My somewhat extended absence

I've got a bunch of posts saved up that I've been meaning to write, but I've been preoccupied lately and probably will be for a little while longer. My wife and I are opening a store.

This post on KERA magazine is currently my #1 in terms of page views. (This and this were #1 before it, at different times.) And it's been that way since I posted it, which was not a short amount of time ago. It's not like it's on the front page or anything. This is all Google search traffic, most of it from the United States.

So we were thinking, maybe there's a market for this stuff here. There are some other web stores selling it to one extent or another, so if nothing else, it's not a completely crazy idea.

I'm not going to give away all of our plans but just so nobody's disappointed, we aren't planning to be the Wal-Mart (or Maruione) of Japanese fashion on day one. We'll be starting small, initially with only a web store and limited stock. We'll build over time, and we're working on relationships with the major brands. That's what we hope will eventually be a differentiator for us - we'll be specializing in the real Japanese brands, not cheap Asian knockoffs, unlike most US web stores that claim to sell Japanese fashion. And we want to carry all of them. We're going for authenticity, and we're shooting for the moon. But we're realistic about how to get there.

Thing is, we've first got to prove that we can sell stuff before the major brands make a deal with us. So we're sourcing inventory from all over at the moment, including used, and initially our site will be more proof-of-concept than anything else.

We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't think we had some major advantages over others that might be trying it, including major web stores in Japan. I think we've got the potential to turn this into something pretty big over time.

I'll let everybody know when the site launches. It'll probably be a couple of months.