The reason to be in Vietnam is shifting: less about making things cheaply, more about selling to a market that’s finally big enough to matter.
I help companies find out whether their product can actually survive in Vietnam — by getting into the market with you, not by mailing you a report. We order your competitors' products online to see how they really arrive. We sit in real kitchens. We meet store owners.
And when it's time to launch, my team runs it on the ground — company setup, licenses, the festival booth, the staff handing out samples.
For years, the reason to come to Vietnam was simple: make it here, cheaply. That's no longer the whole story.
Incomes are rising. A real middle class is forming, and it's spending: on food, on brands, on the kind of products that used to be export-only. The questions I get have shifted. A few years ago people asked how do I produce here cheaply? Now they ask how do I sell here, and who do I partner with to do it?
The opportunity now isn't just building a base in Vietnam. It's coming to this market to sell.
For small and mid-sized companies, and for founders willing to move before the crowd does, the next five to ten years are worth taking seriously.
The numbers behind this (income levels, growth rates, how Vietnam compares to neighbors like Thailand, and how to read the "middle-income trap") are covered in a separate article.
We've run booths at numerous Japan Festivals in Vietnam, and handled full booth operation — design, build, staffing, and run-of-show — at the Saigon Exhibition & Convention Center (SECC). Right now we're helping a cacao farm and a chocolate maker build a collaboration product. We have also worked with a Japanese sake & amazake brewery on winning shelf space in the Vietnamese market.
Launching in a new market is exciting, but the uncertainty is real — and in Vietnam it's specific. From everything I've seen working here, four things trip companies up before they even start.
Most market research ends in a slide deck. The problem is, you can't taste a slide deck, and your customer can't either.
So I do the research with you, in the market — in the stores, in real homes, in the actual buying moment. You see what I see — because the decision to commit your budget should be yours, made on what's real, not on my summary of it.
When the research points one way or another, I'll say it plainly — including when it says don't.
A clear "not yet, not like this" before you've spent the launch budget is one of the most valuable things I can give you.
— Shogo Harada, CEO, Linnoedge
Typical approach
How we work
Most research firms hand you a report and walk away. My team does the research and runs the launch — the same people, in market, from first visit to first sale. Here's what that looks like.
This is the part most firms skip. With you, we:
When the research says go, my team handles the entry end to end, so you're not stitching together five vendors in a country you don't operate in yet:
You don't get a report about the market.
You get the market, first-hand.
We don't advise from the outside. We've put our own capital in and stood on the floor. That's where judgement comes from that desk analysis can't produce — company setup, joint investment, and trade alike.
The first thing we did wasn't shipping product. It was forming a hypothesis: why would a Vietnamese household or a Vietnamese restaurant choose this brand at all?
What sells a product in Japan doesn't automatically travel. More often it doesn't. So we worked backwards from the moment a local restaurant or hotel would actually pour that glass, and designed the sales route and the trading scheme from there.
We walked it from the entry point through to the shelf ourselves. That's why, on the next entry, we can see the stumbling points before you hit them.
We co-invest in several restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City. Not consulting from the outside — our own cash is in, and when it loses money we lose it too.
Why go that far? Because from the outside you never really learn what a Vietnamese consumer's wallet feels like, or what makes local staff stay and what makes them leave. Once it's your own money, "this seems promising" stops being good enough.
There are things you only see under that pressure. That's the lens we bring to your entry too.
The first ask was "we want to hire engineers." But the real decision sat further upstream. Which skills, on which terms, is almost the same question as what kind of company culture you want to build in Vietnam. So we started by designing the hiring criteria.
The office location, the order in which work permits get processed, the accounting setup after incorporation — all of it hangs off that one decision. Split into separate errands and handed to separate specialists, you'd probably get a company registered. You wouldn't get a company that runs.
Six months after setup, the local members started making their own decisions. That's the day an entry succeeded — not the day the paperwork cleared.
More on building an IT development base →We export Vietnamese cacao beans to Japan and bring Vietnamese chocolate into the Japanese market. Negotiating directly with farms, quarantine and export paperwork, connecting with buyers in Japan — we've run the whole line by hand.
The hardest part isn't the documents or the quarantine. It's what you promise a farmer, and what you refuse to promise. A relationship held together by price alone goes to a different buyer next season. Trade textbooks don't cover that part.
Where trust breaks between a product crossing a border and that product reaching a shelf — having lived that once is what we bring to an entry project.
Fair question. Two things make it concrete, not a promise.
The worry
An offshore vendor that hands off and goes quiet
Something unusable arrives, or the team disappears before the project is done.
How we work
One team
The people who tell you whether the market works are the people who help you enter it.
Hands-on
I lead the work with my team, in the field — not a hand-off to a back office.
On the ground
Booths at numerous Japan Festivals and full operation at SECC — we've done the unglamorous parts that decide whether a launch lands.
We'll tell you when to stop. Success is your launch working, not our invoice.
Let me put the order first. When companies start with incorporation, they usually end up redoing it later. Here's the default I run.
Already incorporated and hitting a wall? We start from a later step. The order flexes to where you actually are.
Market-entry cost swings by an order of magnitude depending on how much you hand off. So I'll put both in writing — the numbers we can share, and why the rest can't be quoted until we scope it.
For reference, a market-entry engagement can spend its whole budget on upfront research and hand you a slide deck at the end. For the same spend, we'd rather use it to prove the product sells in-market than deliver a slide deck. Start with test sales and you get the market's answer before you spend on incorporation.
Honestly: if all you want is the cheapest possible registration, we're not the right fit — a registration-only firm will beat us on price. Where we help is when you're looking past setup to what comes after.
Bring the product and the market question.
I'll tell you what the market actually looks like.
Linnoedge is LINNOEDGE JOINT STOCK COMPANY (Enterprise Registration Certificate 0318272580), founded in 2024 and based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We work with companies in Japan and Southeast Asia, and we run market research and market entry from inside the Vietnamese market rather than from a desk.
That's exactly what a first session is for. Bring the question — I'll tell you what the market actually looks like, and whether it's worth your move.
I don't research the Vietnamese market from a desk — I live in it. I lead the work with my team, in real stores, real homes, and at the booth on launch day.
So I bring the session what a report can't: what I've actually seen work and fail when a product meets a Vietnamese shelf — including the times the honest answer was "not yet."
Based in Ho Chi Minh City. Working with companies entering Vietnam from Japan and beyond.