Speaking of standardized merch.
Did all of you guys forget about that recent Yagoo interview that was translated and posted here?
https://c-eye.co.jp/eq/ipo-eq/66679> The difference in operating profit is the product mix of goods. Let me describe ours, since might be a stretch to visualize.> The merchandise sales we have been doing so far have not been the kind of merchandise development that ANYCOLOR sells, but have focused on made-to-order merchandise sold on the talent's special days, specifically anniversaries and birthdays.> As a background, I thought that such goods would return a large amount of profits to the talent and would lead to support for their activities. On the other hand, ANYCOLOR plans and sells a large amount of goods led by the company. If you actually visit our EC site, you will immediately notice that even if you try to buy something on our site, most of them are made-to-order products and there are not many things that are currently on sale.> ANYCOLOR has a lot of things on sale right now, and they have plenty of merch that is not tied to the anniversaries or birthdays of the talents alone.> We are also planning to strengthen the development of commerce with direct listing as an opportunity. For example, we would like to provide products that people who become fans at stores or on e-commerce sites can buy as soon as they become fans, while also taking inventory risks. In other words, we are currently losing opportunities due to not having direct stock-based sales, and as a result, we are behind in terms of profit margins.Basically, any new Nijisanji fan could go to their website, see some merch and buy it IMMEDIATELY.
But for Cover, their merch relies on individual chuuba birthdays, anniversaries etc. and are all made to order, lasting for about a month.
This does get high returns, but unlike the aforementioned Nijisanji fan, a new Hololive fan (and there's FAR more of them coming in every day) cannot directly go to their merch shop and buy the merch of their new oshi - because chances are, it's not her birthday or anniversary yet!
So there's a HUGE amount of opportunity cost being lost here, which he states as the reason why Nijisanji is ahead in terms of sales figures.
This is why there's a lot of talk about standardized merch within Cover.
They want to have simple "gateway" merch available 24x7 to buy for new fans any time for any of their talents.
I just hope they don't underestimate their popularity again and overstock their merch as much as they can, because having all their stock based merch be "out of stock" for 90% of the site's uptime will not change the existing situation much.
