Our feature series of interviews with Shopify merchants. Kakimori is a stationery brand that helps people rediscover the value of "writing." Its worldview and store design are alive with a distinctive perspective that refuses to be bound by the conventions of the stationery industry.
In this interview, we sat down for an in-depth conversation with Takuma Hirose, CEO of Hotaka Co., Ltd., which runs Kakimori — from the background of its founding, to how it uses EC today, to its challenge of cross-border expansion.
(Hotaka Co., Ltd. CEO Takuma Hirose. Photo by Miki Chujo)
The Failure of a Web Shop We Launched Just to "Give It a Try"
—— Hirose-san, thank you for joining us today. Could you first walk us through the path that led to Kakimori as it is today?
Hirose-san My grandfather originally ran a stationery store in Takasaki, Gunma, and I'm the third generation. At the time, I was working at a foreign-owned medical device manufacturer, while my father ran the family business. Then, the company I worked for ended up acquiring Hotaka Co., Ltd., a stationery and office supplies retailer in Tokyo, and I was asked to join. I also had a desire to leave my previous job, so I joined somewhat casually — that's how it started. I was 26 at the time.
Back then, the company's business model was door-to-door style sales to government offices — sales reps would visit every day, take orders, and process everything through paper slips. I sensed almost immediately that this wasn't going to work.
Services like Askul and Tanomail, which let you order online or through catalogs, spread explosively, and it dramatically transformed the entire industry. Most purchasing shifted over to the web or catalog mail-order, and the traditional three-tier distribution model of manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer collapsed almost overnight. We tried to adapt to that shift, but we just couldn't keep up in time. The average age within the company was already over 50, and even though we tried everything we could, we simply couldn't turn around the performance of the company we'd acquired — that was how the first two to three years went.
So I thought maybe BtoC still had a chance, and launched an online shop called "Stationery Station" — a name that, looking back now, was pretty embarrassingly uncool (laughs). But that ended in a huge failure too.
—— What was behind the online shop's failure?
Hirose-san The timing of entering BtoC wasn't bad, but there was absolutely no originality to it. The online shop itself was something I started on a whim with the one young staff member we had, saying "let's just try it" — and everything about it was half-baked. To avoid inventory risk, we didn't hold any stock ourselves; we'd just repost product photos straight from some catalog and only source the item once an order came in. It was a site that just lined up products you could get anywhere — there was no way it was going to sell.
Someone told us, "Pay 300,000 yen for SEO and you're guaranteed to rank at the top," and I actually believed it. I have some bitter memories of getting fooled again and again like that, pouring more and more money down the drain. Our sales back then were something like 3,000 yen a month.
—— That's hard to imagine, given the worldview Kakimori has today.
Hirose-san Looking back, I had absolutely no sense of "what do I want to sell" or "what value do I want to provide." It was really just the naive idea that "if we just put it on the web, it'll somehow work out." The web shop ended up shutting down completely after about six months.
Turning Toward Value That Can't Be Delivered Online
Hirose-san That's where I made the big pivot toward building a store focused specifically on what you might call "the joy of writing," and competing in the physical, real-world space.
BtoB had always been tough, and BtoC had started almost as a side project, so neither was working. Because of that, I decided that if I was going to try again, I'd do something that couldn't be done online.
I personally believe that anything that can be replaced digitally should be digitized as quickly as possible — but even so, there's value that survives that shift, and the value of "writing by hand" was something I wanted to cherish. That's true of letters, and in my own case, I'd always placed real importance on writing out ideas by hand, both during my university years and after I started working. I thought it would be wonderful if there were a stationery shop devoted specifically to that act of writing.
I was still in my twenties at the time, so I wanted a shop that matched my own sensibilities from that period of life. Places like specialty pen shops, with glass display cases and people in suits chatting while testing fountain pens — that kind of formal, high-barrier atmosphere never really appealed to me.
Could I create a shop that focused more on the joy of writing itself? That question is what led to the start of Kakimori.
(The Kakimori store in Kuramae)
Hirose-san Kakimori opened in 2010, and in the beginning it was entirely analog. We were really behind on social media too — I think we didn't start until around 2016. We may have been a little earlier on Twitter (now X), but we were quite late to Instagram. We did put real care into our website, working closely with an outside art director, but I'll admit we were a company that was weak on EC and web marketing.
That said, thankfully, the store started getting a lot of press coverage, and customers kept increasing through those more analog media channels. As a result, the physical store started to hit capacity, and we began hearing more and more requests like, "I wish I could make repeat purchases online."
That's finally what led us to launch our EC site on Shopify in 2018.
2018: The Decision to Adopt Shopify in Its Early Days — Restarting Our EC Effort
—— Back in 2018, Shopify wasn't nearly as well known as it is now. You made that choice at quite an early stage.
Hirose-san Kakimori had been doing events in places like Taiwan since 2015 and handling inbound tourist demand, so we'd been thinking that we eventually wanted to try cross-border EC. We were also working on our branding, and had a real intention to build a proper EC site, so even though platforms like BASE and STORES existed at the time, we chose Shopify.
I think choosing Shopify at that point in time really paid off.
Shopify was already well known in North America, but awareness in Japan was still quite low, so people from Shopify itself actually took notice of Kakimori and wrote articles about us. As for support, back then, if you called, you'd get through right away.
Over the following two or three years, we gradually accumulated know-how and content, and then the pandemic hit, and suddenly no overseas visitors were coming to the store at all. That's when we took all the know-how and content we'd built up and poured it into EC, putting real effort into the web for the first time — and that became the foundation of how things run today.
Up until then, things had basically been store-led, with EC positioned as something more like "a way for existing customers to make repeat purchases," and the product lineup was kept simple — strictly a supplementary role. But now, EC keeps growing steadily, and in terms of sales, the ratio is roughly 3 to 1 in favor of the physical store.
(The English-language version of the Kakimori site)
Hirose-san As for cross-border EC, at first it wasn't so much a deliberate strategy as more of a "someday I'd like to do this" kind of feeling. Around that time, we were mostly focused on domestic orders, but demand from overseas gradually kept increasing bit by bit. We didn't actually start cross-border EC in earnest until the pandemic.
—— How did you build your strategy for cross-border EC?
Hirose-san From the very beginning, we focused our overseas expansion on Europe and North America. We had done events in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia, but in Asian markets, the kind of emotional, story-driven products Kakimori makes can be a bit harder to communicate, and we felt that difficulty firsthand.
In fact, when we ran an event in Taiwan, it generated a lot of excitement at first, but it ended up feeling like a one-off burst rather than something that lasted. We decided to focus on markets with broad reach that we could keep building on over the long term, and narrowed our focus to Europe and the US.
As a result, our products are now available in more than 70 countries, and we have wholesale partners in over 20 countries. At first, we assumed Europe would be the bigger market, but it's actually the US where we sell the most. When starting cross-border EC, the idea of narrowing your focus by region for marketing purposes is something I still keep in mind today.
Not "Buy It Because It's Made in Japan," But a Japanese Quality That Comes Through Naturally
—— When it comes to why Kakimori is embraced around the world, is it the Kakimori brand itself that resonates, or is it more that Japanese stationery as a category is drawing attention?
Hirose-san Amid all this digitization, I feel there's a major worldwide trend of returning to analog. Vinyl records being reappraised, film cameras selling well — that kind of thing. I think there's a movement of "precisely because we're in a digital age, the value of analog is being reconsidered," and that's reaching stationery too.
I get the sense that this trend is stronger in more mature economies globally, but it's also spreading little by little across Asia, and sales there are growing as things stand now.
(Photo by Shoji Onuma)
—— So you're not deliberately marketing it as "Made in Japan."
Hirose-san On the Kakimori website, we're conscious of a sense of Japanese quality that comes through gently, that you can just sense by looking — through the packaging, the tone of the store photos, and even our choice of words — without ever pushing "Japan" too hard.
That said, rather than someone buying it because it's made in Japan, what we value is more the distance of "I liked it, and then later found out it happened to be made in Japan." Most of our customers aren't especially conscious of that before they buy — I think it feels more natural for them to discover afterward that "oh, this is made in Japan," and for that to actually deepen their sense that they made the right choice.
The worldview carried by Kakimori's physical store and website. Kakimori, embraced both in Japan and abroad, didn't get there in one leap of success — we heard the story of the many setbacks and challenges that went into building it. In Part 2, we dig into how they balance the physical store with online, and how they use Shopify to recreate the essence of Kakimori online — the ingenuity and the struggles behind it.
In Part 2, we ask in detail about [The Future Kakimori Envisions for Real and Digital Retail, Delivering What Makes It Kakimori].
