Akira Takata is renowned for his high-pitched voice and persuasive sales talk on infomercials for Japanet Takata Co, the company he heads.

The firm based in Sasebo in Nagasaki, Japan is one of largest mail-order companies in the country. It sells consumer products on TV, radio, Internet and through fliers inserted into newspapers.

At of the end of December 2007, Japanet Takata, which has 345 employees, had chalked up 116.1 billion yen (US$1.08 billion) in sales since the company’s inception.

The company broadcasts live shopping programmes from its own TV studios, featuring Takata explaining home electrical appliances and other products.

Takata graduated from a university in Osaka in 1971 and worked at a machine manufacturer before returning to Hirado, Nagasaki, to join his father’s small photo studio in 1974. Takata started his own retail business in 1986.

The Yomiuri Shimbun interviewed him about his path to success.

The Yomiuri Shimbun: You worked as a salaryman for three years before returning to your hometown to help in your family’s (photography) business.

Akira Takata: That’s right. We used to take photographs of groups of tourists. We’d visit hotels at night and photograph the tourists, and then develop the films and print the photos overnight. We’d then go back to the hotels the following morning and sell the prints to them.
We had to try to sell as many photographs as possible, but at the same time we had to be careful not to make too many prints, which would end up not being sold.

After a while, I started to notice certain characteristics of tourists from different areas. For example, people from certain prefectures were more likely to buy lots of pictures than those from other places. I also saw there were some common traits among people in different occupations.

I guess it was like market research, and what I learned back then still helps me a lot today. And it was a local radio programme that opened the door for your mail-order business?

That’s right. A reporter from a local radio station visited different shopping streets and invited local store owners to advertise their products.
When I appeared in the programme, I sold 50 video cameras priced at 19,800 yen ($180). I only talked for about five minutes, but earned about 1 million yen ($9,331).

I couldn’t believe it. One small retail store I represented could only manage about 3 million yen ($27,992) a month in sales at that time.

After that experience, I started getting involved in radio shopping programmes. I tried to have the programmes broadcast in other areas such as Fukuoka, Okinawa and Miyazaki prefectures.

After three years, our company’s shopping programmes were even being aired in Hokkaido.

But it was a while before I had any call centres or toll-free numbers, so calls from customers were automatically transferred to my home telephone after 7pm Because my wife had to handle the calls until about 9pm, our three children couldn’t have dinner before then. This went on until my company’s sales hit 1 billion yen ($9.12 million).

When I appear in shopping programmes now, I don’t prepare any scripts or practice beforehand.

People often tell me they think I deliberately speak in a high-pitched voice, but this isn’t the case. It just happens naturally when I’m trying hard to persuade viewers to make a purchase.

I used to have to deal with broadcasters who had very strict rules on what and how things could be said in a programme and I was told I had to follow prepared scripts exactly.

Some nitpicking people were involved in my programme and they’d complain about the way I deviated from the script. Once I got really mad during an argument and threw coffee at someone. I ended up leaving five minutes before a programme was scheduled to start!
I came back to the studio about 30 seconds before the programme was to air and just ad-libbed.

In 2004, just when everything seemed to be going smoothly and the company was expanding, the personal information of 510,000 customers was leaked by Japanet Takata employees. The company then halted operations for about 50 days and introduced measures to prevent employees stealing customer information. Your firm’s swift response received a lot of praise, didn’t it?

When I learned about the information leak, I knew I had to take it seriously.

I was willing to go back and start from scratch, so I decided to voluntarily suspend the business for a while.

We even cancelled a special programme celebrating the 10th anniversary of our TV shopping business. I thought it important to always keep in mind the trouble we’d caused our customers.

I don’t want to cover up our failures.

And I also don’t evaluate a company’s performance just by its sales.

In fact, there were two years when I deliberately didn’t increase company sales over the previous year. A company can start to show signs of strain, such as failing to secure enough orders or not delivering products to customers on time if it expands too quickly. That’s why I deliberately held back on expanding the firm, so we could focus on increasing customer satisfaction.

Some people have asked me whether I’ve been trying to achieve annual sales of 1 trillion yen ($9.3 billion).

That’s ridiculous. I don’t think we should be looking that far ahead to achieve our dreams. Realising your dreams is possible just by going one step at a time.

Instead of just trying to boost sales, I believe a company should try to express its social value.

I’ll be turning 60 in November and plan to let someone younger take over. Matsushita Electric Industry Co, for example, was founded by Konosuke Matsushita, but his spirit has been passed on to others.

At the moment, I only appear in my company’s shopping programmes about once every three weeks.

I also plan to change the company’s name from Japanet Takata to just Japanet in the near future. (By YOICHIRO KAGAWA In Tokyo/ The Yomiuri Shimbun/ AsiaNews)