in various articles, many retail companies faced similar tensions internally, and we were no exception — there were some frictions around how online and physical stores should coexist. But as we grew through the experience together, we've been uniting around the idea of maximizing what matters most to our customers through each channel. Most things you can do in EC you can also do in-store. But there are many things only a store can offer, and above all, the "hands-on experience" is a vital role that the physical store plays.

Kurose: Are there any differences in the types of customers between in-store and EC?

We often get orders on Friday evenings followed by a message over the weekend saying "I bought it at the store, so please cancel my order." Customers feel comfortable contacting us because they think of it as "the same brand, wherever I buy from." That tells me they're choosing where to buy based on their circumstances at the time. We also receive daily inquiries from customers who want to see products in-store first, which reinforces that customers are selecting their purchase channel based on their specific needs.

Kurose: Physical stores are an effective way to communicate a brand's world. So stores aren't going away, and EC has so much to offer too — greater integration will only become more important going forward.

When it comes to integration, there's a tendency to jump straight to tactics like "what if we unified loyalty points?" — but I believe what truly matters is maximizing how we communicate the brand's appeal. I want to rebuild how we use social media, email newsletters, and advertising to properly convey information to our customers, and ensure they're well received whether they come to a store or an EC site.

Paul & Joe carries lifestyle goods in addition to cosmetics, and we've heard from customers that they browse the goods online and then come into the store to see them in person. I think that's proof that our information outreach is working and generating genuine interest from customers.

The stores and EC sites are downstream of that information outreach — and I'm glad we were able to move past the "who's taking customers from whom" debate early on.

Kurose: For customers who feel hesitant to buy without seeing the product in person, it might be a good idea to use Klaviyo to send email communications letting them know there are physical stores available.

I used to think of email newsletters as a "dying medium." But running our EC site opened my eyes to the importance of email marketing, and I'd like to move forward on Klaviyo-powered email marketing together with StoreHero.

Kurose: You have clearly defined personas for your newsletters — whose idea was that?

I often came across writing by Fracta's Kawano-san on the topic of branding and customers, and I recall that both Kurose-san and Miura-san of Miura Takuya Shoten spoke about analyzing and defining a brand's best customers and working to convert more people like them.

Those two ideas stayed with me for a long time. Where before we only targeted by generation, age group, and gender, I began to think that more deeply analyzing the people who actually buy from our brands and reflecting those insights in our newsletter strategy would be more effective. I feel that newsletters shouldn't be too overtly advertising-heavy, so we've been exploring ideas like making every other newsletter feel more like a personal letter.

For the personas, I gave the team our sales data and asked them through discussion: "What kind of person do you see in this data?" The persona doesn't necessarily have to match the brand's stated target — the intention is to look at who is actually supporting the brand right now.

Kurose: You can really feel the affection for the personas you've defined. Even in meetings, I could sense that you were talking about this fictional person with genuine warmth.

Yes. When we're reviewing newsletter content and there's a moment of doubt, asking ourselves "does this newsletter speak to our persona?" seems to resolve the uncertainty. Having a reference point to come back to has been a very effective practice.

Kurose: So what challenges or goals are you looking to tackle next?

I'd like to increase initiatives that resonate with our social media followers and create more purchase opportunities. Since our brands have a reasonable level of recognition, rather than simply ramping up advertising, I'd like to take an approach of getting our social media followers to make at least one purchase per year.

Kurose: So it's about continuously refining the information you deliver to members who are always paying attention, and deepening that relationship.

Finally, do you have any requests or expectations for StoreHero going forward?

Our company goals have been set even higher this year. In that context, I'd love for our operations team to be able to provide better feedback to the marketing team. Right now the operations team is very strong on the sales-execution side, so I'd like to level up our site analytics capabilities. That's the area where I'd love StoreHero's support.

Kurose: We look forward to providing even stronger support in areas like data analysis. Thank you so much for your time today!