KAI | KAI DESIGN Dept.

Because of the sharpness of its blades and its flagship razors, KAI enjoyed strong recognition — particularly among men — yet awareness of the company among younger people was weak. On top of this, the aesthetics and thinking behind its product design had rarely been communicated to the world.
The aesthetic KAI always holds dear in making things is not surface beauty alone, but being functional and easy to use — together with a posture of continually engaging with even long-loved tools such as kitchen knives and scissors, striving to make them even a little newer and better.
Through visits to the company’s own manufacturing plants and interviews with members of the design department, we organized these aesthetics and values around design. While formulating a main copy and statement as the design philosophy, we also defined the three perspectives that underpin KAI’s design as the “Marks of Beauty.”

What we aimed for this time was not footage that merely shows products beautifully, but expression that lets you intuitively sense the design thinking and the tactile feel behind them. For that, we chose an interactive video experience that could only exist on the web. We brought on film director Makoto Yabuki of Tangram, with yansu handling video and stills. As a single team — including the art director and engineers — we moved back and forth across the boundary between footage and implementation, fine-tuning the details right up until the site went live.
Rather than producing video simply as a finished film, we built the data with its behavior on the website in mind. At the implementation stage, we used WebGL and Blender to realize an interactive depth-of-field expression. Our aim was an experience where you don’t just look at the site, but feel as though you are touching the products themselves.

The website we created was also developed across a variety of media. We produced vertical signage footage shown at the venue of KAI’s concept design exhibition, “Sharpness and Gentleness.” While verifying how it should look within the exhibition space, we created it with the same worldview as the website. The design philosophy we developed was also published as an advertisement in the Nikkei newspaper. Signage and newspaper advertising were media that emerged as offshoots over the course of the project; rather than staying confined to the website, we considered the optimal appearance for each medium. Starting from the web, it became an initiative that delivers KAI’s design across media.