Takumi’s U.S. Success Story

How this SMB from England in the Marketing and Advertising industry made it in the U.S.A

Country Of Origin England

U.S. HQ. New York, USA

Industry Marketing and Advertising

Year Founded 2015

Number Of Employees About 60

Annual revenue $2M (Estimate)

 

About Takumi

Takumi is a leading Influencer Marketing platform that makes it effortless for brands to implement their Instagram campaigns. Since inception, the company has worked with a large number of renowned Influencers to help their clients with their marketing activities. With Takumi’s intensive help, brands have been able to create authentic content that perfectly resonates with the Influencer audience. Founded in 2015, Takumi has grown into one of the most active and dedicated Instagram Influencer platform. As at now, the platform has created more than twenty thousand pieces of content and successively completed over 1750 campaigns. Moreover, the platform has worked with over six hundred brands.

Takumi’s Expansion to the USA

 

Over the last few years, the platform has gained more skills and has become experts in the field. Nowadays, Takumi provides a fully managed service that results in original branded images on Instagram. Furthermore, the platform creates high quality and creative content that can be repurposed across other marketing channels. That has seen the company gain more customers across the globe. Consequently, the company has seen the importance to expand to other markets and now operates from offices in London, Reykjavik, Berlin, and New York.

The New York office was opened in October 2017. With this new expansion, the company announced more than a thousand influencer marketing campaigns. Initially, the company had close to 40 employees but aims to double its headcount with the new expansion plans. Notably, the company’s US expansion is the first outside of Europe.

Mats Stigzelius, Co-founder and CEO of Takumi said that the company’s expansion would be perfect for the US market. The primary aim of Takumi’s expansion is to offer solutions to brands in working with the best Influencers at scale. In addition, the platform will give access to high quality, authentic and engaging content to US-based companies. With the US expansion, the platform was enhanced to save time for user companies by running the entire process for them. That approach would consistently deliver better results than those of Takumi’s competitors, particularly in the US.

In August 2016, Takumi opened a showroom in Indianapolis to launch a new brand. At that time, the company was unveiling its new technology center and showroom to distributor partners. That was in the efforts to kick off the introduction of Takumi USA to the North American market.

Takumi has unveiled its new technology center and showroom to distributor partners to kick off the introduction of Takumi USA to the North American market. The Vice President of Marketing and Product Management for the Takumi brand, Joe Braun said that the Takumi machining centers have been prevalent in Europe and Asia for 30 years. Nonetheless, the brand had no subsidiary office in the North American market. To penetrate that market, the company successfully launched had to open a local service and support center in Indianapolis.

The rapid growth by Takumi in the US market reflects the growing popularity of influencer marketing. Research indicates that 96% of marketers in the US have plans to spend on influencer marketing. More than one in ten plan to spend more than one hundred dollars on influencer marketing. Having worked with over 500 brands, the company will continue to build on that success in the US. Nevertheless, there are already a number of established influencer marketing platforms in operation and thus the company will face competition.

Funding the US Expansion

 

In September 2016, Takumi announced a $1.4M funding round from a number of UK angel investors. That funding brought the company’s total investment to about $3.3M in three rounds. The main purpose of the investment would be to foster the company’s international expansion. Primarily, the expansion was to be in Germany and later in the US.

In August 2018, Takumi reported a successful £3 million in Series B funding. The company collected the funds from angel investors and venture capital funds from the US and the UK. That new funding would be used to fund its existing product and to expand into the US market.

Takumi has been in partnership with brands like Heinz, Gillette, and Nestlé. The company found relevant influencers for the three companies. That has seen the company’s revenue grow by over 25 percent.

With the US expansion, the company focuses on growing its annual revenue with at least 50 percent. This will ensure that the company is self-sustaining especially in terms of recurring expenditure. The available funds will be used in making a superior experience and distributed sales teams across the US. Besides, the platform will be refined to be to be the leading influencer app around the globe. A small fraction of funds will be used to marketing the overall Takumi brand.

Sources