Ken-Elephant, which sells soft vinyl figures and capsule toys at "eki-naka" stations, is making the world a more interesting place! Hobby Industry Inside - Vol. 64

Ken-Elephant Co., known for developing unique capsule toys, is eager to expand its store network. This July 2020, "Ken-Ele Stand" featuring capsule toys for adults opened successively in JR Akihabara Station and JR Shimbashi Station. Furthermore, in August, the company opened the art goods store "VINYL" in Gransta Tokyo, a large-scale eco-commercial facility inside JR Tokyo Station. VINYL, which has a gallery, also sells original soft vinyl products in the store, which has become a hot topic on SNS.
What is KenElephant's goal in bringing toy culture to meet art?　We interviewed Yuji Aoyama, the general manager of the company's sales department, and Seitao Kato, supervisor of the store operations department, to learn more about the company's history.

From a Convenience Store Beverage Freebie to Souvenir Figures from All Over Japan

─ I see that Ken-Elephant has been collaborating with companies on capsule toys, haven't you? Even audio equipment and furniture are made into precision miniatures?

Aoyama: Every week we have a planning meeting where people from the development and sales departments get together. Rather than saying, "This is the kind of product we want to make," we spontaneously come up with a plan, saying, "That product sold well in the past," or "How about this line of products? The plans come spontaneously. For example, a collection of miniature public bathhouses. It started with a suggestion, "There are a lot of books about public bathhouses out there, so why not go for it? When our sales staff approached the National Bathhouse Association, they said, "That's very interesting, let's do it!
In the case of ONKYO and Karimoku Furniture's miniatures, one of our employees had a personal connection and contacted them, saying, "We'd like to release a capsule toy. We contacted them and asked them if they would be interested in producing a capsule toy. Each project has a completely different story behind it.


───Your website also features Kaiyodo's Revoltech action figure series.

Aoyama: Revoltech is a joint venture with Kaiyodo, and we are in charge of product proposals, mainly sales agency and distribution for Amazing Yamaguchi and the Movie Revoltech series. However, we are a company that has grown up largely inspired by Kaiyodo. I have learned a lot from watching Kaiyodo's way of working up close and personal.

───What kind of products were you producing before you started developing capsule toys?

Aoyama: There was a time when canned coffee and PET beverages sold at convenience stores came with free gifts. Around 1999 to 2000, Furuta Confectionery's "Choco Egg Japanese Animal Collection" became very popular, and we teamed up with Kaiyodo-san to develop a toy that could be attached to convenience store beverages.

─ So the omake for convenience store beverages was the beginning of your relationship with Kaiyodo.

Aoyama: However, in 2008, the Lehman Shock occurred. Around the same time, the Law for Preventing Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations became stricter, and production of novelty goods dropped dramatically. I wanted to start something new, so I tried to develop a design goods brand "NEWSED. Around that time, from 2009 to 2011, New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido was renovated. In conjunction with this, we released "Hokkaido Figure Souvenirs" as capsule toys, and this was the moment for us to enter the capsule toy business. As we expanded the Figure Miyage series from Hokkaido to Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Okinawa, etc., with the direction of "from novelties to souvenirs," we were asked by a JR East group company, "Why don't you release a Figure Miyage to coincide with the campaign? We were asked by a JR East group company, "Why don't you release figure souvenirs to coincide with the campaign? The campaign was called a "Destination Campaign," and posters like "Let's go to XX prefecture! posters at train stations. The proposal was to create a capsule toy that would be linked to that campaign.

───So, next to novelties, you were developing local gacha as souvenirs, right?

Aoyama: Yes, the culmination of our efforts to sell figures as souvenirs was "Ueno Land," which opened in Ueno Station. It is a store that sells a variety of Ueno souvenirs, not just capsule toys. In 2017, the year it opened, a panda named Shanshan (Xiangxiang) was born, which also provided a tailwind. For a while, the store was filled with panda goods (laughs).

Kato: However, we were not aggressive in stocking and selling ready-made panda goods, but rather asked up-and-coming artists to draw pictures of pandas and Ueno to create our original goods. As a store, this concept is also connected to "VINYL," which opened this year.

Aoyama: It was very interesting to collaborate with artists to create a design brand and participate in events, and it was around 2017, when we opened Ueno Land, that we became keenly aware that we wanted to create products that we planned ourselves rather than OEM. It was actually only in the last two to three years that we started developing miniatures of public bathhouses and furniture for adults as capsule toys.