Two sisters connect their characters with an audience through crafting.
Imagine if Coca-Cola sold the secret formula for Coke a few shelves over from the fridge packs, or Disney sold books on making homegrown, imperfect Mickey dolls right alongside the big bin of pristine, mass-manufactured plush. In traditional retail, there’s a vast conceptual distance between thing-in-the-store, thing maker, and thing buyer, and an army of middlemen standing in between. The indie craft movement minimizes that distance, cuts out most of the middlemen, and makes identities like producer and consumer much more fluid.
Japanese craft, character, and product studio Aranzi Aronzo Inc. takes that fluidity one step further. In addition to all manner of goods featuring their strange and wonderful creatures, they sell books on how to make your own crafts starring those characters. The Aranzi Aronzo world is a fluid reality where photo postcards depict their felt dolls in scale staring contemplatively out train windows, playing precariously with cigarettes and matches, and pausing on the way to another dull day at the office. Their “About Us” page has visitors believing the company is owned by two globe-trotting, mysterious gentlemen, until yellow-beaked Usotuki (the liar) breaks in at the bottom of the page to point to truer facts.
Sisters Kinuyo Saito and Yoko Yomura founded Aranzi Aronzo in 1991, as an extension of the imaginative play they’ve engaged in together since
Dave Coustan lives and writes in Atlanta. By day he’s EarthLink’s Earthling ( blogs.earthlink.net), and by night he makes tiny envelopes out of found materials and dreams up new web applications.
childhood. Their stable of characters comprises dozens of players, including moody and mischievous animals like a terrier (Tetsu), fish (Uo), monkey (Mankey), and Warumono, the “bad guy” who does bad things. The characters are featured on an ever-expanding line of clothing, home goods, stationery, and books.
According to Saito and Yomura, the handicraft book line was part growth strategy and part crafter outreach. When they first started selling dolls, they found they couldn’t keep up with demand on their own. They devised the how-to books as a way to let fans share in the creation effort and bond with the characters in a more meaningful way.
Their books quickly brought more dolls into the world than the company could’ve managed at the time, and they invited crafters to play with and think about the characters as Saito and Yomura do — essentially “crowdsourcing” their early brand-building.
This approach also brought them closer to their fans: “We receive a lot of letters and emails from our fans and customers, including photos of what they made with our books. There are many we have kept in touch with for a long time. Their warm messages and direct reviews cheer us up and sometimes make us think. Their feedback is precious and appreciated.”
Visit Aranzi Aronzo at english.aranziaronzo.com. Previously available only in Japanese, The Bad Book and The Cute Book (Random House) have just been released in English. The following project is an excerpt from The Cute Book.
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