Leo un artículo sobre Keiichi Kikuchi, quien es conocido en Japón por ser el CEO de una de sus mayores empresas editoriales. After eight years as manager of a cramped bookstore in Nagoya, Japan, selling gossip magazines and cheesy novellas to housewives, Keiichi Kikuchi needed to breathe. So he borrowed money from his parents, convinced his wife to hand over her life savings of $50,000 and, with the help of a bank loan, opened his own shop. Village Vanguard, named after the New York club that inspired his love of jazz, sold avant-garde books. “Young people back then found the whole thing exciting,” recalls Kikuchi, 57, as he leans across the billiard table he uses as a desk. That was in 1986; sales that first year were $210,000 (at today’s exchange rate). Now Kikuchi presides over an empire of 157 company-owned and 34 franchised outlets in Japan. The chain netted $7.4 million last year on revenue of $120 million. His secret was cross-merchandising, an old staple of U.S. retailing but somewhat foreign to Japan. Kikuchi sells CDs, pictures, figurines and other paraphernalia by linking them to the specialty books on the store shelves. On the same shelf as, say, the […]

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