Hello,
I got back from Korea and Japan a few weeks ago. Came home rested and immediately buried myself in the pile of work I’d left. But one thing from the trip keeps pulling my attention away from it.
Wherever I go, I have one ritual. I find the craft shops.
My family knows the drill by now. They go look at the actual sights. I disappear into some tiny stationery store for an hour.
Korea is dangerous for me this way. The craft shops there are stacked, floor to ceiling, with illustrated stuff. Stickers. Mugs. Notebooks. Keyrings. Little character goods you’ve never heard of, that people are buying by the armful.
And almost none of it has words on it. It’s all art.
Then Japan Took It Somewhere Else
In Japan, cats are everywhere. Not just as pets (though they love them). Cats show up in the art, the shops, the shrines. There’s a whole visual language built around one animal.
Which is how I ended up at a temple called Gotokuji, on the edge of Tokyo.
I’ll let the photos do the talking (below), but the short version: it’s a temple covered in cat statues. Not a handful. Thousands of them. Little white cats with one paw raised, stacked on shelves, row after row after row.
People travel across the city to see it. To stand there. To buy one and leave it behind.
I stood there too, and the thing that hit me wasn’t “this is cute.”
It was this:
A single drawn character can carry enough pull to fill a temple.
The Thought I Couldn’t Shake
And then the obvious thought, the one I couldn’t shake on the flight home…
This stuff isn’t unproven. Illustrated designs, characters, cute art on products — people clearly love it. They build shrines to it. They buy it by the basketful in Seoul. It’s everywhere.
Everywhere except one place.
Our world. Print on demand. Facebook ads.
In our corner, everyone sells the same thing. Text designs. Typography. “Make them cry” sentence shirts, recycled a thousand times until the ads stop working.
The art? The cartoons, the doodles, the characters that an entire economy in Asia runs on?
Barely anyone’s touching them.
And for years, I understood exactly why. There was one thing standing in the way, one skill that ruled most of us out completely.
It ruled me out completely.
The Part I’ve Never Told You
For the last three years, I’ve quietly run a second store.
Not the one you know. A different one, built entirely on this kind of design. It makes sales nearly every day, and it has no business doing so, because I can’t draw to save my life.
How I pulled that off is the whole story. I’ll tell it to you next week.
If you want to hear it, click here to raise your hand.
Click it, and you’re on the list to hear the whole story over the next few days. Don’t, and that’s completely fine — I’ll leave you be. You won’t hear about this from me again.
Talk soon,
Bank K.
P.S. The cat temple photos are below. The raised paw is supposed to invite good fortune in. Make of that what you will. :)
