Episode 56: The Reality of Brand Storytelling — weara Edition, Part 5: An Uncompromising Finale

“Real Management | The Unscriped CEO’s Honest, Unvarnished Talk About Corporate Successes and Failures”

This program features me, Hossy — aka Hoshikawa Tetsushi — speaking candidly about management and its backstage based on my own experiences.

Real Management is,distributed every Friday at 6 a.m..

Good morning. I’m Hossy, the free spirit, aka Hoshikawa Tetsushi.

Last weekright. There was that episode everyone loves, where we enjoy hearing about other people’s misfortunes and failures. How was it, Gajirou?

That’s true.

Exactly.

Yes. In my fairly long business life, I feel the same way.

Despite disagreements with the PR people, we held the presentation. We said, “Isn’t this amazing?” and actually started taking pre-orders at that event.

Quite a lot — about 300 or 400 pre-orders came in on the first day.

Right. It’s a product priced at 17,800 yen, so people hadn’t actually seen the physical item. The media may have seen it, but it wasn’t something you could see in stores. People saw it online, watched my presentation and the described features, and it seems they made reservations based on that.

In that sense, customers had expectations, and I thought it was a promising start.

That’s what made it even tougher. If we had announced it and received no orders at all, we might have quietly canceled it. But the media coverage was fairly positive. It really didn’t exist yet and it was interesting, so many articles were written.

Even though users had made reservations, in the end we couldn’t release it as a product. This was in 2019, right?

We announced it in October 2019 and it was supposed to be 2020. We announced in October and by December it became clear that “a January release is absolutely impossible,” so we issued a notice of a slight postponement.

Postponement is still better, because it means it will come out.

At that time, even if we postponed, we had an outlook like “if we had this much more time, we’d be fine.” So we announced a slight postponement in December 2019.

After that, the real problem is that it was 2020.

Right. From February onward — I think we were aiming for around March. We had told the people who reserved it that it would be January, but we sent a notice saying it would be pushed back a bit regardless. Up until around January 20, 2020, I was literally going to China almost every day to move things forward.

Because the Lunar New Year was coming, around January 23, 2020 they went on holiday including the engineers, so the company would be closed. It was unavoidable to stay there, so I came back.

Then Corona hit, and I couldn’t go back over there.

If you can’t go over there,I think I also said this during NuAns NEO.You really can’t make progress unless you see it properly.

It really doesn’t move forward. If you’re not beside them asking, “What are you doing?” and “What will be done by what time?” and watching closely, it won’t get done.

I think any company that has done development in China knows this.

That’s just too naive. You can’t think like that. For example, if someone says they’ll finish in a week, you have to ask “What exactly will you do today?” “What was finished today?” “Show me,” and check progress closely; otherwise it’s common that nothing gets done after a week if you just leave it to them.

I had been going back and forth constantly, but when Corona hit I couldn’t go anymore and progress slowed even more. I’m not blaming Corona, but the reality was that we couldn’t move things forward much. To conclude, we dragged it out until 2021.

As I mentioned last timein terms of firmware, especially sleep, it was definitely no good. The numbers decide it — it’s either acceptable or not.

We were selling it on the basis that “we can match more than 95% and correctly determine wakefulness and sleep.”

You can’t say “Is 93% okay? Is 92% okay?” — that’s not acceptable.

For example, if the selling point was “This user experience is so great it will improve your life,” how much it improves is ultimately up to each person.

So you can take that in various ways, and that’s fine. But if you claim “95% agreement” and it’s actually 92%, that’s no good.

That’s right.

Ah, exactly.

In the end, wearables were in demand during Corona.

Like using them as thermometers.

That company suddenly shifted to making thermometers instead of doing our work.

Instead of pinching them under the arm, they sold the non-contact, quick-scan type in huge numbers. So they stopped doing our work.

Yeah. Even now, I don’t really understand — I don’t think non-contact thermometers give correct body temperatures.

During Corona, when you entered a store you were made to do that “beep” thing, right?

In winter, coming in from outside you’d get readings like 35 degrees — it’s surface temperature after all.

People were like, “What are you going to do with that?”

Right. Well, Japan did the same, so it’s hard to argue, but the evidence for how they derive that body temperature is pretty flimsy.

Even though it was flimsy, they sold about a million units.

They sold about 500,000 in India first. If it’s selling, it’s making money, and for them it’s obviously the top priority.

There were many other small issues with the firmware, but in the end the biggest question was whether it was acceptable or not, and this point was the largest factor.

This time, within the software side it wasn’t just the firmware — the application development side also had many problems, so I’ll talk about that a bit.

The app design and screen layout were handled by the three of us: Kendaro, myself, and Taiki. Development itself was led by Taiki. We proceeded by coordinating Japanese freelance engineers. As I mentioned before, I didn’t have much development experience, so this arrangement was supposed to allow flexibility and keep costs down, which is why we asked them to do it.

Since this was being done in Japan, I wanted the app development to be done in Japan from the start.

I wanted to refine the design properly and create a solid user experience. For that reason, having it made in China felt very risky. But hardware is often only manufacturable in China.

Even now, as I thought. For a large company like Apple, they might even manufacture in India now. If a company can arrange everything and build it themselves that’s fine, but when a small company that can’t do that tries to make things, China’s resources and supply chain are just so strong that hardware basically has to be made in China, fundamentally speaking.

This has to be made in China, but the software—not the firmware, but the apps for iPhone and Android—can be made in Japan, right?

So I wanted to do it in Japan. But freelancers are inevitably unstable, you know.

Yeah. In the end they’d come up with all kinds of reasons—”I couldn’t work for a while” or “I didn’t have time”—even when it wasn’t done, and nothing really progressed.

They said “it’s done,” so when I asked “show it properly,” it turned out to be unfinished. I think the biggest reason was that I lacked enough knowledge of software development to manage it properly. In the end we couldn’t make it happen in Japan either.

Yes. In the end the trend led us to places like Vietnam.

India, for example.

And sometimes coming back to Japan, etc.

Honestly, I personally enjoy creating things, including gamification, but I didn’t know whether users would actually enjoy it or whether it would match their wishes and expectations.

So at the launch event I said I wanted to do a beta test. I wanted users to try it first and then improve it. But the quality and development progress were nowhere near good enough to run a beta test.

So that also kept getting delayed. Including the impact of COVID, we finally did a beta test in 2021, but it was more than a year late.

That’s right. When you’re the one leading work done offshore—in China, Vietnam, India—you really have to lead firmly. If you just throw it over and have them kind of make it, you won’t get something that works properly.

Exactly.

That’s it. I didn’t really understand that and kept thinking “why can’t they do it?” We had Daiki in the middle, and then the other side’s PM (project manager). After failing with freelancers at first, we asked a proper development company. Then they assigned a PM on their side.

That person is supposed to bridge to the engineers over there, but if they don’t do their job properly it fails. There’s no way to verify other than seeing whether that person is communicating correctly to the engineers and whether what comes back as a result actually works.

As a result, even though we moved development companies around, when you transfer the project it’s pretty troublesome to take over what the previous company built.

Right. Also, you should properly add comments in the code explaining things like “this is done this way for this reason.”

If you’re only planning to use it internally, you often don’t add that.

Open-source stuff that’s going to be public should really be written so that a third party can understand it, but they didn’t. When disputes arise and you decide to switch, showing it to another company often leads to confusion, and code reading—that is, reviewing the code—can take about a month.

Of course that costs money. After repeating those things, I don’t think I was able to make an app with a user experience quality I was satisfied with.

What ultimately triggered the judgment that “this is no good” was the sleep aspect I mentioned earlier—that was a pretty big issue for me personally. But other functions, and things on the firmware side, also had various problems; those could have been fixed.

I also feel that the software-side app never reached the ideal form. When I finally decided to stop development,Trinity’s blogand other places I wrote about it as well.

After all, I started because I wanted to make something I wanted. It’s been about two years since the announcement, and we’ve been dragging it out, but in the end we couldn’t build what I wanted to make or what I wanted to use.

So the question was whether it’s okay to release it in that state.

That’s how it is. There’s no need to release something you’re not satisfied with. That feeling was small in my heart at first, but over the two years after the announcement it gradually grew.

In the end I judged that I couldn’t make it a product whose quality would satisfy me. I also felt that continuing to drag it out wouldn’t work, and, to repeat, at that time I didn’t have confidence I could make something I’d want to use every day.

Yes.

Yes, yes.

That’s right.

(laughs)

Yes.

That’s right. There’s a difference between something that “didn’t go so well” and the failure of Weara, isn’t there?

There are plenty of cases where something sold less than expected, or where you make something that has a defect and has to be recalled.

However, we approached this with a lot of passion. We were convinced it would be great if completed; we held a launch event, people resonated with it, they pre-ordered, and the media empathized and wrote many articles—yet in the end we couldn’t release it. That had never happened before.

No, it’s been going on longer than that.

We started around 2017, and the end was December 2021.

On December 27, right at the end of the year, we decided “this is no good.”

Yes.

Sorry, but, and I apologize if Gajirou has told me this before, Gajirou, do you like baseball? Did you play baseball?

You’ve mentioned Tokyo Dome before, and you’ve talked about high school baseball in the past too, right?

You do look like someone who played baseball, though.

So you were a high school ballplayer.

I see, sorry about that (laughs).

In that way, there’s the embarrassment of saying “this is so great, we’ll release it” and then not being able to. I personally thought “this is definitely great, it doesn’t exist in the world, and it can change the world.” It’s a bit embarrassing now, but the catchphrase for Weara wasSave the Worldafter all.

That is, as I said at the beginning, if we could solve problems like obesity and sleep issues, people around the world could be happier than they are now.

Maybe not everyone, but I believe we can do better than now and even save the world! After all, more than 40 million people have died.

Yes — from diseases caused by obesity. So if obesity disappears, those people would decrease too.

It’s said that improving sleep could increase Japan’s GDP by about 15 trillion yen. So if this product succeeds, people’s lives change, obesity is resolved, and sleep improves, society as a whole should become happier.

Under that grand idea we launched it with the catchphrase “Save the World.” So we couldn’t actually save the world.

That’s right. It’s because people have some kind of dissatisfaction. Because something is missing, they try to take something from someone else.

Yes, because they’re not fulfilled.

Right — you wouldn’t want someone else’s food, would you?

So, in Trinity’s 20-year history, the one I can clearly call an absolute failure is this Weara — isn’t it the biggest one?

Well, yes. This is after spending more than four years, almost five. Trinity has been around for 20 years, so we spent about a quarter of that, roughly.

Refunds were a pain too.

Well, we haven’t really added everything up, but I think it’s probably over 100 million yen.

This Weara failed, but as a company, Trinity’s business was growing even during the COVID-19 pandemic. The core foundational business had been doing well the whole time.

Because of that, we may have become lax and let it slide a bit.

Exactly. In short, if we had been a company only doing Weara, we would have quickly gone bankrupt and been finished.

However, products like Simplism and mobile accessories, even while everyone was down because of COVID, actually benefited — during the pandemic everyone became more dependent on their smartphones. People had to stay home more and ended up looking at their phones all the time.

Mobile accessories were truly needed. Because performance grew steadily in that environment, we were able to keep going — which I’m grateful for — but that may also have led us to continue in a half-hearted way.

However, while this will conclude the story of Weara’s failure for now, unintentionally — without planning it — Gajirou gave a little cue, and actually the Weara product did not end here.

That’s something I’d like to talk about next time. But as a preview: history shows it didn’t go smoothly — so it’s another story of further failures.

Some people looking from the outside might think “he’s been very successful, things are going well, he sold the company and made money — I’m jealous,” but next time is still a failure story, so please look forward to it. Weara is not over here.

So with that, while teasing the next episode a bit, I’d like to end it here for today.

See you next week.

“Real Management | Successes and Failures of Corporate Management. The real, unscripted CEO speaking candidly”

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My conversational partner up to this point was Hossy, aka Hoshikawa Tetsushi,

Well then, we’ll meet again next week — see you.