Street talk Store talk

We are in Suehiro-cho, Hakodate. On a winter morning, the store’s day begins with shoveling out from the previous night’s snowfall. Hakodate is a town full of hills, lined with elegant old buildings and churches, picturesque from any angle. The KANEKO OPTICAL Hakodate store occupies a corner off the handsome granite-paved Nijukkensaka Avenue. Opened in 1998 and now in its 24th year of operation, the store has special importance for KANEKO OPTICAL. 

In a previous incarnation, the Hakodate store was known as "Facial Index Spectacles." Many are surprised to learn this was KANEKO OPTICAL's first directly owned store. Beginning with the company's current leader Shinya Kaneko, many a Kaneko employee have faced the same question: "Why did you open your first store in Hakodate?" 

Back in the 1980s when the company was still only a wholesaler, Shinya Kaneko, then in his late 20s, took over the Hokkaido sales route pioneered by his father and company founder Shokei Kaneko. Based in Hakodate, he threw himself into calling on all manner of eyeglass and watch retailers large and small. A sales trip to Hokkaido meant being on the road for 14 days and 13 nights. He would park the minivan he’d driven from Fukui at a garage by the train station and stay at an inn called the Tokiwa Ryokan in Omori-cho, close to the station, then make his way north in the van, stopping at every retailer in the Oshima and Hiyama regions. He could hardly count the stores who turned him away, and loneliness was his daily companion, but his keen effort began to bring results, and little by little his clients increased, his network grew, and the business took shape. Eventually he rented a room in an aging apartment building, the “Tosho Co-Op,” near his regular lodging, where he set up some desks found in a recycled furniture shop and hired 2 employees to establish the company’s first regional sales office. This little outpost was the foundation for today’s national network of stores, and evolved to became an incubator for the first company-owned store.
After long wanting to break out of the wholesaling business, at the start of the 1990s Kaneko had launched the original company brands "BLAZE" and "SPIVVY," and decided the time had come to start a directly owned company store. ”I want to make a castle filled to the brim with only our own products, where we could be face to face with our customers, and together share in the joy of eyewear. I’m sure the customers will get it, and I want to see them when they do.” As he sketched out this vision in his mind, his instinct told him to open his first store not in Fukui, or in Tokyo or Osaka, but Hakodate. Scenes of the harbor, busy with ship traffic and the liveliness of a maritime community, had made a deep impression on Kaneko. The place he selected, which remains the store’s location today, is in the western area of Hakodate, where much of the historical town still stands. Local employees and acquaintances told him he was all wrong: “Go to the city center near the station, where there’s lots of foot traffic.” “No way that’s a location to do business!” and so on. Kaneko fully understood this. But after exhaustively walking every street on all those sales trips, he knew this territory better than the locals, and his gut instinct told him this was the place.
Whether products in the Hakodate store would sell or not wasn’t the question. Nor did logic and calculations about what would help sales enter into the picture. The young Shinya Kaneko, short on money but long on dreams, built the store there because that’s what he wanted to do, and this was where he wanted to do it. It was Kaneko’s innovation to recognize that more important than geographic convenience was the appeal of the store and the merchandise itself. If people could think, “I want those glasses so much I’m willing to get myself all the way over there to find them,” this could become a new paradigm for retail. 
And in 1998, in Suehiro-cho, Hakodate, before the opening of "FACIAL INDEX NEW YORK" stores in Soho, New York, and Marunouchi, Tokyo, KANEKO OPTICAL’s first store was brought into being.

In 2022, it’s now been 24 years since the Hakodate store opened. This store number one, built from scratch when there was no store-building formula, has a unique atmosphere different from any other of the directly managed stores throughout Japan. Back then Kaneko drew a rough but passion-filled sketch of the store and begged a local carpenter to give it shape. That space, though rough-hewn, glows with a handmade warmth. Shelves and stock cases used in the store were custom-made for a modest price by a local master furniture maker. None of the other directly managed stores has such fixtures. News of the Hakodate store spread gradually by word of mouth. When it opened, Kaneko Optical’s original brands BLAZE and SPIVVY were completely unknown, and when our relationship started, customers hadn’t the slightest awareness of the company. For days and years we faced customers as little more than the humble corner optician, but with the support of so many after 24 years, Kaneko Optical has become part of the landscape.
Young people who once visited the store to buy glasses eventually got married, had children, and now they’re buying glasses for their grown children. A woman in her 30s comes into the store for the first time: “I’ve been a fan since my ‘teens, and now I’ve finally made it to the store,” her eyes sparkling as she purchases glasses. These 24 years of the store’s life have been etched in time with the lives of our neighbors. The store has matured and taken shape through the accumulation of time. Even today President Shinya Kaneko insists that “Hakodate is my second hometown.” He built the store “because I just wanted to do it,” without any thought about “sales this,” or “profit that.” The passion and momentum of that one young man crystallized and the store was built without any regard for calculations. That’s the special position of the Hakodate store. Episode zero of Kaneko Optical, later rolled out across the country, was etched at this location. 
​