Daito Co. Ltd.’s Senboku Newtown residential renovation project (Sakai City, Osaka). Updates on the DIY renovation project are also posted to their Facebook page

This post has been previously published by our friends at Ignition. It has been modified from the original.

Takehito Yamada was 27 when he took the reigns as CEO of Daito Co.Ltd., a tools and hardware wholesaler that’s been trading for around 78 years. “My father-in-law said that if I am to marry his daughter then he would like for me to take over the business. I had always thought about starting my own business but never gave it much thought so I thought I’d give this a go,” Yamada says, recalling the beginnings of his involvement with the company.

However, things were not as he had anticipated. He was expected to follow numerous rules and practices that to him were inefficient and outdated such as dealing with hand written invoices and fulfilling daily orders worth only 100 yen. Yamada’s past work experience and practices had no place here.

The turning point came when the company was on the verge of foreclosure. His father-in-law didn’t want to foreclose the business no matter what and entrusted the company’s future to Yamada. On the condition that he would be allowed to implement whatever he had in mind, Yamada took on the responsibility with e-commerce as the pioneering idea.
“I had no clue about the internet. I would spend the day running the business as usual then at night I’d sit in front of the computer and frantically try to scrape together as much information as I could.”

Unlike the wholesale business where clients order in bulk, e-commerce customers can order single units. For this reason, most of those around him thought his approach made little business sense and frowned upon his decision. Little did they know that the young CEO’s idea would save the company. A year and a half later, his decision was paying off with revenues reaching JPY 1 million (US$8,500) a month.

Purveyors of Japanese Quality

“It’s now around 10 years since we started diy-tool.com,” explains Yamada. “Since then I’ve come realize that tool makers in Japan produce some of the best, high quality tools around but these rarely manage to make it outside of Japan. Kyoto Tool Co. Ltd. for example produces automobile tools under the KTC brand but their export ratio is a few percent at best. On the other hand, if we look at foreign brands like Snap-On, they have a large presence here in Japan. I think this is mainly because Japanese manufacturers are more craftsmen than entrepreneurs. So, to bridge that gap for them, we started targeting overseas markets in 2012.”

Diy-tool.com is currently the largest online DIY retailer in Japan and boasts a catalogue of more than 800,000 products. With this under his belt and his desire to make the products available to customers worldwide, Yamada was ready to take on the world. In 2013, he established an overseas division within the company and even formed a sub-company in the US, Daito Tools USA Inc. From there, he quickly setup an online presence with ecommerce giants including the likes of Rakuten (in both Japan and Singapore), Amazon, and Alibaba.

DIY-TOOL.COM

Japan Tools Shop. DAITO

“Our initial plan was to target the Southeast Asian market and/or countries. But we soon realized that while our products were second to none, developing countries simply couldn’t afford the quality tools we had to offer. That’s when we decided to venture into the US market,” he says.