[KOKUYO Vol.4] KOKUYO employees become editorial members: how an owned media that looks at itself and weaves its own stories came to be

▼Related articles
・Vol.1: The Full Picture of the Project
・Vol.2: The Corporate Site
・Vol.3: The Product Site

Before the renewal, KOKUYO’s website had content produced separately by each department and product owner, so its reading content was scattered. Owned media alone amounted to some 22 separate outlets.

Despite an abundance of high-quality content, because the places of communication were scattered, no small amount of information was not reaching users, and the big picture of “what KOKUYO wants to convey” had become hard to see.
We also found that, depending on the project or service, communication was insufficient — and that many even went unknown in their very existence.

In response to these challenges, we proposed launching a new “magazine area.”

・Consolidate the reading content shared in various places, strengthen its reach, and create a new inflow channel from an SEO perspective.

・Also serve the role of an in-house newsletter — a place for internal branding that connects to employees’ motivation and the fostering of awareness.

Setting these two points as the mission of the magazine area, we gave concrete shape to the concept.

In organizing the information for the corporate area, we had already begun sorting KOKUYO’s new initiatives (new businesses, sustainable efforts, and so on).

As we grouped things to classify them, any number of patterns emerged. On top of that, a single initiative could belong to multiple groups, so a basic approach like MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) could not fully organize it.

So we shifted our thinking, taking the view that “the chaos and ambiguity that cannot be neatly organized” is itself part of KOKUYO-ness, and we stopped forcibly drawing lines to categorize. For the magazine, we set out to design something that could make the most of this “ambiguity” and express it to the fullest.

To advance design and implementation, we needed to propose wireframes before deciding the magazine’s strategy and specific content.

So we began with information architecture.
What we gained from interviews, what we read from the materials, and the words KOKUYO’s people use day to day — we laid out and organized every possible keyword that could become a content theme for the magazine.

Once the keywords were roughly assembled, looking over the list we discovered they could be broadly divided into two viewpoints. The thinking behind a diagram we had produced for the “4th KOKUYO Group Medium-Term Management Plan” became the breakthrough.
A single “conceptual diagram” born from this thinking forms the very foundation of the magazine today.

・Knowledge (Hints): KOKUYO’s wisdom and insight

・Culture: KOKUYO’s corporate culture, history, and philosophy

Having these two editorial axes — “Knowledge (now: Hints)” and “Culture” — made it possible to communicate KOKUYO’s insight and philosophy themselves, going beyond the frameworks of business fields (stationery, furniture, space, mail-order) or single products.

This lets us convey not just surface information but the thinking and philosophy that lie deeper. Moreover, it gave rise to a flexibility whereby a single product or event could be classified as either “Knowledge” or “Culture,” depending on which axis you cut it from.

In this way, a structure that could absorb a certain chaos of KOKUYO — the original challenge — was completed. Rather than preparing boxes sorted by strict rules, by presenting the editorial axes as a “way of seeing,” we allow overlap and leave breathing room in the framework.
The composition of the top page also reflects the philosophy of this conceptual diagram, designed so users can move freely between Culture and Knowledge.

And there is one more idea not to be forgotten: “Style.”
In Vol.3, The Product Site, we introduced it as a device for threading a common axis through different business fields.

Through the “Style Catalog” plan, the magazine functions as a place where the diverse styles of each field are stored. They coexist within the pages beyond the walls between divisions, generating synergy while forming a single world view.

With the three editorial axes of “Knowledge (Hints),” “Culture,” and “Style,” it became possible to convey new initiatives and products, KOKUYO’s people and the stories behind them, and even style proposals.

In the planning/strategy and article-production phases that followed the wireframe proposal, the editorial professionals at itskn joined us and led the project.

At launch on October 2, 2025, we had 10 articles produced by the itskn team and 29 by KOKUYO — 39 in total — a rich amount of content to start with for a launch. And by borrowing, as needed, the strength of other companies’ products and external talent — not only KOKUYO’s in-house resources — we were able to express KOKUYO’s world view more richly.