[KOKUYO Vol.1] Refreshing the image, embodying KOKUYO’s true worth: building a website that united a vast, complex organization through “care for people”

Across five installments, we will share the behind-the-scenes of building the KOKUYO corporate site. Vol.1 delivers the full picture of the project.
We at mount, who took part in this project, spent a little over two years from 2022 in dialogue with more than 200 stakeholders, accompanying a monumental challenge: uniting into one the website of a vast organization that keeps widening its fields.

The keyword was “people.”
Even as we risked being buried under an immense amount of information, our mission became to find the “unchanging thing” at the company called KOKUYO and to embody it in the website.

“What comes to mind when you hear KOKUYO?”
Most people would answer “a stationery company” or “the Campus notebook company.” In the early phase, even the project members were no exception.
But KOKUYO is not a company that makes only stationery.
While stationery is its founding business, it has kept expanding into diverse fields — furniture, spaces, mail-order, and more — always with fresh ideas.
Fitting for a company 120 years old: the more we learned of its breadth and depth, the more we sensed there was “a KOKUYO the world does not yet know.” A desire and sense of mission grew within us — to convey KOKUYO’s appeal exactly as it is, leaving nothing out.

And then, another challenge.
It was the weak coordination between business divisions on the website, a legacy of KOKUYO’s past spin-offs. Domains were split by business, leaving KOKUYO’s figure as a whole company hard to convey.

So what we proposed was to express KOKUYO’s “past,” “present,” and “future” on a single site and generate synergy between businesses — in other words, to build one site that embodied shared values across the boundaries of business.
“Convey KOKUYO’s appeal as it is” and “bring it together into one site around shared values.” To build a website that achieved these two things, the mount team went through the following six steps:

・Research, interviews, and tours

・Strategy

・Information Architecture

・Producing the materials (photography, interviews, copy)

・Design

・Implementation

Each step is packed with an enormous amount of time and trial and error, but in this article we introduce the moments that were especially breakthroughs for the project.

“Getting to know KOKUYO.”
That is what we did over about two months in the earliest stage, when we understood nothing. The work of taking in vast information, forming hypotheses, and organizing it went on and on.

We began by mapping the existing website to grasp the whole, then read deeply into the integrated report, the company history from KOKUYO’s 100th anniversary, the catalogs of each business, and the booklets the company itself publishes — taking in input thoroughly.

Next, we conducted interviews with some 25 key people in total — executives, division heads, and staff in charge. By interviewing everyone across the departments again and again, our understanding of the businesses and of the organization deepened by the day.

We also held an office tour.
At the Shinagawa office in Tokyo, we were shown “THE CAMPUS” — which could be called the symbol of KOKUYO today — while the developers of each division’s products and services spoke passionately about the products they had made and the spatial cases they had designed.

Their way of speaking was astonishingly geeky and utterly earnest.
It was also the moment we felt, firsthand, “what KOKUYO is.”

In the information-architecture phase, we hit yet another wall.
The concept running through the whole project is “people-centered.”

This realization from the interviews became a major guideline, but on its own something was missing — somehow it still did not fully express KOKUYO.
We thought the copy through and dropped it into the wireframes, but what felt farthest away was not what to say but “how to say it” — the manner of expression.

It was CD/AD Yonemichi who caught the thread to solving this.
It was a period when he was advancing the “4th KOKUYO Group Medium-Term Management Plan” project in parallel with the web information architecture, and had many chances to talk with President Kuroda.

As he encountered the natural, unaffected manner of President Kuroda and the employees, the image that emerged was “Kansai dialect, and approachable.” That witty, open, friendly character was KOKUYO itself.
The “character” of a company based in Osaka — that was exactly the element missing from the strategy we had been meticulously assembling.

This discovery became a turning point that greatly shifted the team’s rigid thinking. From then on it influenced every aspect — the site design and the tone and manner of the copy, and on through photography and editorial policy.

*We cover this in detail in “Vol.2: The Corporate Site.”

The new KOKUYO website completed in this way came to hold
four characters: “Corporate,” “Product,” “Magazine,” and “Special Content.”

This web renewal was not achieved by mount’s strength alone. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who was involved.

In the following Vol.2, we introduce the behind-the-scenes of producing the “corporate site area” in more detail. Please take a look!

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