When I was a buyer of plastic products, I came up with a great idea to cut costs, which might be described as epoch-making. At the time, we were importing enormous amounts of goods via ship from China. The charges for the freight per container were the same even if the container had one product or a thousand.

Imagine that there are four buckets in a box. That creates four empty spaces in the box. In other words, about 20% of the box is empty. So, I talked with the former president (Hirotake Yano, the founder). I said, “See? If you put buckets like this, there are empty spaces. Can I put other items here?” He replied, “What happens then?” The conversation went on: “We can carry more, and the cost per item will decrease.” “Then do it.”

I made an assortment of popular products, such as spray bottles, sponges, and scourers, and put them in the empty space among plastic items. Poor store staff! They only wanted buckets, but they come with other products.
I told them that it was necessary to keep the price of the buckets low. But they kept saying, “We don’t need this much.” I tried that for some years, but it never worked. Nowadays, nobody does it.
I was employed at Daiso when annual sales saw an increase from 3 billion yen to 430 billion yen. The corporate climate allowed the acceptance of drastic ideas and mistakes. Such challenges made the company grow.