U-KOMI was introduced to focus on reviews that convey the appeal of products. Reviews increased rapidly, sales increased, and the company realized the importance of customer feedback.

Kurabiz Co., Ltd. operates "Kurashikinu," a brand that sells socks and undergarments made with an abundance of natural materials such as silk and wool. Recognizing the importance of product reviews as a means of communicating the high quality of their products, the company implemented U-KOMI. In this interview, we spoke with 片山　仁様, who oversees marketing at the company, about the challenges they faced before implementing U-KOMI, the deciding factors behind the implementation, and the results achieved since its launch.

Operating the "Kurashikinu" brand online, which offers socks, belly-warming pants, and underwear made with an abundance of natural materials

First, could you tell us about your business?

Our company operates the "Kurashikinu" brand. We sell socks, belly-warming pants, and undergarments made with an abundance of natural materials such as silk and wool, and we celebrated our 10th anniversary in December 2022.

"Kurashikinu" is a brand launched in 2012 by a homemaker living in Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture. Through her experiences with pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children, she developed products that make generous use of natural materials such as silk—said to be the fiber closest to human skin—and wool, which excels in heat retention and moisture absorption and release.

Our flagship product is the “Cold-Prevention Socks.” While the basic design involves wearing four layers of socks, we also sell a single-layer version for greater convenience.

Another main product is the "Harapan," a garment that combines a belly warmer and underwear. While other companies sell similar products, we hold the trademark for the name "Harapan." Because it uses natural materials, this product is popular for its gentle warmth and comfortable fit.

Focusing on customer reviews that highlight the product’s merits, we implemented U-KOMI

When did you start your e-commerce business? What challenges did you face before implementing U-KOMI?

We’ve been selling online since launching the brand in 2012, and we opened our physical store in the Bikan Historical Quarter of Kurashiki in 2017.

I joined the company in 2020, and I was convinced that since “Kurashikinu” products are of such high quality, we could still increase sales if we made more effort to communicate the products’ merits and get to know our customers better. I believed that product reviews were the most essential tool for achieving this.

I believe there is a process involved in selling products. Simply making good products doesn’t guarantee sales. No matter how excellent a product is, if people don’t know about it or its value isn’t communicated effectively, it’s difficult to drive purchases. I was confident that the quality of “Kurashikinu” products was on par with or better than our competitors, and I knew that SEO and online advertising could help raise awareness to a certain extent. However, the question of how to “convey” the product’s merits, the brand’s vision, and our commitment to quality remains a perpetual challenge, especially for online retailers.

For this reason, we created content on our website—such as “Kurashikinu’s Philosophy” and “Why We Are Committed to Natural Materials”—to communicate our brand’s concept and strengths. However, we felt that this alone was not enough.

Since we make high-quality products from premium materials, customers understand their value once they use them, and we actually have a high repeat purchase rate. However, it’s inevitably difficult to convey that value unless customers actually use the products. That’s why we realized we needed the help of customers who were actually wearing our products—in the form of product reviews—rather than relying solely on the sales team to convey the value.

Although we had a review section on our product pages, we were only receiving about one or two reviews per month, and for some products, the only reviews left were several years old. Since product specifications can change over time, reviews that were too old sometimes no longer applied to our current products.

Faced with these challenges, we began researching review management tools and eventually came across U-KOMI.

Did you consider any review tools other than U-KOMI? Also, could you tell us what ultimately led you to choose U-KOMI?

To be honest, we compared and evaluated several other companies, requesting materials and holding discussions, but given our company’s sales volume, the cost was simply too high a hurdle.

That’s when we discovered U-KOMI and spoke with them. We decided to implement it immediately because it struck a good balance between cost and functionality and met all our desired requirements. I remember making the decision quite quickly because we were convinced it was essential and that it would drive growth.

Specifically, what features were you looking for, and what were your criteria for making that decision?

As I mentioned earlier, while customers could already post reviews on product pages, the system was such that the number of reviews wouldn’t increase unless customers wrote them voluntarily. Therefore, we wanted a system that allowed us to reach out to customers directly. We needed a tool that could request reviews from customers through integration with our inventory management system.

Also, from an SEO perspective, I had long wanted to implement a feature that supports rich results in search results, and the fact that the tool could handle this automatically was a major deciding factor. Additionally, integration with Instagram was a necessary requirement, and since U-KOMI met all these criteria and offered excellent value for money, we decided to implement it.

Reviews skyrocketed just one month after implementation! Conversions and sales increased, and we truly realized the importance of customer feedback

What kind of results did you see after implementing U-KOMI?

At first, there were some skeptical voices within the company wondering if we would actually be able to gather product reviews, but thankfully, we were very surprised to receive over 750 reviews within just one month of implementation. We received many comments from users saying things like, “I love using this,” and “(To those who are struggling) I definitely recommend trying this product.” Our staff also said they realized, “Is our brand really this beloved?” which led to a boost in motivation. We feel closer to our customers, and we’ve even discovered aspects of our products’ appeal that we hadn’t noticed ourselves.

Of course, we also receive some harsh feedback. However, rather than these being silent complaints, they serve as opportunities to improve our products and services. Whether it’s a positive review or a criticism, we view it as “thanks to our customers” and are grateful for it. I believe this has created a positive cycle that drives the evolution of our products and services.

We’ve also seen significant changes in website traffic and conversions. We launched U-KOMI on December 20, 2021. Comparing the six months following the launch (January–June 2022) with the same period the previous year (organic search), we saw a 1.5-fold increase in sessions, a 1.2-fold increase in conversions, and a roughly 1.3-fold increase in sales.Actually, the conversion rate has dropped by about 20%, but this is mainly due to an increase in sessions from new users. At “Kurashikinu,” the ratio of sessions from existing customers has historically been high, and acquiring new customers was a challenge we were facing; therefore, the decline in the overall conversion rate—which includes sessions from new users—is not a problem at all. Since sales from existing customers did not decline, we view this positively as a result of successfully reaching new customers.

We believe the reason for the increase in sessions is that as reviews increased, not only did the ratings for individual pages improve, but the overall site rating also improved. We achieved our goal of ranking highly for big keywords, and Search Console results show that the average ranking for search queries we were previously capturing has improved overall, and we are now seeing traffic from search queries we hadn’t previously received.Traffic increased not only on product pages and the homepage that have reviews but also on category pages and content pages. The rise in click-through rates due to Rich Results support has also contributed significantly to site traffic.

Finally, could you tell us about your future plans?

Since 2018, we’ve also been operating a brand called “Soil and Wind Botanical Garden” that manufactures and sells dried flowers. Having seen the tangible results of U-KOMI on “Kurashikinu,” we decided to implement it this year (2022) and rolled it out recently.

"Soil and Wind Botanical Garden" has over 90,000 followers on Instagram and a wealth of UGC, and we plan to leverage U-KOMI’s UGC integration features to promote styling ideas using products on "Kurashikinu" as well.