Goods in Japan are expensive. In fact, everything in Japan is expensive. To help keep costs down we often buy our products 'bulk wrapped'
This means that some items as sent to you in plain boxes in a plain bag or wrapped in bubble wrap. The Paper Pot for example is sold in Japanese boutiques in a nice cardboard box which is heavily printed and fine for taking home if you live in Japan but not so great if you're shipping them across the world!
Many of the manufacturers we work with are happy to supply us with items bulk wrapped instead so we but the paper pots without boxes, in huge bubble wrapped plastic sleeves, with the lid folded inside the base which saves an enormous amount of space in our containers. They are happy to give us discounted prices as they don't need to print and manufacture so many boxes and we also make a saving from fitting thousands more in container that we would if each one was boxed individually.
With some items, the packaging is often part of the attraction such as with the Salmon Notebooks so these do come packaged as seen but with the paper pots most people will throw the box directly into the recycling bin which still means that it will have to be collected by the recycling lorries, driven to a recycling facility, turned into pulp by a power hungry factory and ...well, you get the idea.
Some manufacturers are unable to eliminate the packaging so some products will be boxed and to see what arrives in its own manufactures box please see the end of the item description.
The idea initially came from Amazon who are doing a similar thing now although they call it "Frustration free packaging" and are concentrating on the very hard to open packets such as memory cards etc although the reduction in waste is the same.
Packaging of your order
We are sent hundreds of samples every month and we accumulate a lot of waste packaging - mainly boxes and jiffy bags with samples in them.
Instead of recycling these we offer to send out your items in these giving them at least one more use before they head off to be recycled. If you're happy to receive your items in a recycled box (it may be for frozen squid tubes or a Dell computer box) then tick the box marked "Recycled packaging" at checkout and we will re-use our old boxes to send your goods out in.
