Team Spirit on Display at the 2025 Life Support Fair
Pointing toward a new destination in wellness

Alfresa Healthcare Corporation (AHC), which wholesales primarily over-the-counter drugs but also health foods, supplements and other self-medication products to drugstores and pharmacies, held the 2025 Life Support Fair (“Life Support” meaning to “support people’s lives”) in Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Trade Center Hamamatsucho-kan on February 20 and 21, 2025. With the theme of this year’s event being solutions for the societal challenge of the shrinking and aging population, the event was titled “Destination: Take off to a new place,” which signaled AHC’s commitment to a new value proposition, in which it connects communities with health and sets well-being as the final destination. The event, which was the most well-attended fair yet (a record-high number of over 1,800 visitors), was planned and run by the Consumer Decision Tree and Merchandising (CDT-MD) Dept. from AHC’s Solutions Headquarters. With a mission to deliver products to customers through retail sites, the CDT-MD Dept. has set the goal of customer-oriented demand-creation and value-creation and supports frontline sites with marketing. Members of the CDT-MD Dept. shared their experience in preparing for and running the event.

Raising the problems the industry faces and sharing and proposing new products, services, and information

The 2025 Life Support Fair was the 44th in the series. The annual Life Support Fair has become increasingly important to the OTC drug industry as a venue for sharing information about new products and services for addressing the challenges the industry faces. The first Life Support Fair was held half a century ago, when the main retail clients for OTC drug wholesalers in Japan were dedicated pharmacies. At that time, pharmacies faced a host of challenges: the rising threat from supermarkets (as alternative places for buying OTC drugs), price competition, longer operating hours, and greater consumer choice. Against this backdrop, the Life Support Fair was conceived as an opportunity for industry stakeholders to meet together and share news and ideas about new products that would help pharmacies retain customers amid these challenges. The Life Support Fair initially had a small venue and just a few hundred attendees. Over time, the event grew in scale in tandem with the growth of the industry. The 2025 fair was the biggest yet, with 189 corporate exhibitors and the total visitor number (over both days) topping 1,800.

Heading up the CDT-MD Dept.’s event team was Tomohiro Sasaki. Sasaki had envisaged the industry gathering as an opportunity for sparking innovation and for promoting a broader concept of wellness, as envisaged by AHC’s president, Makoto Nishida. “As President Nishida always says, we want to promote a broader concept of wellness,” Sasaki explained. “With Japan’s super-aged society, it has become increasingly important to support mental and physical wellness in the community.” Drawing on the experience of the project leaders for the past gatherings, Sasaki primed his project team to make the 2025 event one that would create new value and reinforce confidence in AHC’s brand values.

Overcoming Obstacles with Tight Teamwork

The 2025 event was to be the largest and most challenging Life Support Fair yet. As well as having the highest numbers of visitors and corporate exhibitors, the event was to feature new types of exhibits, including content showcasing how companies can turn intangible concepts into tangible products. The sheer scale of the event posed huge challenges for schedule management and staffing.

The task of managing the schedule fell upon Tatsuya Suzuki. “Since the previous Life Support Fairs had been on a much smaller scale, the scheduling process lacked the granularity required to track progress,” Suzuki recalled. “Another issue was that the event would feature new kinds of exhibition content. I felt daunted by the challenge and started reaching for ideas.” Undeterred, Suzuki used visualization techniques to communicate the various time blocks and processes and conferred with contractors to identify processes that could be streamlined. He also identified processes that could be standardized and incorporated into a manual to reduce dependence on a single key employee. In this way, Suzuki lay the groundwork to ensure smooth running in the next fiscal year.

The member in charge of overall event management was Madoka Kasagawa. The bottleneck Kasagawa faced was staffing: Too few company insiders were available to volunteer, partly because the event clashed with the relocation of AHC’s head office and its distribution center in Kyushu. However, Kasagawa decided to use this problem as a springboard for developing an innovative small-team approach. Under her leadership, the team members started thinking about how they could use their limited resources to greatest effect. Day after day, they used a floorplan of the venue to pinpoint where staff should be deployed to guide visitors along flow lines, and brainstormed ideas such as using a QR code to ensure smooth access to the venue. “Referring to the floorplan, we ran simulation after simulation until we were confident that we could guide visitors in smoothly and create an exciting visitor experience,” shared Kasagawa, brimming with pride.

Trying Out New Ideas

In what was for her a first, Natsumi Shimoyama was in charge of coordinating with the representatives of the 189 corporate exhibitors. Shimoyama shared the challenge she faced. “I had to interview the exhibitors about their preferences and then work out how best to allot exhibition space,” This challenge was also a great opportunity. “By asking the exhibitors directly about their vision and heritage, I learned a lot about the value of wellness products and services.” Shimoyama particularly wanted to help the message about feminine care, or femcare, to resonate with visitors and to encourage larger numbers of femcare professionals known as “femcare supporters.” To that end, she managed a booth for Joseken, an organization devoted to women’s wellness, to put community-based midwives in contact with drugstores and pharmacies. During the event, she recruited femcare supporters, offered companies an opportunity to hear advice from a midwife about women’s wellness needs, and advocated for opportunities to increase the number of femcare supporters in companies and communities.

Yuichiro Arakawa was involved in two booths. One was for Kenko Sabo (“wellness café”), a community space for young and old run in a university-industry-government collaboration between Teikyo Heisei University; Nakano-ku, Tokyo; and the Japan Association of Healthcare Initiative. The other booth, called the “well-being solutions corner,” showcased ideas for drugstores to differentiate themselves from competitors in the future. The booth for Kenko Sabo, which made its debut at the Life Support Fair, was run in collaboration with Teikyo Heisei University’s Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences. The booth was manned by some of the faculty’s undergraduates. These budding pharmacists and dieticians let visitors sample Kenko Sabo’s healthy beverages and informed them about the health benefits. Arakawa’s responsibilities involved coordinating closely with the undergraduates and other people involved, a task he poured himself into…

The process of setting up the booth involved a huge amount of back-and-forth communication, creating stress for the booth-installation contractors. To address the problem, I identified each workflow to get an overall view of all the processes and then consolidated onto a cloud platform the vast array of datasets, including all the textual information, videos, and floorplans needed to install the booths. In this way, I vastly reduced the number of processes. Always looking for ways to improve, I kept an eye out for improvements we could make in successive events.

Kazutami Tsuge and Yukihiro Toyota helped run the event and guide visitors. They also served as MCs and instructors.

Tsuge collaborated with private-sector weather forecaster WEATHERMAP Co., Ltd. in presenting content about preventing and addressing the adverse health effects of climate change. In relation to the same theme, he emceed at a lecture by meteorologist Masamitsu Morita about weather and healthcare. Tsuge, with his soft-spoken voice, also moderated at a Joseken seminar. The 2025 event was Tsuge’s fourth Life Support Fair, but it marked his debut as an MC. “In retrospect, the preparations were more laborious than the event operation,” Tsuge reminisced. “Seeing it as a reskilling opportunity, I went to speaking classes and did everything I could to prepare myself for the big day.” Alongside this, Tsuge managed a booth displaying panels about proactive health forecasting. He had to prepare the panel content by himself and act as the booth’s sole host. In his joint roles as MC and booth host, he proved his versatility.

“I always keep my antenna up for the next new thing.” These were the words of Yukihiro Toyota, the CDT-MD Dept.’s only member stationed in Osaka. At the event, Toyota was stationed at a booth showcasing solutions for attracting customers into stores. The booth included examples of drugstores organizing health screening events. Toyota introduced these best-practice examples and gave pointers on running such events, drawing on his experience as manager at front-line sales branch. The content impressed visitors, who said they gained detailed insights into how to run health screening events.

Sure, Give it a Go!

Every new initiative undertaken at the event began with CDT-MD Dept. leader, Makoto Egawa, responding to a member’s idea with the words, “Sure, give it a go!” Egawa respects his highly engaged team and is always ready to hear new ideas. Trusting that his team would know how best to satisfy visitors and exhibitors, he gave members plenty of opportunities to brainstorm solutions for each problem. His faith was rewarded: “Because the process required members to dig deep for ideas, we ended up with highly creative solutions,” Egawa testified.

One of the problems was how to ensure the large number of visitors would have a stress-free experience. The members rearranged the workflows used in previous years’ fairs, streamlining the booth installation process and ultimately shortening the event preparation time. This process helped foster an ownership mindset, in which the members felt fully invested in making their ideas a success.

When in Doubt, Check the Credo Flashcards

* The flashcards describe the guiding credos, as defined by the members themselves, and as such foster both personal growth and team spirit.

Members of the CDT-MD Dept. keep flashcards outlining the unit’s credos. The members thought up the content for each flashcard themselves. In times of doubt or confusion, members pull out the flashcards to remind themselves of the credos that guide them to their goals. “The credo flashcards have transformed members’ attitudes,” Egawa explains. “The whole team now engages in goal-oriented behavior autonomously.”

Buoyed by Success, the Team Looks Ahead

Sasaki shared his relief at the event’s success, mentioning that visitor numbers, at 1,807, had far exceeded expectations and had set a new record, while the number of corporate exhibitors had hit a record too, at 189. “We made the event a success and passed the baton on to the sales team.” Sasaki added that the success was not down to any one individual but was the result of a united team effort, with members supporting one another in pursuit of a common goal. “When the task is too big for one person, you accomplish the task together as a team—that’s what team play is all about.”

AHC is committed to developing preventive healthcare solutions, an endeavor that aligns with Alfresa Group’s long-term goal of extending healthy life expectancy (one of the items of the social value set out in Alfresa Holdings Corporation’s medium- to long-term vision). Buoyed by the success of the 2025 Life Support Fair, the CDT-MD Dept. members feel eager to take on the next big challenge in pursuit of this goal. With the next Life Support Fair scheduled for February 2026, the members prepare to take their next steps on the road to their destination of supporting wellness.

Notice: This document is a translation of the original Japanese document and is for reference purposes only. In the event of any discrepancy between this translated document and the original Japanese document, the latter shall prevail.