Japan’s Mixi Set to Launch Subscription-based Fashion Commerce Service

Yesterday Japanese social networking giant Mixi (TYO:2121) went live with a teaser page for a new subscription-based e-commerce service. It’s called Petite Jeté, and it will be targeting women in their 20s who are interested in fashion, according to Fashion Snap citing a Mixi representative.

The teaser site doesn’t have too much information, but from what I can gather, the service will be limited to 1000 people to start with, charging subscribers a fixed rate in exchange for fashion items, ostensibly on a monthly basis.

Petite Jeté is scheduled to start in September, and if you’d like to join, you can register your email over on the teaser page.

Subscription commerce is a pretty fascinating business model, and its interesting to see Mixi give it a try, even if it appears to be on a very small scale to start. And this is certainly something that Mixi could push to overseas buyers if it works out. On a smaller scale, we have already featured subscription service startup Sugo Toys Japan which will soon try to sell Japanese toys to overseas users, and then there’s CandyJapan which exports fun Japanese candy for a monthly fee.

As for the rest of Mixi’s business, the company saw increased sales and profits in Q1 2012 compared to the same time a year before (Serkan Toto elaborates on this here). But as you can see in the chart below, Mixi’s monthly active users have long since plateaued [1]. With a population like Japan, there’s only so much you can grow as an internet company (in terms of user acquisition) without looking to overseas markets — something which Mixi just hasn’t done. [h/t to Masaru Ikeda for pointing out this story]

[Download image version of chart]