Strategy

Tokyo – The Cool Japan Fund, a fund mostly supported by Japanese taxpayers and linked to Japan’s government, will reportedly invest $2.18 million in a chain of U.S. green tea cafes. According to Reuters, the Cool Japan Fund will take a 49.9% stake in Green Tea World USA Inc.

Green Tea World plans to open its first tea café in California later in 2015. The company intends to open 50 stores in California cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose in the next decade. Beverages will sell for $3 to $4 each.

Aliso Viejo, Calif. -- Johnny Rockets recently signed the largest development deal in the brand's history, with a plan to open 100 restaurants in China, with the first scheduled to open in 2016.

The largest retailer of party supplies in the United States, Party City, has filed paperwork for an initial public offering of its shares.

The company, which sells party supplies, decorations and costumes, said it expects the offering of 21.9 million shares to be priced at between $15 and $17 per share.

Party City Holdco Inc. is expected to be valued at nearly $2 billion in its initial public offering, the first by a U.S. retailer this year.

Seattle - Nordstrom has implemented new Oracle Retail Merchandise Operations Management and Oracle Retail Store Inventory Management solutions to support its expansion in Canada. The retailer plans to roll out the latest releases of these Oracle Retail solutions companywide to support its Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack stores.

New York -- Prospects for stellar rent growth and low vacancy helped make San Francisco the top-ranked city, followed by New York, in Marcus & Millichap’s 2015 National Retail Index, an annual real estate ranking of 46 major U.S. markets. Rounding out the top five: San Jose (#3); Austin (#4) and San Diego (#5).

Recent completion of the $60 million power center Coastal North Town Center signaled the arrival of Myrtle Beach’s first Publix supermarket and Hobby Lobby store.

New York -- Watch out Teavana, Canada’s David’s Tea Inc. is looking to boost its U.S. presence. The Quebec-based chain has filed a registration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO in which it looks to raise a maximum of $75 million. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq with the ticker symbol "DTEA.”

Omnichannel solutions provider RichRelevance has hired a former WalmartLabs executive to serve as its chief product officer.

Mahesh Tyagarajan will be responsible for product strategy and management, engineering and cloud operation and infrastructure. The company also named microstrategy and business objects veteran John Dickson as vice president of client services, where he will drive the expansion of RichRelevance’s position as the dominant provider of large-scale omnichannel personalization deployments around the world.