10% OFF on All Judo & Kendo Accessories

First, we would like to have a thought for all those affected directly or indirectly by the COVID 19 and the upheaval it brought into our lives until now. Recently, the Japanese government announced the end of the emergency state in the four remaining prefectures.

Although life starts to resume its course in a large part of the world, that school, shops and other institutions are finally reopening their doors, the situation for travel and therefore, for international logistics is actually far from getting back to normal. 

However, during this crisis, our team acquired a quite efficient ‘emergency situation logistic’ set in cooperation with two carriers DHL and UPS. 

It turns out that martial arts are still prohibited in numerous countries and that it will stay like that for some few more months. Meanwhile, we still need to live our passion one way or another and this is why we decided to carry out a discount on all Judo and Kendo accessories this month. Please note that this discount will only run until June 30th, 11 am (JPT).

Also, we would like to thank our customers for their loyalty and their interest in our brand. This is why the KuSakuraShop team decided to throw a Special Judo Quiz, that will allow one of you to win a brand new Competition Japan Judogi - JOF or JNF certified by IJF standards.

If you want to try your luck to win one of KuSakura’s best competitive Judogi, you will be able to participate from June 2nd to June 30th.

Challenges we are facing now

Organizing special shifts for our team so we can keep processing your order as soon as possible, with a reduced team. This was a tough challenge, but we believe we did a great job. We announced that we would put in place a 3 business days' delay for all orders, and we managed to ship more than 90% of orders without any delay. Of course, this is mainly because we are suffering a huge drop in orders, but also because of a faultless logistic carried by our team, logistic that proved strong under the stress of the crisis!

Organizing shipments is, of course, the toughest of all challenge. KuSakuraShop has a very well designed logistic that relies on Japan Post, FedEx, UPS, and DHL simultaneously, with per country and per package type/size optimizations. FedEx has suspended all shipments from Japan. Japan Post can only deliver a few countries (France, Canada, the UK, but not the US or Australia). UPS has increased rates, and DHL, in addition to not handling packages over 120 cm, implemented a special crisis surcharge.
Each order requires more time, as we need to check each carrier rate, limitations for each country, etc.
Small orders usually shipped with Japan Post that have not been upgraded to express shipping at checkout are stored in our office.
And many countries cannot be delivered without additional fees or cannot be delivered at all.
Under these conditions, it's very hard for us to maintain free shipping on all orders without increasing our prices, which we didn't do yet. In June, we plan to keep working as we've done in the past two months. Customers can still select free shipping for all orders, and for small orders that haven't been upgraded at checkout, we're offering an upgrade or to store the package until shipments reopen. (For reference, we currently have about 50 orders stored on customer requests. We have no decent solution for only 3 of them, going to Russia, China, and Turkmenistan).

From now on, the next challenge will be to keep the business afloat until September (we hope that orders will return to normal by then). We have already increased our stocks to the maximum to help our workshops, so it's not something we can continue to do, but we are working on alternative solutions!
At KuSakuraShop, thanks to the help of the Japanese government, we have all been able to make the sacrifices necessary to stay afloat (unfortunately, Japan has offered an aid of 100,000 yen to all the residents but offers absolutely no support to businesses). The team is still complete and we do not plan to let anyone go. We are in this situation together, and we are going to go through it together!
Although we do not yet need the help of the community, we will inform you if this changes in the coming months.

May report

• In order to support both our partner workshop in Aichi and our own workshop, we decided to release two face masks model, one close to a "deluxe model" and another emphasizing more on the essentials while staying comfortable to wear.
• You can now purchase a Gift Card directly on our website. Gift Cards have become quite common in the past few weeks but as we already had some customers requesting it, we thought that this could be the right moment to release it on the Shop.
• We reworked our emailing system. Nothing was actually wrong with the former one but some things could be improved to offer the best customer experience possible. More information, better compatibility and better readability, you will be able to check these emails out very soon!
• With the current situation, our team is handling several projects simultaneously but we are still trying to find some time to work on the new products we plan to release on the shop.

Enjoy our discount and see you very soon on KuSakuraShop!