unigem is a marketplace and select shop for jewelry and accessories that brings together bold, distinctive up-and-coming brands. Operating both a physical store in Daikanyama, Tokyo, and an online store, it's a shop drawing a lot of attention right now.
We spoke with Saori Ogaya, founder and CEO of simplify Inc., which runs unigem, about building and operating a marketplace-style site on Shopify.
In Part 2, we ask in detail about the concept and operation of the marketplace-style approach built on Shopify. <Part 2>
You can find Part 1, where we ask in detail about OMO marketing across the online store and physical store operations, here.
A Marketplace Concept Built to Solve the Industry's Pain Points
—— unigem is a marketplace-style shop for jewelry and accessories. How did the concept for this business come about?
Saori Ogaya (hereafter, Ogaya-san) It started from noticing two pain points in the industry. One was on the brand side, the other on the consumer side.
First, on the brand side, there's the problem of "nowhere to sell." When it comes to marketplaces for selling accessories in Japan, names like Creema or minne usually come up, but my impression was that what's sold there tends to be more like individual artists' "creations" than "products" — very much in the handmade accessory space.
Back in 2019, when I was working out the concept for the marketplace, D2C was just becoming a trend in Japan. In the jewelry and accessory industry too, the number of people launching their own individual brands was exploding. As a result, many of these brands ended up being D2C, but in a lot of cases that wasn't really an intentional choice of business model. Online, they'd have their own website and Instagram; offline, they'd sell at pop-ups in commercial facilities. What they really wanted was to get permanent placement in retail stores, but that's a narrow door to get through. Even after putting in the work to make something, they had nowhere to sell it, and no know-how or budget for attracting customers. That was the reality.
The reasons brands want to be placed in retail stores are mainly "it brings in traffic," "you can outsource the actual selling," and "having retail placement itself builds your brand" — but those same benefits should be achievable online too. So I thought, why not build an online space that can deliver all three of those things?
Next, the pain point on the customer side: "there are too many brands, and I don't know which one to buy from." As individual brands exploded in number, each one putting out its own website and social media content, customers would see it, think it looked lovely, and take an interest — but then worry would creep in: "This brand looks great on social media, but can I really trust them enough to buy?"
Is the quality good? Will they deliver on time? Is it safe to enter my card details? And so on. With literally countless brands out there, once you start checking each one individually, you end up not knowing what to buy at all, and you lose the motivation to buy anything. So I thought that if a marketplace sat between the brands and the customers, it could curate that vast number of brands and vouch for them: "these are brands you can safely buy from."
And beyond that, there's simply the joy of discovering wonderful brands you didn't already know about.
Branding That Puts the Customer's Perspective First
—— This gets pretty deep into the behind-the-scenes side of things, but looking at the site, it doesn't come across outwardly as a marketplace — to customers, it reads as a lovely select shop.
Ogaya-san That's right. We moved to the marketplace model in November 2024; before that, we were running it as a normal select shop. I felt that even if we called it a "marketplace," it wouldn't really click with general customers... and honestly, it also just didn't feel very stylish (laughs). That said, we do separate items into labels within the store, so customers can tell whether a product is one of our curated picks or not.
Conviction and Expectations for Shopify's Marketplace Model
—— There aren't yet that many examples of marketplace-style shops built on Shopify. Even so, did you have confidence that it could be done on Shopify?
Ogaya-san I did have expectations for Shopify. The app we use now was custom-developed for us, but before that, during a testing period, we used a Shopify app released by another company. That let us verify that it was achievable both technically and operationally.
—— What was the reason you chose Shopify in the first place?
Ogaya-san There's no single special reason — it just had momentum as a service. At the time, not many businesses in Japan were using it yet, but my impression was that it had become fairly standard overseas.
Back then, most people in Japan seemed to be using BASE or STORES, but I felt those had low customization flexibility, making it hard to express originality. I also had future overseas expansion in mind, and felt a service based in the English-speaking world would be a better fit long-term. With extensibility in mind, we initially used WooCommerce on WordPress, but WordPress was never really an EC cart system to begin with, so we kept hitting walls — limits on what we could do, a confusing admin interface, and so on.
Amid all that, I gave Shopify a try, since it was growing rapidly overseas, and it was excellent, so we switched over. There was even a migration tool, so we got it set up quickly.
unigem, a marketplace and select shop for jewelry and accessories
The Key to Shopify Is Running It No-Code
—— Looking at the site, I really felt the beauty of the unified design, along with how easy it is to browse products and shop. What's the ratio between custom-built parts and parts using Shopify's existing features?
Ogaya-san About 90% is basic, no-code functionality, and about 10% is where I've customized things a bit by rewriting or adding code on top of the default templates.
Our basic policy is to touch the code as little as possible. It's a SaaS, so the service keeps getting updated, and it's provided on that assumption. The more you tinker with the code, the more work it takes to keep up with each update, and the more that work piles up, the slower you are to benefit from the latest updates. So I think staying as no-code as possible is actually more cost-effective in the end.
—— How do you keep up with the latest Shopify information?
Ogaya-san I'm not exactly diligent about following it — I just look at the admin dashboard day to day and often notice, "Oh, something's changed here." I also have a Shopify developer account, so I sometimes glance through the emails aimed at developers.
Shifting the Balance of Initiatives Between Online and the Physical Store
—— Could you tell us about your outlook for the online store, which is currently your main focus?
Ogaya-san Our product lineup still isn't all that large, so I want to keep growing the number of products. As the number of products grows, I think it'll get harder for customers to find things with our current online site structure, so we'll need to put some thought into making it easier for customers to reach what they want, while keeping the site fun and exciting to browse.
I'd also love to be able to offer online the same kind of serendipity you get from the in-store experience. Personally, I'm actually more interested in something like a virtual space than in AI recommendations.
—— Heading into 2025, we're hearing more shops talk about putting effort into both online and physical-store or offline initiatives. For unigem, which already has a physical store and where online accounts for the majority of sales, where do you plan to focus your effort in 2025?
Ogaya-san We still intend to keep investing more heavily in online. Until now we've weighted things toward online across the board, but I'm thinking of shifting that balance depending on a product's price point.
After about five years of running the store, what I've learned — which makes sense when you think about it — is that lower-priced items, for us that's roughly up to 30,000 yen, sell just fine online. But the more expensive something gets, the higher the psychological barrier becomes: people want to "see it in person first." So the image I have is investing a bit more in in-store initiatives for higher-priced items, while leaning fully into online for lower-priced items.
unigem, a marketplace and select shop for jewelry and accessories
Shopify Apps That Are Essential to Our Operations
—— Could you tell us your favorite Shopify apps?
Ogaya-san Honestly, the app we had custom-developed for us is still my favorite (laughs). Beyond that, the first one is a well-known one — Matrixify (an app for importing and exporting Shopify data). We used it a lot this year around price revisions. With the price of gold surging, the jewelry industry has been in a wave of price revisions these past few years. Often you need to switch all your prices at once starting from a specific date and time, and without this app we'd be stuck manually uploading CSVs in the middle of the night. Our operations simply couldn't run without it.
Another one is Delivery Date & Time Scheduler. It supports Japanese delivery carriers, and if you want something with good design, this is really the only choice.
And then there's Tsun's pre-order app. It's really convenient — when something goes out of stock, you can switch it over to pre-order. The help page is also really thoughtfully written, showing all sorts of usage patterns — I'm a huge fan!
—— Thank you so much (laughs)! Is there any kind of app you wish existed going forward?
Ogaya-san Probably a points app that works across both online and POS. What we're using now isn't bad, but there just don't seem to be many points apps in the app store that support POS in the first place. It'd be great to have one that's both well-designed and easy to customize.
Not just for points apps, but especially with apps from overseas, I often run into confusing admin screens or the inability to customize the storefront-side design, and that's often the reason people give up on adopting them. So beyond having the functionality you actually need, I'd love to see more apps out there that also look beautiful.
Shopify Is a Platform You Can Count on for Future Updates
—— Lastly, do you have a message for people considering adopting Shopify, or who are currently running their business on it?
Ogaya-san I'd recommend Shopify without hesitation. There are various Japanese-made EC cart systems out there, but their user base is almost certainly confined mostly to Japan. A service like Shopify, with users all over the world — meaning developers all over the world, accumulating knowledge and pushing the service forward every day — personally, that's the kind of service where I see real future potential.
Thank you so much for this valuable conversation, from your outlook for the marketplace-style business you're running on Shopify to your favorite Shopify apps!
