nicott: A Failing Eyelash Salon Bought for ¥6 Million Now Runs 21 Stores on Roughly ¥800 Million a Year

One salon bought for ¥6 million now stands as 15 owned stores and 6 franchises, with roughly ¥800 million a year in revenue from the eyelash business alone. A business that grew this far must have been a sound purchase to begin with. The source rejects that reading outright. In an interview published by the M&A marketplace TRANBI on October 10, 2023, the buyer, nicott CEO Masaya Tamura, says he “paid no attention whatsoever to the financials,” and adds that “even if the same deal came up today, I would absolutely not buy it.”

The deal did not come through TRANBI either. Tamura found the salon on a small, essentially one-person M&A site and bought it after contacting the seller directly. What he did put on TRANBI was the tutoring franchise he later sold, covered below.

What ¥6 million bought

According to nicott’s company page, the firm was founded in December 2016 with ¥8 million in capital and is based in Nakatsu, Kita-ku, Osaka. Tamura worked in hair-salon consulting at Funai Consulting before going independent, and consulting for beauty salon owners remains his main business. Buying the lash salon was a new venture started as tuition for building “a consulting practice centered on M&A,” and the original plan was to rebuild the store and sell it.

He bought an address, not a set of numbers. Tamura was looking only in Osaka’s busy districts, Umeda, Tennoji and Namba, because what mattered was being in an area where customers could be drawn and the store could be turned around. He paid ¥6 million knowing it was above value, and explains the reasoning as speed: buying the counseling sheets, the products in use, the storage practices, all the small operational detail of running a salon, in one go rather than assembling it from scratch.

A note on the arithmetic. TRANBI’s headline reads “100x revenue,” but the figures in the interview body run from about ¥10 million to about ¥800 million, which is 80x. This site uses the body figures.

“No staff, no advertising”

The handover went badly. The negotiated documents included a clause committing the seller to “provide support with hiring.” It was never honored, and the broker settled the matter by explaining that the clause carried no legal force. Tamura’s only recourse was a price reduction of about ¥200,000. Then the three staff he had been told about turned out to be one. The other two were on the books but never came in after the handover. The one who remained told him she wanted to quit.

The decisive blow was customer flow. More than 90% of the store’s customers came through Hot Pepper at the time, and after a review mentioning an allergic reaction appeared, the listing was suspended for six months. The treatment in question predated the purchase, but the review landed one month after Tamura took over. In his words: “I’d bought the place, and there were no staff, no advertising.”

The most expensive item in this deal was not the ¥6 million. It was a support clause that moved not one yen. Any plan that counts on the seller’s help collapses the moment the clause turns out to be unenforceable. Before arguing about whether the price was right, look at what is left standing when the clause is ignored. That is the structure this handover exposes.

One rule: give 10% of every add-on back

Losing 90% of customer acquisition for six months made losses a certainty. Tamura accepted that and switched to work that would pay off later, testing other acquisition routes and rebuilding how the salon treated the customers who did walk in. He describes the period plainly: “the playbook was basically finished during those months.”

Two decisions sat at the center. The first was to push add-on menu items on every visit. The salon was also listed on Groupon then, and customers who had bought a discounted ticket in advance paid nothing at the counter, which left room to add better lash material or a treatment. The second was the rule that 10% of every add-on sold goes back to the staff member who sold it. Revenue did not move at first. It improved gradually, and the average ticket climbed.

The effect was not only financial. Salon staff, Tamura says, carry a pride that runs “I don’t want to do low-priced work, I want to deliver high-priced service.” As the ticket rose, the staff began to see themselves as working at a high-end salon, and that became the company culture. One 26-year-old stylist reached ¥700,000 in monthly pay by the time of the interview.

The pay system was opened up at the same time. Compensation formulas and evaluation criteria tend to be a black box in this industry, so Tamura posted all of it in the back room, letting every stylist calculate her own pay. The payouts are layered: a share of add-on sales, a share of total store revenue, and a share for handling seven or more customers in a day. That design differs from the 40% to 50% percentage-back schemes common in salons. The stated aim was “a system that makes you want to take customers, and a system that makes you want to suggest add-ons.”

Tamura credits the growth to three things: clustered store openings, hiring inexperienced staff and his “80% management” philosophy. The order of the numbers says otherwise. What was built during the six dead months was the pricing and compensation design, and the store rollout is the stage that copied it. Our reading is that this rescue was not a recovery of customer flow but a rewiring of pay so that suggesting more meant earning more.

Only four stations

Every move in the copying stage works against spreading out.

Stores open only in Umeda, Tennoji, Namba and Kyobashi, and some sit in the same building under different names. Most operators avoid clustering because of overlapping catchment areas. Tamura’s arithmetic runs the other way: if 200 salons are listed in the Umeda area on Hot Pepper, about half of them are presumably profitable, so a market for 100 stores exists. Proximity also makes transfers easy, which turns the main reason staff quit, friction with colleagues, into a problem solved by moving someone two stations over.

He does not build large stores. Fixed costs rise and so does risk, and he chooses small units knowing their fixed-cost ratio is higher. Small stores are also easier to close. His rule of thumb that disputes stay rare up to four or five people also caps store size.

Hiring targets people with no experience, and skills are not a criterion, because the system produces revenue from beginners. He would rather have someone who stays than an experienced stylist planning to open her own place. Tamura personally handles recruiting and interviews for all 15 owned stores. His stated philosophy, “80% management,” asks staff for 80% rather than 100% or 120%, and forbids competition between stores. By the time of the interview the opposite problem had appeared: staff who had become pay-conscious were pushing themselves too hard, and he was proposing to raise days off from two to three a week.

Head office is Tamura and nobody else. Store development, hiring and bookkeeping are all his, and payroll is the only outsourced function. In a structure where one person runs 21 stores, the rate limit on growth is neither property nor capital but his own hours. Systemization has gone far enough that some stores opened through email alone, yet he states plainly that interviews are the one thing he will not hand off for now.

The same man lost ¥17 million on a cram school in two years

Read only the buyer’s success and this becomes a story about repeatability. The failure sits inside the same two years.

When Tamura decided to franchise the salons, he joined a tutoring franchise to absorb the know-how of a growing FC system from inside. He put in about ¥10 million up front, ran it for close to two years, and accumulated losses of roughly ¥17 million to ¥18 million. He recovered ¥3 million on the sale and let it go as tuition. TRANBI is where he found that buyer.

His own explanation for the failure is the business model. A beauty salon accumulates customers, while a cram school fills up in March and April and resets to zero when students graduate in January and February. That cycle did not suit him. The franchisor’s customer-acquisition projections also missed, since the number of franchisees had grown to the point that per-store demand had already thinned. He also writes that “I lost interest in growing revenue, and as a result I could not do the one thing that mattered most, which was getting students in the door.”

The ¥6 million purchase and the ¥17 million loss are decisions by the same person in the same period. The difference lay somewhere other than industry knowledge, in whether he had any appetite for growing that particular line of revenue.

The ¥800 million has no breakdown, and consulting carried the losing six months

The interview reflects October 2023, and both the ¥800 million and the 21 stores describe the lash business as a whole. The split between owned and franchised stores, the profit, and the revenue per store are all undisclosed. Whether ¥6 million was the right price is answered by the buyer himself, who says he would not buy it today, so what this case yields is not a valuation lesson. And he could sit through six loss-making months because he kept deals within the range his consulting revenue could cover. As Tamura puts it, “never make an M&A deal a life-or-death bet.”

Related cases

Among buyers in Japanese small M&A, the price band tends to define the repair work being taken on. Compare the record of roughly 20 purchase offers that took an unemployed buyer to ownership of three businesses in the ¥1 million range, a 51-year-old salaried buyer who took over a Saitama salon for ¥2 million and runs it remotely from Nagoya, and this ¥6 million deal, and the weight of the rebuild in each band becomes visible.

Businesses stalling right after a purchase is not unique to this case either. A two-employee marketing firm that bought a coffee stand and closed it for five months faces the same question of how to fill the gap immediately after handover.