Creema
👤 Kotaro Marubayashi (Ex-pro musician (Keio) who watched gifted artists go broke. He built Creema so makers get paid — and still directs its curation.)🌐 site
A pro musician who watched talent go unpaid built a handmade market, then won on curation and a live festival.
Will it work? · our read
Community moat. But it's a niche, mature market with no verified size, GMV fell 4% this year, and operating profit dropped 59% as it spends to defend share against richer rival GMO's minne.
01How the money moves
Makers list handmade goods free
→
Buyers discover via curation, features & the festival
→
Creema takes 11% of every sale
02The numbers
¥14.87B
annual GMV, -4% YoY
TDnet
11%
take rate
co. IR
¥42M
op. profit, -59%
co. IR
GMV is about $99M; net sales ¥2.54B. Margins stay thin by design as it invests to hold share. Creema IR
Net sales ¥2.54B (about $17M), yr to Feb 2026; GMV ¥14.87B (about $99M), down 4% YoY.
🔒
The facts are free. The judgment is for members.
You've seen how the money moves, the numbers, and every source — free, on all 365 cases, always. Members get the part you can't look up: why it won · where the moat really is · how it dies · how it beats its rivals — plus the 🚀 launchpad prompt that turns any case into a plan for your business.
Sources stay public, always · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
Creema FY results (TDnet) — net sales ¥2.535B, GMV ¥14.87B (-4%), op. profit ¥42M, yr to Feb 2026.Handmade Park: minne vs Creema vs iichi — take rates, minne's ¥12.9B FY2023 transaction volume.The Bridge: Creema files for IPO (2020) — C2C handmade model and figures.Dentsu Web: interview with founder Kotaro Marubayashi — ex-musician origin and mission.Creema press release: HandMade In Japan Fes' 2026 (PR TIMES) — Japan's largest creator festival, about 3,000 creators, Tokyo Big Sight.
Revenue is first-party: consolidated net sales of ¥2.535B for the year to Feb 28, 2026, from Creema's financial results filing (TDnet). The about $17M and about $99M-GMV figures are my conversion at about ¥150/$. GMV of ¥14.87B (96% of the prior year, i.e. down about 4%) and the 59% drop in operating profit are both from that same TDnet filing; Creema's own IR page confirms net sales and operating profit but does not carry a GMV figure itself. minne's ¥12.9B GMV is fiscal-2023 transaction volume from a secondary handmade-market guide, not GMO's own filing, and is itself down 14.4% YoY — so the Creema and minne bars are not from the same fiscal year. I found no independent source for a total Japan handmade-platform market size, so I removed that figure rather than sum two platforms' GMV and call it TAM. Take-rate comparisons come from the same secondary guide. Exact registered-creator count isn't consistently disclosed, so I cite the disclosed 16M+ listed items instead. The claim that Creema 'chose a festival over ad spend' is [our read]: the festival and the GMV lead are documented facts; the causal link is my inference. No drama was invented. We never score you.