About Inari
I'm a stationery designer who had to learn the business side. Now I teach it.
Inari Stationery Strategy is a small education studio helping Japanese stationery creators sell internationally with calm, practical systems.
The making half. I design fairytale wedding suites. Maximalist ones — layered, ornamented, unapologetically a lot. I know what it is to care about the weight of an envelope, and I know the particular silence of finishing something beautiful and then having no idea how to sell it.
That silence is where this company started.
The business half. For twenty years I've been an ecommerce coach for creative sellers — first on Etsy, then Shopify as the industry moved. Hundreds of shops. Listings, pricing, SEO, email lists, launches, the slow work of turning a talent into an income.
For some of them I didn't just coach. I ran the business outright, because business was never what they were good at and they knew it. Someone has to do the numbers. It might as well be someone who understands why the paper mattered.
Why Japan
I lived in Yokosuka for six years, as a military spouse. I learned the language because I was there and I wanted to talk to people properly, not in the tourist register.
My first market research was my family, and I didn't know that's what it was at the time.
I'd send gift boxes home to the States — snacks, small things, whatever I'd found that month. And every single time, the response came back the same: more of the stationery. Not the food. Not the souvenirs. The pens. The tape. The notebooks. People who had never thought about stationery in their lives were suddenly specific about it.
I shipped a lot of those boxes. Six years of customs forms, weight limits, and the occasional package that arrived crushed. That part isn't theory for me either.
When I came back to the US, I kept seeing the same gap I'd been standing in the middle of the whole time: Americans falling for Japanese stationery, and Japanese makers with no clear route to reach them. I already knew the American ecommerce side. I already knew Japan. Inari is what happens when you put those two things in the same room.
What I believe
Your brand is not the problem
I have never once looked at a Japanese stationery brand and thought it should be more American. The work is already good. What's usually missing is the layer between the work and the customer — the words, the numbers, the box.
Guessing is expensive
Most of what makes international selling hard isn't creative, it's clerical. HS codes. Duty. Margin. Lead times. These have right answers, and you should have them written down instead of re-deriving them the night before a shipment.
Small and finished beats big and someday
Everything here is meant to be completed in an afternoon and used the same week.
Steady is the goal
Not virality. A brand shipping a few overseas orders every week for five years is worth more than one that goes viral once.
How I work
- Everything is in both Japanese and English. I write the Japanese myself — it isn't machine-translated, and it isn't American advice run through a dictionary.
- There's no subscription and no upsell ladder on the guides and tools. Each one is bought once and stays yours.
- If you don't know where to start, the GO Global Quiz will tell you. Five minutes, free.
- Inari watches over rice, abundance, and the fortunes of merchants. Shopkeepers have been leaving offerings at Inari shrines for centuries, asking for a good year in business — the right name for a company that exists so craftspeople can make a living.
The world is ready for your work.
The GO Global Quiz gives you a readiness score and a personal roadmap in about five minutes.
Take the GO Global Quiz →