Swedish smoke cabins
The day is burned into his memory when Jacob Laurin went out for a late lunch and realised what it means to be a non-smoker in Tokyo. “I sat down at a table in a non-smoking area and waited 10 minutes for my food,” remembers Laurin. “But while I was waiting the no-smoking rule changed and I was suddenly surrounded by smokers.”
As Japan country manager of Swedish company Smoke Free Systems, Laurin believes his company holds the key to preventing such olfactory offences. In September 2008, Smoke Free Systems K.K. was established in Tokyo, setting up shop within the Swedish Embassy business offices. Along with Laurin, the company also brought in a demo version of its flagship product, a door-less smoking compartment. Instead of trapping smoke and smokers behind a closed door and walls, Smoke Free Systems’ cabins use the surrounding air to force the smoke through layers of filters before it disperses.
“The idea was to create a unit that was much better than a smoking room, meaning that it doesn’t smell when you go in and it doesn’t smell on your clothes when you come out,” says Laurin. “Maybe, most important of all, a place where you don’t shut smokers off. They are in the open so you can have communication between smokers and non-smokers … We tried to take away the smoke, not the smoker.”
Established 20 years ago in Sweden, Smoke Free Systems originally sold smoking rooms in Europe that were similar to the enclosed compartments common in Japan now. Ten years after the company launched, disappointment in its units and smoking rooms in general convinced the company to try its current approach. Today Smoke Free Systems in Europe has about 2,000 major customers and 5,000 of its cabins operating in 12 countries, the majority in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.
One of the keys to success in Europe was the company’s streamlined business model. Of about 120 people working for the company, only 20 are directly employed; the others are sales agents and service representatives under exclusive contract. Laurin’s goal is to expand the network in Japan in a similar way and prepare Tokyo as a headquarters for possible future expansion in Asia.
Market research on Asia spearheaded by the Swedish Trade Council concluded that Japan offered the best mix of factors favourable to Smoke Free Systems’ entry into the region.
“Japan has a very high smoker rate, but it’s not too high,” says the Swedish Trade Council’s product leader, Sonny Söderberg, whose latest figures on Japan put the percentage of male smokers over 20 years old at 40%. “You have a relatively high frequency of those who care for non-smokers and that tendency is getting stronger,” he explains. “It’s a smoker-friendly society with some care for non-smokers. I think that was one of the biggest merits.”
Among the difficulties, however, was trying to introduce a new product to a populace often sceptical of anything unfamiliar.
“I wasn’t sure the products would be accepted in the Japanese market,” says Tomonori Sato, recalling his first days as Smoke Free Systems’ sales account manager back in December 2008. But when Sato and his potential customers saw the cabins in action, those doubts were whisked away.
The open design of Smoke Free Systems’ cabins creates an airflow of up to 1,230 cubic meters per hour in the standard model, capturing and pushing any smoke through five layers of filters. Even while standing near or just within the cabin boundaries, a quick test of the model cabin set up at the Embassy confirms that nary a whiff of burning tobacco can be detected.
Designed primarily for offices, the SF6000, the main model currently being sold in Japan, takes about three square meters of floor space and stands over two meters tall. A small table in the centre has an ashtray receptacle for discarding cigarette ends and ash into a non-flammable bag housed in a support column underneath. A sensor in the roof of the cabin detects when a person enters and immediately powers up the fans, then downshifts and stays on standby mode if no movement is detected after 30 seconds. The ashtray also has suction, so an abandoned cigarette has its noxious fumes safely sucked away.
However, Laurin knows that even a superior product doesn’t guarantee success in Japan, particularly if it’s introduced just as the world economy goes into a tailspin. “One of the Swedish guys who’s been here a long time said, ‘Jacob, [business in Japan] is like swimming in syrup, but don’t stop and don’t give up.’ ”
Nevertheless, the company is determined to establish a foothold in Japan with an initial commitment of at least three to four years. Laurin concedes it has been a battle to gain traction in Japan, not made easier by a 40% scaling back of personnel and other expenses. But if all goes well this year, they plan to move out of the Embassy’s offices and into their own office, perhaps by summer’s end.
The company has 20 cabins installed in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area and 12 customers. Laurin and his sales staff confirm there are several other verbal agreements on deck, with the goal in 2010 to have 100 cabins in operation. The company installs the units, has a service contractor collect the ash and cigarette ends, and changes the filters every three months, under a monthly rental contract, signed typically for three-year periods. In Europe, satisfied customers have renewed their contracts at an 85% clip.
Laurin is convinced that success can be duplicated in Japan, as long as anti-smoking laws don’t become more restrictive – as they have, for example, in the United States. ”Smokers [end up] near the toilets or the archives, creating fire risks. We’ve seen it all.”