DMM.水 (DMM Water)

» see dmm.com/water/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

DMM.com rented out water coolers. The company described itself in 2011 as a general entertainment site built on mail order and video streaming, and in Japan it was and still is known first for adult video, not for anything involving plumbing. On 13 April 2011 it opened DMM.水, a subscription that delivered Mount Fuji spring water to your door and lent you the dispenser for free.

Look at the launch date again. The Tohoku earthquake hit on 11 March 2011, Fukushima Daiichi followed, and Tokyo spent that spring reading iodine figures for its tap water while bottled water went missing from shelves. DMM.水 launched 33 days after the earthquake, and its product page carried a line stating that radiation had not been detected in the source water or in the product. I cannot find any source where DMM explains the launch in those terms, so I am not going to put the motive in their mouth. The date and the disclaimer are both just on the record.

The commercial shape was unusual in one specific way: the hardware was free and the water was not. DMM took no rental fee for the server and no charge for delivery. What you bought was water, at 4,620 yen including tax for four seven liter packs, which the product page itself worked out to 82.5 yen per 500 milliliters.

New applications had already stopped by October 2014. The service ended on 1 September 2015, and DMM's own notice said so in the past tense, carrying the standard Japanese business formula apologizing for its own convenience and attaching no reason at all.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually cost ~

The free server came with exit terms. Swapping your dispenser inside the first year cost 5,250 yen, and canceling inside the first year cost 5,250 yen as a collection charge. If you canceled and then did not return the server within 30 days, the bill was 31,500 yen.

You also could not order one pack. Four was the minimum, and at seven liters each that is 28 liters of water arriving at an apartment door in a single delivery.

~ the water ~

The brand was プレミアムフジ, Premium Fuji. DMM's pages put the source at 1,000 meters of altitude and 273 meters underground, at what they called the limit of the developable area on the mountain, and described it as unheated natural water filled at a plant on Fuji itself under a Yamanashi prefectural permit. Unheated filling is a real regulatory category in Japan and the permit is a legal requirement.

The packaging carried the other engineering claim. Water came in seven liter aseptic airless soft packs weighing 53 grams empty, built to collapse as they drained so that no air got in and nothing needed collecting afterward.

~ the diversification years ~

DMM.水 was not alone in there. The same stretch of the company's history produced a study abroad agency, and it produced a shaved ice line that was an OEM job from the confectioner Futaba Foods. Reading the register of DMM's dead services now is like reading a list of things somebody once thought a website could also be.

A water cooler subscription is domestic in the plainest sense of the word, because somebody has to physically haul it up to a specific apartment, and that is the kind of service that does not export even when the company behind it does. The notice page outlived the product by at least three years, and that is why the date can be pinned down at all.

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