How TokyoTreat Built a Snackable, Scalable D2C Subscription Business with Chargebee

With a carefully curated assortment of Japan-exclusive snacks and treats every month, TokyoTreat delivers millions of customers across 150 countries a piece of their jostling Konbini (convenience store) culture. In an industry that thrives on differentiation through agility, TokyoTreat dwelled on deft storytelling and swift technological efficiency, delivering continuous improvement to help parent company ICHIGO Inc record 3X revenue and rack up 1.7X subscriber growth during the pandemic.

“In the D2C industry, customer trends change very swiftly. Picking these trends, capturing data to perform granular analysis, and selecting the correct tool that helps us scale continuously and identify recurring patterns is often a make or break for us,” says David Asikin, CTO of ICHIGO Inc.

Building for the Last Mile

From starting with ~30 monthly subscribers to shipping more than 2 million orders, TokyoTreat’s lightning-fast growth outpaced their WooCommerce-led subscription tech stack. Instead of spending engineering bandwidth to firefight technical challenges or build additional capabilities, they were looking to onboard a tool that:

• Automated subscription management across the entire lifecycle

• Integrated seamlessly with third-party and in-house tools

• Provided out-of-the-box testing and experimentation

The Problem

In a storytelling, service, and distribution-intensive industry, TokyoTreat had to spend a lot of time firefighting technical challenges.

• The WooCommerce plugin on WordPress frequently broke, disrupting subscription experiences, and having a tangible impact on revenue, making it unreliable.

• Off-the-shelf solutions like Shopify+Recharge were unscalable for a hypergrowth D2C brand like TokyoTreat due to feature limitations and an inability to integrate with in-house and third-party tools seamlessly.

• Conventional subscription management tools did not have testing and experimentation capabilities, making it difficult to iterate and analyze changes before launching new product updates, discount campaigns, or subscription lines.

• All data captured in their existing subscription management process had to be manually exported and fed into other tools making data transfer error-prone and tedious.

The Wordpress+WooCommerce proposition did not solve for the entire subscription lifecycle - with no support for revenue recovery or invoicing. As a growing D2C brand, they needed a mature, scalable tool that could minimize friction and work effortlessly with an ever-changing product.

The Solution

TokyoTreat wanted to simplify their subscriptions, making access to Japan-exclusive snacks fun and engaging. Instead of registering each item in the box as a product, TokyoTreat created a single subscription plan with Chargebee and further divided it based on the billing cycle — monthly, quarterly, six-month, and annual plan.

• Chargebee’s discount and coupon management capability helped TokyoTreat set up seasonal offers and nudge new customers from consideration to subscription faster.

• The sandbox site enables them to test and optimize the impact of each major pricing or subscription update before going live, further minimizing technical strain

• Chargebee keeps up with an evolving product roadmap, integrates with third-party or in-house tools with minimal developer support, provides white-gloved onboarding, and takes care of subscription upkeep on its own.

The Payoff

• Saved thousands of dollars and hours on building and maintaining a future-proof full-stack subscription management system with Chargebee.

• 10% improvement in retention after setting up their dunning and revenue recovery process with Chargebee.

• Minimized broken processes and revenue leakage by enabling pre-launch testing for subscription experiments

• Quick API integrations and webhook triggers enabled automatic data sharing between Chargebee, TokyoTreat’s in-house order management tool, and Klaviyo, making the post-subscription fulfillment, cross-sell, and upsell methodologies more robust.

In the last five years, ICHIGO Inc. has registered a 45% year-on-year growth and launched three new subscription businesses — Sakuraco, YumeTwins, and nomakenolife without having to reinvent their subscription stack. By leveraging Chargebee’s advanced capabilities, round-the-clock support, and fluid integrations, TokyoTreat saves time, money, and IT bandwidth that they can reinvest in building a sustainable brand.