Omameya: ¥2.26M Monthly Revenue Six Months After Opening, From a Location the Owner Calls "Not Even Good"

Omameya, a coffee shop that roasts its own beans, reached ¥2.26M in monthly revenue in May 2025, six months after opening on November 9, 2024. Its operator, Hirotomo Ichikawa (known as “Afro”), has published the store’s actual monthly revenue on note every month since day one. The figure worth staring at is less the ¥2.26M at the six-month mark than the ¥1.29M in the very first month, which is exceptionally high among the brick-and-mortar launch cases. The food-truck case that published four months of revenue, for instance, sold ¥64,000 in its first month and ¥384,000 even in its fourth month once things were rolling. Omameya’s first month was more than three times that.

Physical retail, the saying goes, is decided by location. Yet Ichikawa himself describes his spot as “not even good,” and a Kaldi outlet, the chain that sells imported beans cheaply and in volume, sits right nearby. How did a store stack up textbook disadvantages and still produce ¥2.26M a month? We trace it using only the numbers he has published for free.

Seven months of revenue

The source is his note article, where all monthly revenue figures sit in the free portion (the revenue breakdown and details of tactics such as the LINE membership card are paywalled and not used in this article).

Two things stand out from the series: the entry level, and the shape of the line. ¥1.29M appeared in month one. Even discounting an opening buzz, that is not the number of a new store starting from zero awareness. Nor is the line a straight climb. After stretching to ¥1.88M in December, revenue fell to ¥1.56M in January, recovered to ¥1.99M in March, then dipped again to ¥1.86M in April. Levels ratchet upward while absorbing single-month dips, the classic waveform of retail and food service. Lay seven months side by side and it becomes obvious that no single month can tell you whether a store is thriving or fading.

The first month’s ¥1.29M is imported experience

Ichikawa has roasted for 15 years and heads INDIGO COFFEE WORKS Inc. Omameya is not his first store. According to his blog, his first shop sold about ¥700,000 in its opening month and grew more than threefold to ¥2.3M by month eleven. Overlaying the two makes Omameya’s oddity plain: it entered at ¥1.29M, more than half of what took the first store eleven months to reach, and pulled roughly even at ¥2.26M in month seven.

Location and luck are hard-pressed to explain this gap. The location, after all, is one the owner admits is weak. What remains is the reuse of accumulated knowledge: Ichikawa has written about visiting more than 500 coffee shops and about building a retail model that reached ¥4.05M in monthly sales. Product lineup, pricing, roast quality, operations, every variable the first store spent eleven months testing was available to the second store as a settled value from opening day. A solo operator’s second store can run ahead of the first store’s learning curve from month one. The cleanest way to read Omameya’s revenue series is as a measured instance of that general rule.

Café plus retail: two pillars that offset a weak location

The free portion confirms the skeleton of the business: retail sales of beans roasted in-house, combined with café service. On his blog Ichikawa lists five revenue sources for a small coffee shop, in-store drinks, takeout, bean sales, equipment and goods, and an online shop, and Omameya is built along this multi-line design.

Food-and-beverage revenue alone has a structural ceiling: it cannot exceed seats times hours times average ticket. Retail sits outside that constraint. Beans leave the store and get consumed elsewhere, so revenue is not bound to dwell time. Roasted beans are also a consumable repurchased every few weeks, which keeps generating reasons to come back. That a one-to-two-person crew can turn over ¥2M-plus a month is plausibly because short-transaction retail is layered on top of attention-heavy café service.

The fact that ¥2.26M happened with a Kaldi close by also settles into place in this frame. Mass-market imported beans and beans roasted in front of you differ in both price band and purchase motive, so they are not fighting over the same shelf. That reading is the editorial desk’s, not the owner’s, but at minimum the folk rule that a specialty shop cannot survive near a big chain does not square with this case’s actual numbers.

His habit of publishing monthly numbers is itself connected to the two-pillar design. Revenue disclosure is rare in food service, but for a store with bean retail and an online shop, writing that shows the owner’s face and thinking becomes a channel to buyers outside the neighborhood. Ichikawa has disclosed as far back as his first store’s results (about ¥700K in month one), so the openness is an ongoing policy rather than a one-off campaign.

Opening a physical store also means an upfront-investment wall. For scale, the takoyaki food-truck cost breakdown documents ¥2.82M to ¥4.39M including the vehicle. A storefront with a roasting machine is typically heavier still. Omameya’s initial investment has not been published.

Reading ¥2.26M as figures published by the author of an opening guide

Three reservations belong next to these numbers.

One reservation is commercial: Ichikawa also publishes a book on opening coffee shops and runs a school and consulting practice for prospective owners. His revenue posts can carry a promotional function aimed at that audience. The seven consecutive months of actual figures are internally consistent, but readers should know the interest exists (it is also why this article cites only the free portion).

Another is that profit is unknown. Costs of goods, rent, and payroll against the ¥2.26M are not in the free portion, so take-home cannot be verified. His blog offers a model case of ¥400,000 in recurring profit on ¥1.5M monthly revenue with a break-even around ¥1M, but that is a model, not Omameya’s measured result. Revenue curves and profit curves are different animals. As the case of a company that bought a coffee stand and had to suspend it for five months shows, a food business can stall on variables other than sales.

The last is dependence on the person: the launch leans heavily on the owner’s own skill and labor. One-person operation works because roasting, service, and retail all fit inside one person. What holds it together is the person, not the format.

Omameya’s numbers carry 15 years of career and the operating experience of multiple stores. For a first-time founder the relevant reference is the first store’s opening month of about ¥700K, not Omameya’s ¥1.29M. And with the breakdown unpublished, what this case lets you verify ends at the shape of the revenue ramp. What the business keeps, the inside of that ¥2.26M, remains outside the public record.