Genki Ito: Building Tippsy, America’s Largest Online Sake Retailer
Tippsy Sake founder Genki Ito. Photo courtesy of Tippsy Sake.
Genki Ito, the founder of Tippsy Sake, the largest online sake retailer in North America, was born and raised in Japan. Yet the first time he took note of sake as being something especially delicious was as an adult, working in Hawaii for Nishimoto Trading Company , now known as Wismettac Asian Foods, Inc.
The sake was a Kudoki Jozu ginjo sake from Kamenoi Brewery in Yamagata Prefecture., “nothing like the cheap dry sake I’d tasted before,” he recalls. “It has aromas of bananas or melon, and was very juicy. Later I realized I like ginjo aromas from the kind of sake you’d enjoy in a wine glass. I was surprised sake could be so delicious.”
I caught up with Ito last week at a downtown Los Angeles coffee shop a few days before he was scheduled to fly to Japan for a pitch event. While there, he hopes to hire a senior engineer for Tippsy as well. Under an alternating gray and sunny sky, he told me the Tippsy origin story and more about his background.
After relocating to his company’s Los Angeles office, Ito continued to learn about sake while attending the University of Southern California part time to earn an MBA. He got to know the city’s start-up culture, and wanted to start a business of his own, something that he could be proud of, something that would add value to the world. He hit on the idea of selling the delicious craft sake of Japan which, unaccountably to him, lagged behind sushi in popularity in the United States.
“I knew it had great potential, but people associated sake with sake bombs, or warm sake in sushi restaurants,” he explains. “As soon as I gave them a pour of a great sake, they wanted to know where they can get more.” From his experience at Nishimoto Trading, he knew that supply chain regulations, multiple layers of laws and regulations (differing from state to state), and poor communication between breweries and the public made sake a tough sell.
Still, he took on the challenge, raising several thousands of dollars through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign and launching Tippsy in the fall of 2018. Since then, he’s raised over a million dollars in funding.
Tippsy is by no means an easy sell to tech investors, Ito noted. Though some like the idea of selling a Japanese product to the overseas market, the shipping of alcohol is a complicated process that even Amazon has struggled with. Still, the Covid pandemic has accelerated the streamlining of supply chain issues by about a decade, Ito estimates, and restaurant lockdowns were good for online sales of many products, including sake.
The growing Tippsy team, with mascot. Photo courtesy of Tippsy Sake.
Tippsy has grown to a staff of more than 15, which operates out of a 5,000-square-foot warehouse space in Carson, south of Los Angeles. Its website is well designed with lots of content aimed at making sake casual, fun, and easy to understand for a customer base that skews toward 25-to-35-year-olds, most of them non-Japanese.
There’s a basic seven-lesson guide that explains what sake is, how it is made, and how to pair it with food. Other posts range in tone from information-laden profiles of breweries (like this one on Fukushima’s Ninki Shuzo) to a playful post about celebrating Hello Kitty’s birthday with a strawberries-and-cream scented Hakutsuru nigori sake.
Ito sees his challenge as finding the right balance between not overwhelming newcomers to sake with too much granular sake information, yet offering enough to satisfy knowledgeable aficionados who are interested in details about yeast, mold, and rice varieties.
Sake + information. Photo courtesy of Tippsy Sake.
One of his innovations has been gift sets of assorted 300-milliliter bottles that allow customers to sample a wide range of sakes. When I took the site’s basic quiz to find out what my ideal sake profile is, the answer was Senkin Classic, from a brewery that I like and visited for our book research. But Ito says he’s aiming for a much more sophisticated user data-based algorithm that will provide visitors with an increasingly accurate sake recommendations.
His next challenge is to collect more data from breweries, something that can be difficult in part because many brewers don’t believe that specifications such as sake meter value, acidity levels, and other technical information say much about a sake’s quality and taste. Yet this level of data, Ito says, will allow him to “reach the next level in curation.”
Ito in DTLA at Verve Coffee Roasters, which, incidentally, has three branches in Japan!
Four years into his business, Ito feels he’s only achieved a fraction of what he dreams of. “It’s been quite a ride,” he says. When I ask him to share the biggest lesson he’s learned as an entrepreneur, he thinks for a moment then answers, “The importance of crafting a good story that resonates with people.”
In Other Sake News…
Our book, Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice, Water, Earth, is rapidly approaching its March 8 publication date! Tuttle Publishing sent me a big box of BLADs, which are 16-page promotional excerpts that look great; above are images of the cover and the table of contents. I’ll be passing the BLADs out to sake folks I meet during my travels. You can pre-order your book now. Pre-ordering helps signal to the big booksellers that lots of people love sake and want to learn more about it, so please vote with your order, and considering gifting a couple more to friends and family to help spread Sake Love!
Next week, I’m planning a visit with West Covina, California’s very own sake brewery, Nova, so stay tuned for that post.
If you liked reading this, click on the pink box above or below this post and subscribe to get future posts in your inbox!