When Emotion Leads, Numbers Recede
When you talk about Heralbony, many people's eyes light up. It develops the art of artists with intellectual disabilities like a luxury brand, posing a question to society with the tagline "Unleash your brilliance." Since its 2018 founding it has raised funds across multiple rounds, including a January 2025 round led by WiL (amount undisclosed); stacking up publicly reported figures suggests cumulative fundraising in the range of roughly ¥900 million, and media exposure is unceasing. It is a company often described as a success model for the era of the empathy economy.
Yet in the impact-management maturity assessment that Impact Management Review independently conducted, Heralbony's "Proof (measurement) score" was 2.5 and its "Transparency (disclosure) score" was also 2.5 — among the lowest of the twelve domestic and international companies we evaluated this time. Its overall level is Level 3 (managed and operated), but limited to the lens of impact measurement, it remains at Level 2.
This is not a criticism but a question. Why is it that a company with such a clear will toward social change cannot — or has not — turned its impact into numbers?
What Heralbony Is Trying to Change
Let us lay out the company's business. Heralbony contracts with intellectually disabled artists affiliated with welfare facilities and develops their works into apparel, miscellaneous goods, interiors, and corporate collaborations — calling itself a "welfare experiment unit." It is not merely an art business but a model that seeks to achieve both the economic independence of people with disabilities and their social inclusion at once.
Its Theory of Change is explicit. Under the vision of "contributing to the development of a culture of distinctive brilliance," it aims to dismantle social prejudice toward disability through revenue-sharing license contracts with welfare facilities, thorough crediting of artists, and D&I consulting for companies. Read as a logic model, the chain of activity → output → outcome can, more or less, be drawn.
The problem, however, is whether that outcome is being measured.
The Three "Invisible" Numbers
After a comprehensive review of Heralbony's public information, press releases, and interview articles at present, the following three figures cannot be found.
First, the reality of artists' compensation (partially disclosed). The company pays license fees to welfare facilities, which distribute to the artists. Forbes JAPAN (December 2025) reported that aggregate artist compensation had grown "22-fold over four years" and that "some artists now earn several million yen a year and file tax returns," so aggregate-level results are partly public. However, the distribution rate per facility, the average compensation per artist, and the outline of contract terms with facilities remain undisclosed. The broad claim that "artists earn compensation" is externally corroborated, but verifying the fairness of that distribution case by case remains difficult.
Second, the economic benefit to partner facilities. According to public information, as of December 2025 the company had roughly 75 contracted facilities (69 domestic, 6 overseas, per its own disclosure) — short of the "more than 100" figure. In its relationships with these facilities, there is no data showing how much revenue contribution exists at the facility level. The depth of the relationship and the scale of revenue surely differ by facility, yet not even aggregate figures are disclosed.
Third, beneficiaries' changes in life. This is the most essential question. Did the income of the artists contracted with Heralbony increase? Did their opportunities for social participation expand? Was there any change in their self-efficacy? Such outcome indicators exist in none of the published materials.
Measured against the framework of the Impact Management Project (IMP) advocated by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), what Heralbony grasps and discloses is mainly outputs (number of works, number of collaborations, media exposure); it does not reach the tiers of outcome (change in beneficiaries) and impact (change in society as a whole).
Why Can't It Measure? Three Hypotheses
Several structural factors can be considered behind this "blank in visibility."
Hypothesis 1: A mismatch between measurement cost and business scale.
Impact measurement, especially when it involves beneficiary surveys, requires considerable cost and expertise. For a startup in a growth phase, institutionalizing business development and impact measurement in parallel is realistically difficult. As of 2023, media reports put Heralbony's full-time headcount in the several dozens (up-to-date figures could not be confirmed from public sources at the time of writing). Even accounting for likely growth since then, a fast-growing startup's resources for building an IMM framework tend to remain limited.
Hypothesis 2: Measurement difficulty created by the indirect structure.
Heralbony has no direct employment relationship with the artists. Revenue is distributed through facilities. This indirect structure reflects the institutional reality of the welfare field (facilities being the agents of support), but it simultaneously complicates the collection of outcome data. Designing who measures what about whom is difficult, and the cooperation of the facilities is also required.
Hypothesis 3: "Emotion" has become a substitute for impact measurement.
This is the most deep-rooted hypothesis. Heralbony's business model works by winning the empathy of consumers, companies, and media through the beauty of the works and the power of the story. When "emotion" has stronger appeal in the market than "numbers," the priority of investing in impact measurement relatively declines for management. If you can grow without measuring, the motivation to measure is weak.
The Risk That "Unspoken Numbers" Reveal
Leaving this problem alone as "a transitional phase peculiar to startups" is dangerous for several reasons.
First, the gap with the expectations of investors and partner companies. Heralbony has received funds from impact investors, and many of its corporate collaborations are with large companies that expect the achievement of D&I goals. Sooner or later, these stakeholders will begin to demand outcome data. A phase will come when "moving testimonials" alone cannot fulfill accountability.
Next, the question of the business model's sustainability. As long as Heralbony espouses a "fair relationship with welfare facilities," it has an obligation to show the grounds for that fairness. A state in which the proposition of appropriate compensation to artists cannot be verified from the outside could someday become a problem. More broadly in the welfare sector, commentators have at times observed that businesses lacking transparency in how proceeds are distributed can unintentionally end up shortchanging the very people they aim to support. We are not aware of any confirmed wrongdoing at Heralbony specifically, but this is precisely why proactive disclosure serves as a preventive safeguard for trust.
And the risk of impact washing. Advocating social change without measuring creates, even unintentionally, the ground for criticism as "impact washing." Especially for corporate partners under an increasingly strict ESG gaze, a lack of disclosure is beginning to appear as a risk factor.
What the Comparison Reveals — The Gap with Sakanotochu
As a fellow domestic startup, the comparison with Sakanotochu is instructive. Sakanotochu's Proof score is 4.5 and its Transparency score is 4.0 — top-tier among this round's twelve companies (for details, see our earlier article, "Why Sakanotochu Became the Only Company in Japan to Reach Level 4").
The core of what Sakanotochu achieves is that it continuously collects three outcomes — reduction in pesticide use, biodiversity indicators, and improvement in farmers' take-home pay — in a form integrated with business operations. Measurement has become not "work for producing reports" but "a tool used in business decision-making."
Is it cruel to ask the same of Heralbony? No, we do not think so. Changes in artists' income, improvement in welfare facilities' revenue, and artists' well-being are all measurable indicators. What is difficult is the will, not the technology.
How to Face "What Cannot Be Measured"
In fairness, it should be added that part of what Heralbony is trying to measure is indeed hard to quantify. The outcome of "dismantling social prejudice toward disability" is a long-term, wide-area change, and it is methodologically difficult for a single company to attribute it in a single year.
But this is no reason to give up on outcome measurement. In international practice of impact measurement, solutions such as "proxy indicators," "clarifying the scope of theoretical contribution," and "long-term outcome frameworks" have been developed for such difficulties. Impact-leading companies in the West, precisely because measurement is difficult, carefully disclose their methodology and present data after acknowledging the limits.
Not hiding what cannot be measured, but disclosing the limits of measurement and its premises — that is the essence of raising the Transparency score. What Heralbony lacks may be less the numbers themselves than the honest disclosure of "what is not being measured, and why."
Toward the Next Question of Growth
Heralbony is clearly in a growth stage now. Expanding sales, accelerating hiring, signs of overseas expansion — there is no doubt it functions as a business. That is precisely why now is the time to pose this question.
The maturity of impact management is often questioned only after a crisis arrives. Investors change, partners reconsider, media report critically — and at that moment, "emotion" will not serve as a breakwater.
If Heralbony raises the words "unleash your brilliance" as its banner, we hope it will unleash brilliance in impact measurement too: becoming a company that, in the field of welfare × art, defines outcomes more carefully than anyone and discloses more honestly than anyone. That would not contradict the vision the company envisions — rather, it would be its inevitable evolution.
Measurement is not criticism. Measurement is the language of trust. And what Heralbony seeks from society is, ultimately, the renewal of trust, is it not?
Appendix: Maturity Assessment Scores (Heralbony)
These scores are based on Impact Management Review's proprietary assessment framework. For details, see "What Is the Impact-Management Maturity Assessment?"
