Explaining Japan's manufacturing decline.from @frontoffice.co

Transcript

Twenty twenty four, six hundred rank eighty six thousand babies were born in Japan, and that is a problem. And that's because that is the lowest figure since the records began. And this means two things, population shrinks and the population ages. In modern day Japan, if you walk into a dye house, a sewing workshop, or a weaving mill, the average artisan is about 60 years old. Their children are working in big cities like Tokyo. They're working in offices, and that's if they have children at all. So the skills that are passed down from generation to generation, like things like indigo dyeing, loop wheel weaving, the maintenance of these antique machines, the branch of knowledge just disappears. So smaller factories are faced with a decision. They either have to close down or they have to join up with these better conglomerates. The work moves away from slower artisanal practice into flatter, more broader work that everyone is interested in, everyone can afford. So on the production side, things are changing. But on the consumer side, things are changing. Tier stream taste goes more towards higher quality, comfort, functionality instead of hype. So here is the problem. Right? On the consumer side, people want sophisticated high quality, and on the production side, we are moving away from it. So in the middle of all this, in March, we moved our operations to Japan, and everything we've been warned about was true. It is more expensive to make things. It takes longer to make things. And even if you accept much less money for the same amount of work, it's not about you choosing a factory. It's about a factory choosing you. More people want to make things in Japan than Japan can deal with. So our strategy as a young company isn't wowing these factories with how much money we have because we don't have a lot of money. But what we can offer is tier type of interesting work we can do better, and that takes us away from mainstream commercial work. It's better if I show you. So this pair of jeans is completely made from plants, and that's pretty obvious because we're used to things being made out of cotton. But this is half cotton, half paper. The Japanese have been making a type of durable industrial paper called washi for centuries. It takes the bark of the mulberry plant, and this isn't the same type of paper that you use in a photocopier. It's a different type of paper. You yes that for windows. You use that for doors in an ancient house. But if you cut it into strands and twist it together, it also forms a type of yarn, and we have blended it together with cotton to form a type of denim. As it ages and washes, it develops a type of softness that we haven't seen before. And this is our six month drag test. You can see that the cotton turns into fluff, but the washi is durable. It's still intact. And the mulberry plant, which grows in Japan, is actually very useful. Not only can you make interesting yarn, but the leaves feed silkworms, and the silkworms produce silk. And these are our half cotton, half silk jeans. This is made for our women's wear line. It's woven into a twill, so you have cotton on the outside, but on the inside, that's part that contact your skin is silk. And that's what I mean while we're talking about interesting work. We're trying to blend ancient craft that isn't necessarily passed down with modern design to create something new. And we are in the final phase, the dying phase of Japanese manufacturing. There is no getting around that. That's just a fact. But how is that different from any timeline, like the short duration of my career or the short lifespan do I have? We all have some sort of responsibility to do something interesting and meaningful with the time that we have best, and this work is about leaning into a different definition of what made in Japan means. And the goal is not to remind people of what Japan has made, but what Japan wants to make with the time it has left.