Entrepreneur Association of Tokyo
"The Florist and his Blooming Business in Japan"

What would a florist know about being an entrepreneur? The answer is plenty if that florist is Nicolai Bergmann, the man behind the hugely successful ‘Nicolai Bergmann Flower and Design’ brand. On July 3 at The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, one of Japan’s most recognizable foreign artists spoke to EA members about his career and establishing himself as one of the most innovative florists in Japan.

From a flower family
By way of introduction Nicolai began by talking of his childhood visiting flower festivals across Europe with his father, himself the owner of a flower business. After a less than spectacular time in school, by his own admission “getting probably the worst scores in my class,” and unsuccessful work experience placements that took in one day at a computer company and a week shoeing horses, Nicolai tried working in a flower shop, an experience that made an instant impact on the then 16-year-old and which led him toward the business with which he has made his name. “I decided immediately, that was what I was going to do – I was going to work in a flower shop,” Nicolai said.

The decision led him to three years of flower school, after which he decided that he wanted to open his own shop – a choice not wholly welcomed by his father. As a compromise, Nicolai’s father told him that he knew some people in the flower business in Japan and suggested he go work with them to broaden his horizons. As Nicolai explained, the decision was easy. “I said ‘why not?’ let’s go to Japan.” The rest as they say is history and a 20-year-old Nicolai flew to Japan.

Learning the trade and the language in Kawagoe
After three weeks “of putting the same little plants in the soil and not seeing anything” working at a greenhouse in the depths of Saitama and then a month and a half working at a small flower shop in Kawagoe, Nicolai explained that he moved down the road to Hama, also in Kawagoe, the flower shop where he would make his name and get his first taste of arranging flowers for weddings in Tokyo, which he went on to describe as “an extremely big business” in Japan.

After his three month visa expired Nicolai was forced to head back to Denmark where he worked in a flower shop for nine months but “couldn’t forget all the different things that happened in Japan.” He got back in touch with Hama and started working for them again in Kawagoe spending time going in and out of Japan on tourist visa’s before finally getting an artist visa in 1998 on the back of a portfolio of his work and his experience of entering a variety of flower competitions.
His time living and working in Kawagoe gave him the opportunity to learn Japanese very quickly and gave him valuable insight into the Japanese mindset, but after a couple of years in Saitama, Nicolai was ready for a new challenge.

Success with Hama and going it alone
With Hama, Nicolai opened a shop in Aoyama 3-chome in 2000 that initially struggled to attract business and then convinced his boss to let him set up another flower shop in a dilapidated property he had found on Koto-dori in 2001. With several of his designs attracting media attention and the Koto-dori shop having firmly established itself after only six months of business, more shops, two of which carried his name, followed in Yurakacho, Akasaka, and Roppongi Hill before 2003.

After eight years of “fantastic experiences” working with Hama, during which time he had become a director of the company, Nicolai said he felt his old dream of opening his own flower shop coming back. Nicolai raised enough money to buy the two “Nicolai Bergmann Flower and Design” stores in Roppongi Hills and Yurakacho from Hama in March 2005 and has since seen his workforce increase from seven to 30 staff, with profits taking a similar upward turn.

Turning adversity into a positive and Nicolai’s keyword
Although success came quickly for Nicolai, he pointed out during the seminar that life for a non-Japanese entrepreneur in Japan throws up its own unique challenges. “I had so many troubles living in Japan, for one thing having to work 15 hours a day in a Japanese company with nobody speaking English at all,” he said. “I had to adjust to so many things, but it has been such a fantastic experience for me and a tool to use for where I am today.”

In keeping with the entrepreneurial spirit, Nicolai went on to reveal his never-say-die outlook. “My keyword during the period working up to those four shops in 2003 was ‘gamman suru’, to hold on as long as you can because something is going to happen in the end,” he said. “Even when I thought can it be any worse something would happen all the time.”

The importance of self-promotion
From appearing in countless magazines to having the Prince of Denmark reopen Nicolai’s Roppongi Hills shop, Nicolai has shown a natural aptitude for creating a buzz.
And he places a lot of importance on making the Nicolai Bergmann brand as well-known as possible. “I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot of collaborations with a lot of companies,” Nicolai said of his work that has seen him put his face on Coca Cola vending machines, design watches for Lukia and even work on a Honda TV commercial. “And why have I done all these things?” The answer he says is PR and the establishment of the Nicolai Bergmann brand.

“I have been in more than 200 magazines and I’ve never paid more than one yen for it for PR, but used all these magazines and TV appearances to promote myself as a flower designer and a flower brand in Japan and in Tokyo,” he said, adding that he also spends a lot of time travelling the country giving demonstrations to increase his brand recognition.

Q and A
Which accounting firm helped you establish your business?
At that time it was called Strata Works, it’s not called Strata Works anymore, but the key person in this business is actually sitting just behind there, if he could just raise his hand. He’s now moving on and I’m sure that he can tell you much more about the fantastic service they can provide.
Very helpful, by the way, for someone like me who knows absolutely nothing about Japanese laws and what’s going on and so forth, so they were very helpful.

How did you expand so quickly?
It’s step-by-step, after I worked down in the shop in Yurakacho, I got into the Four Seasons Hotel, not the Chinzan-so one, but the small one down by Tokyo Station. When you get into a hotel like this you have events all the time and they bring in all the good names and so I can say ‘Hello, I’m the hotel florist, my name is Nicolai Bergmann, I have a shop down in Yurakacho and one in Roppongi Hills, I’m the one that’s doing your flowers.’ You meet so many names and in these groups of people there is usually one chain that owns so many of the same companies so if you get in the right way you can really get introduced to a lot of people that way if you provide the right product and I managed somehow to do that.

Being a florist I am sure you enjoy working alone, how have you adjusted to managing a team of 30?
I’m still working on that. Having 30 employees is quite a headache. I think we spend half our time at home talking about that. Out of the 30 people I have, I have a handful of very good people who have been with me since the beginning, even before I took the company over in 2005. They are the key strings in the shops. I have one working with me in the office; I have one in each shop. They are the few people I am pulling on to teach all the others. I take all my staff into free flower lessons, which is also rare for being a company in Japan as a lot of Japanese flower shops would charge their own staff for flower school.

I would not say I have succeeded 100 percent because there is always something I am not satisfied with because doing what I’m doing, if possible, I would like to do everything myself, but I can’t do that because everything I sell is something that I build up from the beginning. There is a concept - that is why I can control it. It’s not like we do all sorts of flowers. I have made like 20 products which can be combined in many, many ways. The staff are working with these guidelines to make the products. That’s the way I can keep a little bit of control.