Baby bottle company Zoom. T opens first online shop

Zoom. T, a large seller of baby feeding bottles in Japan, just announced its entry to the Chinese market by opening its first online shop on JD.com in mid-September, betting on the huge potential of the market.

According to CEO Tomoko Kawai, Chinese customers already constitute a large percentage of the company's total sales of its Betta brand baby feeding bottles in Japan. Seeing this popularity, the company decided to launch the business in China to offer better service to Chinese customers.

After that, more official online stores will open on other platforms, like Tmall, another big e-commerce platform in China, Kawai said.

The volume of the Chinese market is 20-25 times larger than the Japanese market, said Yuko Toyoda, company vice-president. The current economic uncertainty won't affect the business in China heavily as customer groups for the baby care market remain rather fixed.

Online selling will be the major channel to sell products in China. "Chinese people are more used to online shopping and with our online store open, they could buy our products whenever they need them," Kawai said.

Zoom. T also plans to open a large experience store in China in the future to offer Chinese customers the chance to try its products and learn to use them correctly, said Toyoda.

According to Kawai, she hopes that after her business gets on track in China, total sales of its feeding bottles will reach 100,000, half of current sales in the Japanese market, and increase with time.

"We will update our products after getting feedback from Chinese customers and design special products only for Chinese market," she said.

Yang Pengyu contributed to this story