1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Kodai Takahashi: SILK THE RICH was built around one material: water-soluble silk fibroin. Most “silk” you see in beauty is hydrolyzed silk that any company can buy off the shelf. Ours is a proprietary technology that liquefies silk while keeping the nanofiber structure of the fiber intact, at high concentration and low cost, protected by three patents.
The part people underestimate is the moat behind it. One of our shareholders is Katakura Kosan, which traces its roots to the Katakura zaibatsu that once owned the Tomioka Silk Mill, Japan’s only UNESCO World Heritage site for silk. It was the first outside investment in their 152-year history. Another company can raise a trillion yen and still not buy 150 years of silk history. So our difference is two layers: real proprietary tech, sitting on top of cultural IP that cannot be replicated. And unlike the legacy Japanese houses, we’re DTC-native and built for TikTok from day one.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Kodai Takahashi: First: we stopped treating the US as a distribution problem and started treating it as a category-building problem. Early on the instinct is “sell shampoo.” The shift was realizing that “J-beauty” doesn’t really exist yet as a category in the US the way K-beauty does, so our job is to build the category, not just sell into it. That reframed everything from PR to who we talk to. The lesson: in a new market, demand has to be visible before any retail buyer will bet shelf space on you. We grew Amazon monthly sales 903% in three months in 2025 specifically to make that demand undeniable.

Second: getting brutally honest about unit economics. The headline numbers everyone assumes are wrong. Amazon’s real all-in take rate is closer to 54% of revenue than the 16% people quote, and air freight quietly eats your margin on every single unit. Once we saw the actual cost structure, we rebuilt around it: moving to sea freight, weighting toward D2C where the margin is healthiest, and treating marketplaces as discovery channels rather than profit channels. The lesson: in beauty, the margin is won or lost in logistics and channel fees, not at the price tag.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Kodai Takahashi: Amazon gives us trust and discovery: a 4.7 rating against a category where most popular brands sit between 3.9 and 4.6. But with that take rate, we treat it as a credibility engine, not a profit center.
Wholesale we started inside Japanese-American grocery, where the brand already carries cultural credibility, then used that shelf proof to open conversations with mainstream beauty retail. The lesson: enter where you’re already trusted, then walk that proof into the rooms where you’re not.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Kodai Takahashi: The biggest shift is that discovery is moving from “rank for a click” to “be the source the AI cites.” When someone asks ChatGPT “what is J-beauty” or “best Japanese shampoo,” the answer is assembled from content and verifiable claims, not from who bought the ad.
That actually plays to our strengths, because AI assistants reward specificity and things they can check. We have real, checkable proof points: patents, the Katakura silk history, a No.1 ranking at Don Quijote. So our content strategy is to be the brand that defines the category in those answers. We’re building owned editorial that clearly explains silk fibroin and J-beauty, structuring our product information so it’s machine-readable, and investing in being named in the editorial roundups that these models ingest. The goal is simple: when the category gets explained by an AI, we want to be the example it reaches for.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Kodai Takahashi: Our online F2 repeat rate was 91% in 2024, measuring how many first-time buyers came back for a second purchase. The single biggest driver is that the product over-delivers on the first use. In haircare the sensory experience, the lather, the scent, the way hair feels after, is what decides whether someone reorders, so we obsess over that first wash.
Around that, three things compound it. We sell low-risk trial samples so the first yes is easy. We treat early customers as collaborators, replying to tagged posts and bringing them into the brand rather than broadcasting at them. And we keep the experience consistent across every channel so the brand feels like the same thing whether you found us on TikTok or a grocery shelf. Advocacy comes from one feeling in particular: that they discovered something good before everyone else. We protect that “I found this first” feeling on purpose.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Kodai Takahashi: Double down on three things over 12 months. One, make demand visible before you chase distribution. Build the thing people can see working, then buyers come to you. Two, own your customer and creator relationships outright. Anything you rent, you can lose. Three, know your true unit economics to the cent before you scale spend, especially channel fees and freight.
Stop entirely: chasing press and exposure for its own sake, trying to personally do every operational task instead of delegating it, and launching new SKUs faster than you can build people coming back for the first ones. Speed in the wrong place is just expensive motion.