A D2C brand at ¥12M/month in sales, ¥2M in profit — the decisive move was a flat 15% price hike across every product

A physical-goods operator published an entire month’s P&L

Plenty of e-commerce operators disclose their monthly sales figures; far fewer lay out gross margin, ad spend, payroll, and profit all together. What Chacha (raised in Kumamoto, moved to Tokyo after high school, 32 years old at the time of writing) published on note was exactly that, a full month of readable profit-and-loss for a proprietary D2C brand. The company is in its fifth fiscal year, and the brand itself has been running for about three years.

The disclosed monthly P&L

Gross margin: 50%. Operating margin: roughly 17%. Ad spend eats up half of gross profit, of the ¥6M in gross profit, ¥3M gets reinvested.

Here’s the breakdown by sales channel:

The team consists of Chacha himself, plus 2 part-time staff and 2 contracted social-media specialists, with spot outsourcing on top, a five-person scale in total. Inventory on hand runs about ¥10M (4–5 months’ worth), financed through a ¥20M loan from a government-affiliated finance corporation and a regional bank, plus personal capital. Worth keeping in mind: the ¥12M/month figure is supported not by outside equity but by borrowed capital and inventory turnover.

The six retail ventures abandoned on the way here

The proprietary brand isn’t his first attempt. What he lists is a string of exits.

He writes that he started side-hustle resale at age 27. Against his stated age of 32 at time of writing, simply adding up each stage’s duration exceeds five years. It’s natural to read some of these as overlapping in time. Either way, his abandonment reasons lean toward “unsustainable” rather than “unprofitable”. That’s clearly his decision-making axis. He’d already reached ¥2M/month twice, and stepped away from both on his own call.

Building the proprietary brand over three years

The launch sequence went: market research → concept design → sharing the development process and running giveaway campaigns on X → an Amazon launch (achieving bestseller status via pre-launch social buzz) → starting Instagram (daily posting toward a 1,000-follower goal, with ad-driven cost-per-follow of ¥50–100) → building a proprietary e-commerce site on Shopify (customizing the free Dawn theme himself) → launching Meta ads (¥35,000/day budget) and Google ads (¥17,000/day budget).

For market selection, he lists nine criteria, with the top ones being market size (is there demand you can picture reaching ¥10M/month?), marketing difficulty (niche-leaning markets are easier to compete in), brand extensibility, and profitability (minimum 50% gross margin, unit price of ¥5,000 or more). That “50%+ gross margin” condition connects directly to how the later price increase works.

The turning point: the month he rewrote the price tags

The turning point he names is the month he raised every product’s price by a flat 15%. He was worried about a resulting drop in sales, but the actual outcome was roughly flat sales and doubled profit (monthly profit topping ¥1M).

You can verify why this works with simple arithmetic. Say monthly sales are ¥10M, gross margin is 50%, and fixed costs plus ad spend run ¥4M (profit: ¥1M). If unit volume stays constant while prices rise 15%, sales become ¥11.5M while cost of goods stays at ¥5M, gross profit becomes ¥6.5M, and profit becomes ¥2.5M (editorial team’s estimate). Since the price increase flows straight to operating profit without passing through cost of goods, “a 15% price increase roughly doubling profit” is structurally plausible for a business running around 50% gross margin and 10% profit margin. Put differently, the entire force of this move depends entirely on volume not dropping.

Why volume didn’t drop

The price increase alone doesn’t explain it. What was doing the work were two steps taken beforehand.

One was switching from drop-shipping (no inventory) to holding inventory. Shorter delivery times improved conversion rate, cost of goods dropped by ¥1,000, and he exited the race-to-the-bottom pricing war among no-inventory sellers. The other was investing in the unboxing experience, spending ¥500 on packaging and filming unboxing footage to use as ad creative. That improved conversion rate enough that he could raise his daily ad budget from ¥10,000 to ¥20,000 and still hold up, doubling unit sales.

The sequence isn’t reversed. It wasn’t “raise prices, then earn profit”. It was “step off the price-comparison playing field, then rewrite the price tags.” Raise prices 15% while selling the same product as no-inventory sellers on the same shelf, and volume drops. Holding inventory and investing in the unboxing experience came first, creating a state where the only comparable product was his own brand. That’s the precondition that let the price increase go through. Outsourcing shipping and packaging to the two part-time staff, freeing Chacha himself to focus on sales-generating work, was also a decision made around the same time.

What didn’t work

He’s also explicit about what failed. A pop-up store sold exactly one item and ended there. His takeaway was that offline retail requires a different skill set entirely. Gifting and influencer PR were “underwhelming for the visual-appeal category.” His in-house affiliate program barely attracted participants, and a general-public ambassador program proved uncontrollable.

On the other hand, the PR tactic that worked was reaching out to product-review accounts. It reached a higher-quality audience, and, importantly, the posted material could be repurposed as ad creative. Instagram followers sit under 10,000, not a huge number, but PR posts have ranged anywhere from 4,000 to 1.8 million views, with one post reaching 10,000 saves. On the SEO/blog side, he’s reached 6,000 organic monthly visits. On advertising, the core spend is ¥800,000 on Meta ads (CPO of ¥4,000–5,000, effectively under ¥3,000) and ¥300,000 on Google ads. He’s explicit that Amazon Ads’ ACOS and Rakuten RPP’s ROAS are both poor.

Conditions and limits of replicability

What’s replicable is the sequence: setting market-selection criteria of 50%+ gross margin and a ¥5,000+ unit price, investing in inventory and packaging first to step off the price-comparison playing field, and only then testing a price increase. These three steps can be verified regardless of brand size.

What’s hard to replicate is the underlying capacity. A ¥3M ad budget, ¥10M in inventory, and a ¥20M credit line are the kind of creditworthiness that only comes from being a fifth-year corporation. They’re not available in year one. On top of that, the judgment of “which category won’t sustain,” built up through six abandoned ventures, isn’t the kind of knowledge you can pick up from an article. He states he has no intention to sell the business, with his stated target of ¥300M in annual revenue and ¥60M in operating profit.

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