Challenge

Morisawa Inc. is Japan’s leading digital font producer. Since 2005, Morisawa has offered the MORISAWA PASSPORT, a font licencing product, but in 2022 it released Morisawa Fonts as a new cloud-based font subscription service. With this service, a single account can access over 1,500 fonts on up to two PCs, while a web-based process makes continuous use easy.

"Changes have become necessary to how font services operate due to the increase in working remotely and other factors. We have begun to offer a cloud-based service so users can engage in a style of work that isn't constrained by location, where users conduct account and contract management procedures online with licences that aren't limited by the device," said Takafumi Omuro, senior manager of system development at Morisawa.

To make Morisawa Fonts a reality, Morisawa began by restructuring the company to promote development.

"In the past, we struggled to undertake challenging projects using a contract-based, waterfall methodology. So we built a system to push development forward faster by leveraging SaaS products. We were initially interested in Stripe as a payments platform that could be rapidly implemented, and decided to give it a try," said Omuro.

Solution

Having faced some challenges in previous development experiences, Morisawa wanted a quick, trusted solution that would be able to handle its payment needs. The company decided to turn to Stripe for its new payment solution.

"With domestic payment companies, modules were delivered on physical media and could take two weeks to arrive, which hindered rapid development. We also faced difficulties when dealing with payment services established overseas, such as lacking documentation in English or needing a local presence to facilitate development. Stripe's solutions are developer-friendly, which makes such a difference in development lead times," said Omuro.

Since most of Morisawa's fonts are used by other companies, it was also important for Morisawa to offer a variety of payment methods for its customers, such as bank transfers. With Stripe, Morisawa was able to implement the functionality to initiate bank transfers before going live with its payment solution, providing its customers with the ability to pay their preferred way they preferred from the outset.

Results

Stripe Billing has facilitated the management of Morisawa Font subscriptions. Various price settings, such as coupon discounts and volume discounts, can be implemented without any additional code. With Stripe Elements, Morisawa is able to customise its checkout page. Additionally, since credit card information can be stored through Stripe, Morisawa does not need to worry about managing confidential information. Additionally, the Stripe-powered payment system makes it possible to make payments 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, without any interruptions.

Since Morisawa has local subsidiaries in the US, Taiwan, and South Korea, Stripe is able to handle payments in local currencies, such as US dollars, and handles international credit cards, which allows Morisawa to focus on future global expansion.

"Stripe is an important choice in the future global expansion of Morisawa Fonts," said Omuro.

By shortening development lead times, Morisawa has been able to concentrate on enhancing the customer experience. Additionally, implementing Stripe has alleviated some of the burden on the accounting department, including providing the Morisawa team with detailed reporting and visibility into all customer transactions.

"Sales and accounts receivables used to be manually processed, but now Stripe manages it automatically. We're able to quickly deal with all types of situations, and the detailed reports are very helpful for financial management," said Daisuke Yamada, an expert in the service integration and development department at Morisawa.