A gift box carries three promises at once: that it was made recently, that it reaches the recipient on the day the sender chose, and that the name on its wrapping is right. A confectioner's systems earn their cost when they keep those promises at peak volume with the staff we actually have. I would rather narrow a promise in July than apologise for it in December.
I judge a confectioner's systems by whether a December gift reaches the right door, on the promised day, under the sender's correct name.
I am executive officer and chief information officer of Utsugane Confectionery, a family-owned maker of Japanese sweets and baked gifts based in Utsunomiya. We sell through 46 shops of our own in Tochigi, Ibaraki, Gunma and Saitama, through counters in 17 department stores in Tokyo and northern Kanto, online and through corporate gift orders. Revenue for the year to February 2026 was ¥11.2 billion. I lead a systems department of 21 people and report to our president, Ritsuko Utsugane, the fourth generation of the founding family. I present to our board but do not sit on it.
My working life started on the other side of the counter. In April 1995 I joined Kawatsubaki Department Store and spent my first summers and winters at its gift centre, writing ochugen and oseibo orders on carbon slips and checking the names for noshi wrapping. I later maintained that store's merchandise systems, then spent six years at a Tokyo integrator installing ordering and shop systems for food retailers. Utsugane was one of my clients before it became my employer in 2009.
The decisions on this site share one discipline: narrowing a promise before the peak so that we can keep it. We moved gift orders off a 1998 system a season ahead of everything else, at the cost of running two systems. We stopped offering every December delivery date when our parcel carrier's capacity fell. We kept shop stock out of the online promise and reserved production instead. Each choice cost sales or money that colleagues wanted to keep, and I set out both sides.
Gift orders moved first, on a platform of their own
Since ochugen 2023, direct-ship gift orders have run outside the old merchandising system. The December 2023 peak handled 201,000 orders without an overnight overrun, and name or address errors fell from 0.38% to 0.09%. Running two systems costs us ¥31 million a year until the core replacement in 2027.
Fewer delivery dates, more parcels arriving as promised
When our carrier capped December pickups at 7,500 parcels a day in 2024, we closed date-specified delivery after 12 December. About ¥46 million of orders went elsewhere, and 99.4% of the 188,000 we accepted arrived as promised, against 97.1% a year earlier.
Reserved production instead of pooled shop shelves
Click-and-collect for seasonal sweets now draws on a daily factory allocation, not on shop stock. Cancellations fell from 4.2% in the pilot to 0.3%, and shop staff count nothing extra. We accepted about ¥19 million of foregone sales and 1.4% of reserved boxes left unclaimed.
Current focus
I am leading the staged replacement of our merchandising and production-planning system, due to go live in March 2027, while making sure the December 2026 gift season runs only on systems we have already tested at full volume.
Conversations I welcome
I would consider one outside director or advisory role with a Japanese retailer, food maker or consumer-services company, with about twenty days a year available, subject to our president's consent and a review of business relationships.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
Formation
Bachelor of engineering, information engineeringMineuchi Institute of Technology · 1995
Masato told the board that his plan would cost more and take longer, and then showed us which December each stage had to survive. That candour made the decision easier to take and harder to regret.
I would consider one outside director or advisory role with a Japanese retailer, food maker or consumer-services company, with about twenty days a year available, subject to our president's consent and a review of business relationships.