Conquering Southeast Asia with one Japanese knife.
A knife. A website. Four months.
Hatori came to us with a beautiful product — a single-SKU Japanese kitchen knife — and a short runway. The goal wasn't brand-building for its own sake. They needed to prove the category in Southeast Asia before the season ended, with enough revenue to justify a second shipment.
There was no existing audience, no retail presence, and no other marketing spend to lean on. The site had to earn every visitor twice: once to trust the brand, and once to trust the blade.
One product. One promise. One funnel.
We stripped the storefront back to a single-page narrative — the knife, the maker, the use case. Then we built a performance funnel around three audience theses: home cooks graduating from big-box brands, regional food creators, and gifters.
Meta carried the top of funnel with short, quiet video from a home kitchen. Email closed the gap. Every dollar of spend pointed at a product detail page we'd already tested copy on three times.
Four months, one product, a category proven.
Small brand, grown-up discipline.
Hatori is the kind of engagement we love — not because of the dollar figure, but because it proved a thesis we still run on. You don't need a huge budget to build a category; you need to pick one audience, one message, and one number to be accountable to.
We ran on that playbook for four months. Then we handed it back, fully documented, and the brand kept going.