For a limited time, use coupon code "PREMIUMPENS" at checkout to get free international airmail on our best three. This coupon applies to the below three pens plus related refills, although if your order contains other items, they will incur regular shipping charges. Please also note that this discount only applies to airmail and does not include Express Mail Service (EMS).
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The Trusco Ridged Tool Box is the newest addition to our Trusco lineup. It joins our Trunk Tool Box - Medium, which is a great size for pens, pencils, and scissors, and our Trunk Tool Box - Small, an ideal fit for all your compact office supplies. We felt the time was right to offer something bigger, and the Ridged Tool Box certainly fits the bill. It's big enough to act as your mobile office cabinet, accommodating everything from our small packs of pins and clips to our compact stapler and even our medium-sized notebooks. Artists will love packing it with paints and brushes. And if your stationery goods are already properly stored, this tool box is also an excellent place to store a small collection of classic tools. We're very excited to announce the addition of a new brand to our lineup. Metaphys is the brainchild of Chiaki Murata, designer and managing director of Hers Experimental Design Laboratory, Inc. Murata’s desire to create everyday items with unique shapes and added functionality is nowhere more apparent than in his stationery product designs. Metaphys products will challenge your preconceptions about the shape and beauty of office products. Once you have a chance to use them, you’ll understand why countless Metaphys products have been awarded Japan’s prestigious Good Design Award. We at Fresh Stock will be leaving Japan for three weeks to celebrate the holidays with our families in the United States. This unfortunately means we will have to close up shop while we are gone. Our last orders will be shipped by December 17 (Japan time), and orders received afterwards will not be fulfilled until the week of January 5. If you are hoping to place a Christmas order, we highly recommend opting for Express Mail Service. EMS only takes a few days to many countries and less than six to most. We cannot guarantee shipping times, but an order placed before our December 17 cutoff should arrive by Christmas via EMS. We thank you for your understanding, and we hope you have a safe and happy holiday season. Our stationery Christmas tree was built with the following products:
To commemorate the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season in the United States, we will be offering 15% off all orders over $20 from Friday, November 28 through Sunday, November 30. Now’s your chance to get a jump on your Christmas shopping or order something you’ve been eyeing for yourself! Please type in the coupon code "KUROKIN" during our checkout process to get 15% off.
We would also like to introduce our new gift wrap, just in time for the holidays. Our gift wrap includes simple, brown craft paper and traditional mizuhiki cord. This cord is used as a decorative art form, most commonly formed into a bow and affixed to gift envelopes. Gift wrap will be available on all orders over $20 and will be complimentary. Please indicate if your order contains a gift in the "Note to Seller" section before completing our checkout process. You can indicate which specific items are gifts or simply type “Gift” if this applies to the entire order. In honor of our first 100 likes on our Facebook page, we are giving away a free product bundle. The bundle includes a CDT Tradio Plastic Fountain Pen, CDT Graffiti Pad, Velos Gold V Paper Clips, and Velos Wood Pushpins. For the official rules and a chance to win, please visit our Facebook page. To learn more about each product, please click the pictures below.
Recently, the summer humidity has given way to cooler temps, the leaves have begun to change colors, and it’s finally starting to feel like autumn. But before any of these things happened, we knew that fall was upon us when we started seeing seasonal foods arrive at our local supermarkets and convenient stores. The average Japanese supermarket is not able to maintain the year-round varieties of foods like enormous U.S. grocers can, so food seasonality becomes much more important here. Seasonal foods also have cultural and even religious significance, so foods are connected to seasons in a very profound way. I bet if you asked the average Japanese, they would have a hard time imagining a season going by without eating the prerequisite seasonal foods. Like the falling leaves, it's simply another indicator of the passing of time. In addition to seasonal cuisine being offered in restaurants or cooked at home, Japanese snack makers have also gotten on board with the seasonal changes and produce chips, crackers, and chocolates in limited seasonal flavors. During the fall, you can enjoy your favorite treats in pumpkin, chestnut, and sweet potato. Japan often experiments with limited flavors, and it’s a regular occurrence to fall in love with a new flavor only to see it go away and never appear again. If a limited flavor is connected to the season, at least you can look forward to eating/drinking it once a year. During autumn in Japan, there are also seasonal activities like mushroom hunting, picnicking beneath or just watching the changing leaves, and participating in fall festivals. Fall festivals can be large, regional events or small, neighborhood get-togethers. Most have religious significance, relating to the fall harvest or honoring the moon, but their contemporary goal is to bring local communities together. If you ever visit Japan in the fall, I highly recommend seeking out a fall festival, whether it be big or small, to have an experience usually only reserved for locals. In honor of autumn, we want to show off a few of our fall colors at Fresh Stock. If your pencils and notebooks are looking a little dull, you can think about picking up some new office items in yellows, oranges and golds. I bought my first Trusco tool box in 2008, and the blue steel looks as shiny as it did when it was new. I chose a medium Trunk Tool Box as a place to store my pens, pencils, scissors, etc. My Trusco tool box has moved around the world with me and has always been placed proudly on my desk as soon as it’s unpacked. Perhaps it comes from my love of Lego as a child (and the need to constantly clean up pieces), but I like being able to scoop up all my office tools, pop them in a box, close the lid, and have them out of sight when they’re not in use. Trusco makes their steel tool boxes in an impressive array of shapes and sizes. The two boxes we chose to carry are the smallest sizes in their lineup, which are well-suited for stationery, craft supplies, and other small storage. I personally also own an 11-inch ridged tool box, which I use to securely store my shoe shine kit. We are currently considering offering other models, which are more suitable for tools or larger items. Virtually all of Trusco’s steel tool boxes come in their signature metallic blue enamel, but a few are available in other colors. We hope you like our stationery-sized tool boxes, but don’t be surprised if we soon announce some bigger sizes and maybe additional colors too. Fresh Stock began as a hobby in 2009 when I was living in eastern Hyogo Prefecture, between Kobe and Osaka. I was spending a lot of my free time seeking out well-designed cafes and stores, concentrating mostly on boutiques in Kobe and Osaka's fashionable Horie neighborhoods. I struck up a friendship with Daisuke Matsue, then the store manager for APC Kobe. Daisuke was working on a number of side projects, and we talked at length about how we could facilitate more international creative collaboration. Of the many ideas discussed, Fresh Stock was the first project that actually took root in the form of creative consulting. I had hoped to make a little money at it, but I was more interested in connecting with Japanese creatives and craftsmen — people who were passionate about making things with excellence. I ended up helping Daisuke contact a few companies overseas, do a little translation, and finally import some furniture and accessories from Portland to Japan. Daisuke later became a regional manager at APC Japan but eventually left to pursue his personal projects. Currently, he runs Biotop Nurseries in Osaka and is involved in a number of other ventures (mondoverde, CHAKI, merde). After some time, I returned to the States, got married to my wonderful wife, and later we moved back to Japan together. On our arrival, I found myself between jobs for a brief period, so I took it as a chance to look for new Fresh Stock opportunities. I ended up meeting the team at Okayama Denim, purveyors of high end denim brands exclusively from Japan’s denim capital. Okayama Denim was getting ready to launch its site, and I got to help edit product photos, contribute to logo design, and put some of the finishing touches on the site. Being involved in this process definitely influenced what happened next. Flash forward a couple of years, and my wife and I were out shopping in Kobe. I told her how much I would like to take Fresh Stock beyond casual consulting and turn my attentions toward product curation. We had come across the Velos Wood Push Pins, and were talking about how simple yet great they were, and suddenly stationery products seemed like the perfect launching point for a web shop. After countless emails and phone calls to a handful of Japanese stationery companies I admired, we created our starting product lineup and find ourselves here today. Fresh Stock could go in all kinds of directions in the future, and we’re excited about the possibilities. But for now, we’re content with our humble beginning, and we hope you enjoy our products and follow us as we continue finding new Japanese products, made with excellence, to share with people around the world. |
AuthorBenjamin Stock founded Fresh Stock in Kobe, Japan and now runs it in the U.S. along with his wife, Rebecca. Archives
November 2017
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