A crowd of students wearing uniforms, closer in standard to mine than this rich boy’s, surrounded the gazebo, and I spotted a petite girl among them. Surrounded by her friends, her eyes were telling me to focus on what was in front of me.
They started by pouring Dreyfan’s yellow honey onto a biscuit. A small amount of tension seized the rich boy’s body. Anybody would feel tension when it comes to the royal family. Incidentally, the one blocking our Weinder Company’s expansion into the capital is none other than this boy’s family, the Dreyfans.
The capital lies in the center of the Kingdom, and is the only place with a significantly scaled market for high-class goods. I know full well that the shares in this market are dominated by hereditary trading relations built ages ago. Well, heavily influenced as I am by Japanese sensibilities, I might not actually truly understand it.
Nevertheless, I’ve naturally thought of countermeasures to this. My plan wasn’t to penetrate into the market of those big merchant houses, built on tradition and status and composed entirely of the noble class. It was to build a new niche for honey to avoid any sense of competition.
My hint for this came from the difference between raw goods and processed goods. For example, fruits are classified as a raw good. Meaning, they’re meant to be consumed as they are. But if we plan to process the goods and make juice or candy out of them, the same fruit enters a different price category. In this case, it’s close to the difference between wine and cooking wine. By the standards of the other world, honey here is priced like fine wine. And no matter how abundantly available resources were over there, fine wine wasn’t meant to be boiled down or used in a cocktail.
I tried to create a new market for honey meant to be used as a substitute to sugar for flavoring liquor, confections, and other such things. Of course, my target market wasn’t the noble class, but the richer commoners. The scale of that market is several times larger than the super high-class market of the nobles, and my expectations are to even further expand that market as well.
Compared to Dreyfan’s “gold honey,” Weinder’s “copper honey” can’t even be called silver. This was my so-called reverse branding strategy. This was also a means of making it more convincing that an unknown, smalltime company could sell honey at a tenth of the normal price.
Nevertheless, the goods our company began peddling out of nowhere were still high-class goods. I went through many hardships spreading our customer base, going practically door to door. And the moment that work began to bear fruit, the larger companies suddenly began obstructing us. Seventy percent of our customer base, and verging towards eighty, all turned down business with us at once.
Such was the influence of the Dreyfan Company, the representative of the guild which controlled the distribution of foodstuffs throughout the Kingdom. Apparently, they got their information on us from Berthold. Though I guess that’s to be expected of the company supporting so many others under their umbrella.
At that time, it seriously had me trembling. It happened immediately after I purchased the small shop I was renting in the capital to spread my roots.
Fortunately enough, the remaining customer base was enough to keep us out of the red in the Weinder Company’s venture out to the capital. Our profit ratio is just that large. However, it put us in a situation where further growth was out of reach.
Even after that, they went as far as paying a surcharge to interfere with already prepared orders, and even when they were finally delivered, we’ve had cases of jars suddenly being broken. We really went through a lot. I took great care not to break into their share of the market, and this was the treatment it brought me. Thinking about it from another perspective, if I didn’t take some sort of countermeasure, the reputation of my company would never recover.
Well, it was enlightening. Thanks to them, I got more than enough of an understanding of the way business here was conducted. It gave me a real sense of the merits and demerits of the trade system here in this world, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. In the sense of collecting information over the course of a single year in the capital about the way the guilds functioned, you could even say that it was efficient.
In other words, I got a sense of reality, and found the means to be able to change it. I became able to clearly picture how I could apply the knowledge and concepts in my head. In that sense, I could honestly thank them.
Well, going along the lines of the dilemma of innovation, my eventual plan was to overturn the entire market, including their super high-class market, so the Dreyfans were going to become an enemy either way.
In any case, as an extension to that little quarrel in the market, the Dreyfans’ heir picked a fight with me here in the Academy, though it really was just a fight between children. I did manage to claim some new customers, however, so we’ve been able to keep their obstructions under control, and this is what they resorted to.
This rich boy was probably hoping to keep me in check. The Dreyfans largely deal in enormous quantities of grain, as well as a variety of high-class goods. Honey is actually just a small portion of their business. Their primary goal in this quarrel is likely to keep face concerning the worth of their brand aimed at nobles.
However, there are limits. Going around the halls of the Academy, filled with potential future customers, claiming that my product was diluted halfway with water was going too far. Evaluating it based on traditions and social status is one thing. Doing so using its taste and depth of flavor is another. But making the false accusation that we were watering it down left me with no choice but to object.
After all, the responsibility a company has to their customers has nothing to do with whether they’re a big or small company. Moreover, they’re my precious customers that are dealing with me despite all the pressure this rich boy’s family is pouring on them. I couldn’t possibly let them down.
And since I refused to back down, this rich boy grew more irritated, and threatened to use his connections in the business world; such was his habit. And just as he did...
A classmate of ours who didn’t attend school all that often just happened to pass by. It would’ve been fine to ignore us, but apparently it pained her sixteen-year-old heart to hear what was going on. I suspected this all to be an act, though.