A fun work story which hits a lot of geeky interests at once, and some brief notes about it: stripe.com/newsroom/stori…
Shueisha, one of largest publishers in the world, used Stripe to sell gallery-grade manga prints direct to consumers globally.
Shueisha, one of largest publishers in the world, used Stripe to sell gallery-grade manga prints direct to consumers globally.
One of the most striking graphs I’ve ever seen is the international popularity and country of origin of various characters. The U.S. dominates the top 50 slots (Disney, Hollywood, etc) but Japan punches far above its weight, entirely due to the anime/manga/games industries.
These all started as mass market entertainment, but many manga fans have grown up over the years and now have disposable income, and so Shueisha thought to do a more high-art project to fill the market need.
There are people more qualified than me to discuss archival quality paper and printing techniques, but focusing on the bit I do understand: this upends the traditional distribution model, which is based on licensing agreements with globally distributed publishers.
“Well how hard can global e-commerce be in 2021?”
As it turns out, still surprisingly difficult! Presenting a payment experience that met customer expectations across many, many markets was tough, and left Shueisha with a second paper logistics problem: moving money around.
As it turns out, still surprisingly difficult! Presenting a payment experience that met customer expectations across many, many markets was tough, and left Shueisha with a second paper logistics problem: moving money around.
It’s interesting that there is no size of company at which this sort of thing ceases to be challenging. Receiving money in even the top markets worldwide for the largest companies worldwide causes endless headaches. (Oh the stories I can’t tell.)
Shueisha ended up using Stripe.
Shueisha ended up using Stripe.
And in lieu of the traditional method of a back office full of salarymen tallying numbers in Excel and staying up far too late to make sure wires were made from countries in Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia, they automated most of the money movement.
I’ll observe that they also put provenance information about the prints onto a blockchain, so technically speaking the physical artifacts are also tied to NFTs.
They explained that the thought was provable scarcity and authenticity (in a world where knockoffs are common).
They explained that the thought was provable scarcity and authenticity (in a world where knockoffs are common).
There’s also an interesting angle here of hobbies once classified as geeky moving mainstream and high-status by sheer economic force, which observers of the trajectory of e.g. Marvel over the past two decades can probably appreciate.
Is Spider-Man high-status in the same way that e.g. Othello is? I don’t have a rigorous answer, but I will observe that you can find both performed on Broadway.
Who knows, maybe you’ll see Dragonball Z there one day as well.
Who knows, maybe you’ll see Dragonball Z there one day as well.
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