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 Part 2 of this interview, we spoke with Takuma Hirose, CEO of Hotaka Co., Ltd., which runs Kakimori, about the respective roles of the physical store and online, and about the worldview and branding they build using Shopify.
You can find Part 1 here.
(Hotaka Co., Ltd. CEO Takuma Hirose. Photo by Miki Chujo)
Web and Physical Retail: Not "Connecting Them," but "Dividing Their Roles"
—— What do you keep in mind about how the physical Kakimori store in Kuramae, Tokyo, and the website work together?
Hirose-san With Kakimori today, we've deliberately avoided designing things to push people strongly from the web into the physical store. If anything, the store getting overcrowded is more of a concern for us, so we've made an effort to let customers spend time there in a calm, quiet setting. When some customers come back to our flagship store after being reached through promotion, we position it as a destination where they can get something made to order — while if someone just wants to buy an item, EC is more than enough for that.
Right now, I want to keep growing EC. For example, I'd love to be able to offer the same kind of made-to-order service we currently do in the physical store through EC as well, but app functionality hasn't quite caught up with that yet. I think if Shopify's features keep evolving and allow for a bit more flexible customization, we'll be able to deliver that distinctly Kakimori made-to-order experience through EC too.
Shopify's Flexibility Lets Us Scale Even with a Small Team
—— Kakimori's EC site is currently built on Shopify.
Hirose-san We decided from the very start to go with Shopify consistently, and we have absolutely no plans to switch to a different platform. The topic of switching has never even come up internally.
A big part of it is that Shopify is proactive about third-party app development and offers extremely high extensibility. In the beginning, we were developing our own theme in-house, but recently we've switched to a policy of customizing an existing theme, keeping the custom-built portion to a minimum. And even so, the quality is more than satisfying — that matters a lot.
In the past, I felt constrained by things you simply couldn't do without using Liquid (Shopify's own template language), but these days, quite a lot of customization is possible even without code, and that's made it entirely manageable even for a small team like ours.
—— What kind of team handles theme customization and similar work?
Hirose-san We don't have a dedicated engineer right now — it's basically handled by our own in-house staff. Once Shopify went through a major version upgrade, we started purchasing a theme and customizing on top of that as our base. Small fixes can now be handled entirely in-house, and only for the parts we can't handle ourselves do we bring in an outside engineer for a one-off request.
Not Relying on the Defaults: The Effort Behind Conveying Kakimori's Worldview
—— Could you tell us specifically what you focused on in your branding and design work?
Hirose-san To capture that distinctly Kakimori feel, we've incorporated handwritten elements, switched between vertical and horizontal text depending on whether it's Japanese or English, and inserted illustrations into the menu, among other things. Since you can't do that kind of thing with the defaults, we built it from scratch. We put a lot of effort into that initial customization, so we could keep the worldview intact while still making it easy to update ourselves in-house.
We also made adjustments to the fonts — the original theme had limited font choices and sizes, so we brought in fonts that matched our worldview — along with fine-tuning spacing and balancing responsive behavior.
—— Going forward, do you plan to keep customizing mainly through apps and similar tools?
Hirose-san Right now we can run things just fine with the default theme, and since Shopify rolls out updates frequently, we probably won't end up building anything from scratch in-house.
Take something like Nike, for example — I think a thoroughly custom-built experience like that can succeed, but that assumes very large-scale development, and it's not really realistic for a mid-sized brand like ours to take on.
—— Do you have any thoughts on the direction you want to take with future site customization?
Hirose-san Honestly, when it comes to Shopify's customization apps for EC, I haven't yet come across one that really clicks and makes me think "this is it." If you try to just recreate what works in the physical store directly on the web, it usually ends up feeling flat. For example, letting people click through colors or parts on the web and having the image change — that might work technically, but as an experience, it's just not that interesting.
That's exactly why I think we need an experience design that can only exist in a web-native context, and I keep exploring that possibility — but honestly, I haven't yet found something that really feels right.
—— Is there an app you're especially fond of?
Hirose-san One app we use a lot is a translation app called LangShop. We run the entire Kakimori site in English as well, but rather than using machine translation, we have everything translated by a professional translator, and we reflect that translated text through LangShop. The English we use is British English. Part of the reason is that the translator we work with for the copywriting lives in Australia and already has a natural feel for something closer to British English, and also, when it comes to conveying Kakimori's sense of emotional nuance, British English simply fits the tone better than American English.
Shopify lets you customize a lot through apps, but adding too many apps also creates the problem of management becoming complicated, so right now we've deliberately kept it narrowed down to somewhere around 10 to 15.
—— Do you use Shopify POS for the register system in your physical store?
Hirose-san We don't use Shopify POS. Right now we use Square as the POS in our physical store. Shopify POS doesn't quite fit our current core register operations yet. Because of that, the biggest challenge right now is that we can't manage offline and online customer data in one unified place. That's something we'd love to see addressed through future updates to Shopify POS.
The Physical Store as a "Billboard" — The Value of Physical Retail That an EC-Driven Era Demands
—— With Shopify around, it's easy to launch an EC site these days, so there are genuinely a huge number of brand EC sites out there now. What do you think brands need in order to survive in EC?
Hirose-san There's a growing trend now of launching EC without spending much on upfront costs, but personally, I think it's worth having a physical store too, if you're able to, even a small one. Even a small physical store can become a starting point for press coverage and content creation, or get featured on Instagram. A store is genuinely powerful as a kind of billboard.
When you consider how quickly ad spend can just disappear, I think investing in a small store where you can offer an actual experience delivers a much better return.
Right now I'm involved in launching an EC-focused children's brand called Woset, and honestly, it's been a real struggle. The site is well put together, the products are good, the photos look great, and it's available in English — and yet, it still doesn't translate directly into sales all that easily. What matters just as much, it turns out, is expanding brand awareness. Personally, I really do think that if you're able to have a physical store, even a one-person operation, it's worth having.
How do you design things so that "what makes Kakimori Kakimori" comes through, even while flexibly making full use of a platform like Shopify? What stood out was a site-building process that considered not just technical craft, but even emotion and atmosphere.
In an era where growth in EC is now taken for granted, this conversation felt like it offered a real answer to the question of "why bother having a physical store" and "how do you divide the roles between online and offline."
Kakimori keeps taking on new challenges without fear of change, all while protecting its own worldview. Thank you so much for a conversation packed with insight for anyone involved in brand management, not just EC.
