10% OFF on our selection of 20 high quality pieces of equipment
And here we are, the holidays are over and we're starting a new year!
For this "back to the Dojo" discount, we simply picked 20 bestsellers from all categories so everyone can take advantage of the discount. It will run until September 26th, 10 am JPT.
August has been a very difficult month for our industry and for Budoka of the world. One of the biggest wooden weapon workshops, Horinouchi, announced it would close in September. Of course, it pushed many people to rush their orders and buy as many weapons as possible, which forced Horinouchi to suspend all orders earlier than expected. They stopped accepting orders on August 26th.
We were planning on working on our interview with the Master Bogu Craftsman Tokusanai in August, but the closing of the Horinouchi workshop changed our priorities.
Unfortunately, there was not a single company in our industry that stepped up to take care of the transfer of knowledge from this workshop to the others, so we took on us to do it. It was indeed always our main concern that this traditional craftsmanship would die with its last representatives, and that its designs would be forgotten and lost forever. So we ordered each and every single product Horinouchi was manufacturing, and we are in the process of cataloging them, one by one, to create an exhaustive and tangible database of his weapons. This way, we will be able to copy any products in the future, and we will act as keepers of Horinouchi's legacy as long as we exist.
This is a very long and complicated job, but it's something we are proud to do. It is directly linked to our #BudoStudies program, since each and every single Koryu weapon they were manufacturing is part of each Koryu’s history. Should the school disappear, a piece of their history will be preserved with us at least.
As for purchasing wooden weapons at the moment, we are actively working on finding a solution for most of all items. We already transferred all the Nunchaku and Tonfa to the Aramaki workshop and they are already available for purchase. Now that all samples are catalogued, we are splitting them between the three remaining workshops to start making copies of the originals and launching the production.
As we already announced, we are planning on a significant price increase for most of those items, from 20% to 100%. We believe this is generally a good thing though, as low prices (and low wages) were one of the main reasons why the Horinouchi workshop closed. The others must absolutely do whatever it takes to ensure their future, and we are 100% with them, no matter what.
Please refrain from sending us too many questions. We already work as fast as possible, which implies lots of overtime. As soon as we confirm that a product is actively transferred to another workshop, we have to order stocks, reshoot all the pictures, reset the prices and reactivate it on the website. To know which products are still suspended it's easy: just open the product page and all products that will not have been transferred yet will have a big red banner indicating that it is not possible to order at the moment.
During the month, we continued publishing Aikido videos from the 57th All Japan Aikido.
We also received the visit of our Fukuroshinai Craftsman Mr Aki Kenji, during which we took a Fukuroshinai leather fitting lesson, as well as a short history of recent Fukuroshinai and manufacturing lesson, all filmed and soon available on our Youtube channel.
That's all for this month. Not much content, but an incredibly busy month nonetheless. Enjoy our contents, enjoy the discounts, and have fun on the mats!