Wolt is a food delivery company headquartered in Finland that provides services in over 100 cities in 23 countries. In Japan, Wolt started its service in Hiroshima in March 2020, and as of April 2021, the company is operating in 17 cities nationwide.
Tabula began providing services to Wolt before the company's entry into the Japanese market, and has provided comprehensive assistance in UI/UX localization, product strategy, design localization and market research, also helping Wolt plan their market entry strategy and sales channel development/network building.
When Wolt was considering whether they should expand into Japan, there were no Japanese-speaking employees at the head office and they had very little information about Japan. As a result, they had no clear idea about the competition in Japan or which would be the best candidate start city.
Tabula stepped in to conduct surveys of Japan's top 300 cities in terms of population, age demographics, number of restaurants, urban composition, , etc. as well as conducting a survey of competitor companies, partner relationships and status of entry and exit.
Based on these data, Hiroshima and Sapporo were proposed as locations where Wolt was most likely to make effective progress, rather than Tokyo.
When overseas services come to Japan, localization is essential to success. Many overseas services do little to tailor their offering to Japanese audiences, and localization is either only partly addressed, or doesn't take into account social and cultural mores.
In order to help Wolt localize their service in the best way possible, we combined our innate understanding of Japanese consumers with thorough competitor app research, where we examined and compared the English versions and Japanese versions of successful overseas services who had entered the Japanese market to see where the pain points and success stories could be found.
