Kinzuna

The problem

Kinzuna sells kintsugi-inspired fabric repair patches to ski and outdoor retailers in the Niseko-Rusutsu corridor of Hokkaido. That means two audiences who do not overlap: Japanese shop buyers placing wholesale orders, and English-speaking visitors who find the brand on the mountain and want to buy a patch.

A single-language site was never going to work, and neither was a translate widget. Japanese buyers judge a brand by whether its Japanese reads like a person wrote it.

What we built

Two parallel language trees rather than a toggle bolted onto one. Each language has its own URLs and its own hreflang declarations, so search engines serve the right version in each market instead of guessing.

Behind the front end sits a Cloudflare Workers back end handling order submission, inventory state and transactional email. Order confirmations, wholesale enquiries and internal notifications all route through it. No third-party form service in the middle, no monthly fee for something that is forty lines of code.

Why it matters for other clients

This is the build that proves the back end. Most small-business sites are brochures with a contact form pointed at an email address. Kinzuna is a working system: it takes orders, tracks state and sends mail, and it runs on infrastructure that costs almost nothing at this scale.