Tofugu News

I promised myself I wasn't going to cry… but don't mind me if I do. Today, I have sad news: we're closing our beloved Tofugu Store.

Over the past several years, we've sold all sorts of stuff on the Tofugu store, including tenugui, stickers, enamel pins, e-books, and even "Tofukubukuro" grab bag style boxes filled with Koichi's old stuff. It wasn't always easy to pack and ship orders on top of our regular work. It involved intense physical labor of handwriting/doodling on cards, packing, and shipping. (…D-did you just laugh? 😠 Well, think about doing it all day every day for thousands of orders during the holiday sales. It was hard work!).

At the end of the day, though, it was all worth it because it was an absolute pleasure to see Tofugu and WaniKani fans using and showing off our merch. Sometimes, we would even spot Tofugu and WaniKani stickers on some random, windowless van on the street. These moments made our days.

However, during this global pandemic, Tofugu (the company) went 100% remote. Not to mention, laws about selling products online—especially physical ones—have gotten quite a bit more complicated in the last few years. We don't make money from the Tofugu Store (and lost money on a lot of the physical goods). We just wanted to make sure the fans could get their swag, and other cool things, too. Hopefully we will figure out other ways to get people stickers and swag in the future (giveaways, and the like), but our days of letting you pay for physical goods are over. It was a tough decision to make, but it was one that made a lot of sense to make when considering the context.

So please don't cry. I know how you feel, but this is not a sad goodbye. Thank you for all your support and enjoyment. We may complain about it a lot, but it was fun to stuff envelopes and doodle on cards. ありがとう and これからも、どうぞよろしく！🙏