The Mokutang Journal
Founder's notes on building MOKUTANG — the products, the customers, the mistakes — plus onsen dispatches from Japan.
My blog's very first post is about a customer — the day I found out the person I'd only imagined in my head was real, and using our soak, was the happiest moment since starting this brand.
A friend asked why I'd put chili in a bath soak. Here's the honest answer — and why I built HAPPY TEARS for sweating, not relaxing.
The most common complaint about HAPPY TEARS was also the reason it exists at all. Here's how we tried to fix the coughing without losing the heat.
A regulator suspended our sales for three months over ad copy I thought was honest. Here's what that taught me about explaining a product versus overselling it.
One overheated soak at a local Beppu bathhouse, on my third bath of the day, turned into the scene I still picture whenever I think about why HAPPY TEARS exists.
Both products came out of the same brand, but the customer who reaches for our mugwort soak is almost never the one reaching for HAPPY TEARS.
Our mugwort soak was designed for the bathtub. Amazon reviews had a different idea — and once we tested it ourselves, we understood why.
The most common question about HAPPY TEARS is whether it really has chili in it. Here's the honest answer, plus every reason I could think of for why a half-bath sometimes just won't make you sweat.
A first-time customer ordered two jars of HAPPY TEARS on a whim. The story of how she found us — and why her order made me more nervous than happy — says a lot about how we grow.
The same personality trait that makes me a considerate friend makes me a slow founder — and, oddly, a genuinely difficult client to my own manufacturer.
Deep inside a bamboo forest on private land, an elderly couple built and still maintains this onsen entirely by hand. No showers, no clean tiled changing room — just water, bamboo, and a very determined nude stranger.
A smaller-than-expected ryokan, a disappointing family bath, and a kaiseki dinner so good it fixed the whole stay. A one-night family trip to Kurokawa Onsen village.
I used to buy Japanese bath soaks because I liked them. Now I buy them, use them, and quietly interrogate every one of them for what MOKUTANG should be.
MOQs, factories that can't reproduce a recipe, and a stack of tomato and cabbage cleansers that never made it to the world — what small-batch product development actually looks like.
A four-star Vine review on Japan's Amazon described HAPPY TEARS so precisely I wondered if the reviewer had read my mind. Chili jokes and all.
A customer once told me she wished she could buy a bath soak that perfectly recreates a real onsen. Here's the honest, slightly deflating answer I never said out loud.