This is our interview series featuring Shopify merchants. Today we spoke with Nitta Jozo, a long-established miso brewery in Nagano Prefecture that migrated to Shopify in April 2024. We talked with Morie-san, the brewery's young proprietress, who manages its Shopify operations!
Nitta Jozo, Young Proprietress Morie-san
Nitta Jozo: A Long-Established Nagano Miso Brewery Making Shinshu Shirakabajirushi Miso
Nitta Jozo, located in Sakaki, Nagano Prefecture
Morie-san Nitta Jozo is a miso brewery said to have been founded in the late Edo period. It's the family business of my husband's family, and my husband is the sixth-generation owner. We're located in the town of Sakaki, next to Ueda City in Nagano Prefecture.
—— What is Nitta Jozo's most popular product?
Morie-san Our signature product is Shinshu Shirakabajirushi Miso. While regular Shinshu miso is mainly made from rice, our Shinshu Shirakabajirushi Miso also contains a bit of barley. We make miso from rice and barley, age it in wooden barrels for a year, and then blend it with two other types of miso.
This April, we rebranded — changing our logo and renewing our online store. Before the renewal, the 2kg size of Shinshu Shirakabajirushi Miso was our best-seller, but now, looking at the Shopify admin, the 500g zipper-pack size is overwhelmingly our top seller. I was surprised myself when I looked at the Shopify data (laughs). I think it's because the renewal brought in a lot of new customers.
Our best-selling Shinshu Shirakabajirushi Miso
Running an EC Site for About 10 Years, Migrating to Shopify in April 2024
—— When did Nitta Jozo start selling online?
Morie-san We had an EC site running from about 10 years ago, well before I got involved.
We migrated from the platform we first launched on to MakeShop about six or seven years ago. Then, in April 2024, we migrated to Shopify.
When we migrated to MakeShop, my husband was handling it as a side project alongside another job, but since MakeShop offered support and we didn't have that much customer data yet, it was tough but not a huge undertaking.
This April's Shopify migration had two especially difficult aspects. One was migrating customer information and building out the site itself. The other, separate from the migration, was that we rebranded — a new logo and new packaging — so there was so much changing all at once around the time of the migration that it was really tough.
The typography of our new logo after rebranding
—— How far in advance did you start planning the Shopify migration?
Morie-san We spent about two years preparing before the migration. Even before I started working at Nitta Jozo, my husband had been consulting with a company run by an acquaintance that specializes in rebranding for small and medium businesses, and they eventually helped us develop the tagline "Unleashing the potential of miso" and organize our brand concept. Because of the pandemic, it took a lot of time — about a year.
Once the concept was set, I asked a friend of mine from university, a designer who had also been part of the rebranding, to update our logo. We upgraded both the Nitta Jozo logo and the logo design for our miso products, and for our main product, Shinshu Shirakabajirushi Miso, we redesigned the packaging bag and changed the sizes. We also launched a miso we hadn't sold before, called "Shinshu Shirakabajirushi Miso Original," around the same time — so that preparation took another year on top of that.
The Words That Pushed Us Toward Shopify: "If You're Going to Migrate, Sooner Is Better"
Morie-san For the EC site migration and Shopify build, we didn't use a specialized agency — instead, an engineer introduced to us by a friend handled it. We'd been consulting with them for about two years, and with the schedule shifting due to the pandemic as well, they worked backward from our April 2024 launch date to build everything out.
—— What was the deciding factor in choosing Shopify as your migration destination?
Morie-san Right after I quit my previous job and started working at Nitta Jozo, when I had no idea what I should be doing, someone introduced to me by an acquaintance recommended Shopify. It wasn't so much about specific features — it was more like, "Shopify is good, and if you're going to migrate, sooner is better" (laughs).
At the time, migrating to MakeShop had been fairly tough for my husband too, so I had this feeling that I'd want to move to Shopify eventually but that it seemed like a lot of work. But when I was told that, I realized that if we were going to seriously push EC going forward, migrating after accumulating even more customer data would only get harder — so I decided to treat it as a full-fledged migration project and push it through.
So starting about two years ago, we were thinking about moving to Shopify, and since the rebranding was also a high priority, we decided to time it to coincide with that.
Our online store, rebuilt and renewed on Shopify
—— What do you think is an appropriate amount of preparation time before migrating to Shopify?
Morie-san I think it depends on whether you're launching a brand from zero, simply migrating something you're already running, or rebranding like we did.
I imagine launching from zero isn't all that difficult. For example, if you're launching an EC site with just one product, I think you can start the site and then keep adding content as you go.
If anything, I think what takes time is what comes before you actually launch the Shopify store — deciding on your brand concept and what to do about product packaging.
—— Shopify makes it easy to express your brand, but if you don't have anything to express in the first place, that ends up being really difficult, doesn't it.
On Shopify, You Need to Find Your Own Place to Ask for Help
—— For Shopify operations, you mainly handle the email newsletter, social media, and communicating with customers, is that right?
Morie-san We'd already been doing email newsletters and social media since our MakeShop days. But at first, I really had no idea what order to do things in. Even when I started dabbling in Instagram, I didn't know what to post, so I talked it over with my husband and started posting recipes. I can't actually create recipes myself, so I asked a chef and a photographer my husband knew to help out as a side job, and that's how we started posting.
MakeShop's email newsletter feature seemed hard to use, and it also cost extra on top of the monthly fee, so we used a tool called SendGrid instead.
Around the time before we migrated to Shopify, I joined a community salon on EC operations run by Takuya Miura, and that really helped me see how to prioritize initiatives and what I should be focusing my effort on. From that point on, we started sending both our newsletter and social posts more frequently and consistently.
Nitta Jozo's Instagram account now has 10,000 followers
—— So it was helpful to join a community where you could ask about anything you were stuck on with Shopify, and really get answers and connect with others.
Morie-san Don't you feel like there just aren't "Shopify insiders" out there in the world (laughs)? When we were on MakeShop, we had a dedicated support contact, and customer support was available by phone on weekdays from 9am to 6pm. Functionally, Shopify can do a lot more, but when it comes to being able to quickly ask about something you don't understand, I feel like domestic Japanese cart systems have an edge there.
A Basic Stance of Building Without Relying on Apps
Morie-san Our basic stance is that we don't want to install a ton of apps without good reason. The nice thing about apps is that you can keep extending functionality indefinitely, but before you know it, your fixed costs can spiral out of control.
We have regular meetings with the engineer who originally built our store, and they've built out quite a few detailed features for us directly.
For example, right now it's the o-seibo gift-giving season, so we started offering gifts, but when we installed an app that someone recommended to us, the app's features were way too much — it actually made things harder to use.
After looking into it more, it seemed like we could solve it just by tweaking Liquid (Shopify's own coding language) a little, so I sent that over to our engineer and asked them to build it that way instead. Our stance is: even when something isn't an app, if we can solve it through custom development, we try to solve it that way as much as possible.
Nitta Jozo kindly showed us the specific apps they use on their store.
—— So is that a judgment call made looking at both cost and usability?
Morie-san It really depends on the case, but I do think custom-built solutions are often better.
One example of a widely used app we decided to stop using is Pagefly or Gempages, apps that make it easy to build landing pages.
We originally posted our recipes on note, but Shopify's blog doesn't let you adjust font size or add easy-to-see buttons, so I was thinking about introducing Gempages. But after talking to various people about it, I heard that it can get pretty costly, and that if you stop using Gempages, the pages you built with it can no longer be published. Hearing about those drawbacks made it seem like not such a great fit, so in the end we decided against it.
Right now, I want our recipe blog to look more like a note-style layout, so we've had our engineer set up metafields for us, and we're doing what we can through custom development to get as close to our ideal as possible.
The Challenge Now Is Building a Shipping System That Can Handle Rapid Sales Growth
—— Going forward, what initiatives do you want to prioritize to grow on Shopify?
Morie-san Back when we were on MakeShop, we were running Meta ads, but we couldn't embed the pixel on MakeShop. You could do it with MakeShop's default design, but once you'd customized the site's design, pixel embedding wasn't possible. That meant the machine learning couldn't really progress, and I think that was one of the reasons our sales didn't grow all that much.
After migrating to Shopify, where pixel embedding is possible, we decided to give Meta ads another shot, and when we ran them, the results were great — sales tripled in three months.
But then, since we only have one miso filling machine, our shipping couldn't keep up. We could grow sales if we wanted to, but shipping had hit its limit, so we had to stop. So our first challenge now is to add more filling machines and get our shipping system in order.
After that, I think the key points will be increasing our Meta ad creatives and budget.
Combining Meta Ads, Shopify Email, and Shopify Flow
Morie-san Right now we're putting a lot of effort into Shopify Email. We also show a "Sign up for our newsletter?" pop-up using Shopify Forms, and among the people who come in through Meta ads, quite a few don't buy right away but do sign up with just their email address. A fair number of them end up buying at some point after receiving our newsletter a few times.
So I think the combination of these three things works well: pushing Meta ads, letting people sign up for the newsletter through Shopify Forms, and putting real effort into the newsletter itself through Shopify Email.
—— You could say Shopify makes it easy to run that kind of combined strategy.
Morie-san That's true. I think it depends on the platform's system, but I feel like MakeShop couldn't show pop-ups.
Being able to set up a pop-up by default is really nice. And with Shopify Email, if you register a photo on a product page, you can instantly pull that image up when creating a newsletter — that's really convenient.
Hoping for More Built-In Shopify Features
—— What do you hope for from Shopify and Shopify apps going forward?
Morie-san First, I'd love to see Shopify's default features become even more full-featured. I'd also like to make our recipe blog easier to browse.
I'd also love better integration with LINE. With Shopify Email, when you create a segment like "people who opened at least 3 times in the past month," if someone who's opened twice opens it one more time, they automatically get added to that segment. With LINE's default features, you can create an audience like "people who opened at least 3 times in the past month," but even if a user's status changes afterward, that audience doesn't get updated.
You can download and upload Shopify Email segments too, but that doesn't reflect updates either. I'd love it if we could get automatic integration so we could send to the same segment across both Shopify Email and LINE.
Whether Shopify Is a Good Fit Depends on Who's Running It
—— To be blunt, would you recommend Shopify?
Morie-san I think whether Shopify is a good fit depends on the merchant's digital literacy and motivation. I actually come from the IT industry myself, but even if you can't write code, if you're someone who can roughly understand how things are structured, who can look things up on your own, or who can find and hire someone who can build things for you — I think Shopify is a great fit for people like that.
On the other hand, say you're in a rural area where the only people at the company are older and never shop online themselves, and the person in charge of EC is in the same boat — that would be a pretty high hurdle.
I feel like it really comes down to how much IT and web literacy the merchant has, and how much they're willing to commit to it.
Approaching Shopify Operations with Real Commitment
—— Do you have a message for people who are just starting out with Shopify, or who are currently running their stores on it?
Morie-san With Shopify, commitment matters most. I think the most important thing is facing Shopify with the resolve to master it and grow your sales. I sound like Matsuoka Shuzo or something (laughs).
—— Thank you so much — that really came through!
