Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business • Hacker News Board

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#81

Post by aaronbrethorst » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:47 PM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #71

specialist wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. A recent example: Nitram fine art charcoal. http://www.nitramcharcoal.com Grandson of founder sells business, gear, and secret recipe to enthusiastic customer, who relaunches a beloved product line. http://www.nitramcharcoal.com/blog/the-history-of-nitram-cha... Obsolete technologies become forms of art. Vinyl records, polaroid pictu…

Film, also. The Impossible Project is truly impressive. Polaroid film is a mindblowingly complex product to develop, since it's basically a photo lab sandwiched into a thin sheet. Even if their results aren't perfect, it's amazing they're making it work at all. There's also a small group of people who are rebooting the Ferriana film line.

    There's also a small group of people who
    are rebooting the Ferriana film line.

In typical Kickstarter fashion, yes maybe, if we're lucky and they don't run out of cash first. They just sent out an update yesterday saying that the hardware they thought would satisfy their needs won't do anything of the sort, and that they're now months behind on their schedule.

I hope to, at some point, receive my rolls of 135 and 120 film, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#82

Post by ars » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:47 PM UTC

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #55

tokenizerrr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there is. Sadly you'll need humans for that part, though. You could get several humans who all get a sample of each supplyers chalk, and then ask them to rate the quality of each on one (or several) scales. The computer can then integrate this rating with the rest of its metrics.

I didn't mean to say that it wasn't possible, you probably don't need a subjective measure of quality. I think you could empirically discover some objective characteristics of good chalk that would do the trick. You could at least quickly reject the worst chalk which is too brittle and too hard. I meant to say that there was and is no way that is recognized sufficiently universally that enables one to specify a chalk…

Specify bending strength, the chalk must not snap under specified force. Next define a writing pressure, angle and stroke speed and require fewer than x blank areas in the line. Require that the line width be within a specific tolerance, not too thick not too thin.

Maybe a spec like this doesn't exist now, but you could use the good chalk and write the spec based on how it did.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#83

Post by foobarian » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

gcb0 wrote: post #46

ansible wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What drives me up a wall is when people find a non-working marker... and then put it back! No! Throw it away! It is better to have no markers than have non-working ones. That is an easy and clear signal that it is time to find / buy more markers.

can't you just drip alcohol into the dry ones to get them back to working condition?

That's why I don't throw them away--never know if there is a coworker who collects the dry ones and restores them.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#84

Post by kuschku » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 6:22 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #77

creshal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously…

> I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously can't work" – well, duh). The Japanese domestic consumer market is so enormous t…

Same in Germany. And the reason why so many smaller German companies existed in pretty much the same way for the past millenium.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#85

Post by HCIdivision17 » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 6:40 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #59

ams6110 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

surface-type screens, computers attached to projectors, etc These have their place, certainly, but I'd find it hard to believe that power-consuming electronic replacements (also considering the environmental impact from raw materials and waste products, and energy used to manufacture them) are a "better" choice than a chalkboard in many cases.

Power is also required to mine chalk (giant limestone mines), process it, package it, ship it, etc and its completely non-renewable. It becomes dust and then you place another order. A PC with a projector can last a decade in use and depending on the region may be powered by mostly or all renewables.

One of the interesting notes in the article is that they apparently use a lot of oyster shells. I would assume the shells are typically a waste product in other (likely food) industry processes. That's pretty darn green. Besides, we have a lot of limestone, veritable rock-oceans of it.

That's part of why it's incredibly difficult to talk about waste on industrial scales. One plant's garbage is frequently another's input. Waste is expensive, so plants will always try to reduce it to the bare minimums, and if possible make money off it, in the case of certainl classes of recyclables.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#86

Post by kuschku » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 6:51 PM UTC

kjs3 wrote: post #72

putchdes wrote: post #52

When he said that people sent a flood of faxes, it made me totally cool with no more chalk. When your customers are still sending faxes, that pretty much sums up your dire situation.

You should perhaps learn something about cultures other than your own... https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+fax+machine+culture tl;dr: Fax machines are still fundamental to Japanese business communications.

Same in Germany: A lot of official things can only be done through fax or paper mail even today. And you know what? I’m totally fine with that.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#87

Post by toyg » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 7:16 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #80

toyg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a cultural element -- the Japanese perceive the cultural contrast between their world and "ours" more acutely than we do, in both directions (i.e. their positions go from "the West is much better than us" to "the West is so much worse than us" very quickly, it's hard to find level-headed assessments of both positions). Most of the "obviously it can't work" sentiment actually comes from there, in many cases.…

> There is also the obvious difficulty of limited chances for local expansion: the country closest to them in cultural terms are Korea, which they historically see as inferior and poorer, and China, which they know they simply cannot match on equal terms. I'm not so sure about this analysis. Korea is a much smaller market than Japan and also has regulations hostile foreign products in general (high import tariffs and…

This is the historical perspective I was talking about, but I'll just note that your points are not orthogonal to mine. The end result is that post-crash, Japanese companies have been very reluctant to expand, either close-by or far away.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#88

Post by drzaiusapelord » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 7:21 PM UTC

HCIdivision17 wrote: post #85

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power is also required to mine chalk (giant limestone mines), process it, package it, ship it, etc and its completely non-renewable. It becomes dust and then you place another order. A PC with a projector can last a decade in use and depending on the region may be powered by mostly or all renewables.

One of the interesting notes in the article is that they apparently use a lot of oyster shells. I would assume the shells are typically a waste product in other (likely food) industry processes. That's pretty darn green. Besides, we have a lot of limestone, veritable rock-oceans of it. That's part of why it's incredibly difficult to talk about waste on industrial scales. One plant's garbage is frequently another's in…

>Besides, we have a lot of limestone, veritable rock-oceans of it.

Sure but the amount of carbon you burn to get to that rock, excavate it, process it, move it, etc, etc is non-trivial. A computer and projector on 8 hours of day is a drop in a bucket to that.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#89

Post by toyg » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 7:23 PM UTC

acveilleux wrote: post #66

navait wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of those are legal issues, whether it be in the US or in the country they are expanding to, especially in the case of copyrighted media.

I don't buy that (outside of copyright licensing). Especially for anything cloud based. As a Canadian, we don't have a choice but to expand to include the US early on (since it's a market 10x bigger) and I've not really seen that become a stumbling block.

Because you don't have a choice, you faced the related issues right away and found them not a big deal. Most US businesses do have a choice to just ignore these issues completely, because their internal market is big enough to sustain expansion for a long time.

(although when it comes to audio-video, @navait is correct: it's a legal minefield.)

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#90

Post by wpietri » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 7:47 PM UTC

kvcc01 wrote: post #57

I read the whole letter and loved the tone of it! It jumps at you right away that: (1) Here's a guy who really cares about his business, its future, his employees. (2) He talks candidly about the reasons for closing up: his declining health, sales volumes, even including awkward sentences like " So chalk is more environmentally friendly, I think. " I am now a fan of Hagoromo. It was rather refreshing at a time when I…

Yes. There's none of this maximize-shareholder-value, church-of-the-mba religion that pervades Western business culture right now.

He wanted to serve people sustainably. He did it for decades, and when that became untenable, he responsibly searched for a way to minimize the waste and harm caused by him exiting the business.

I especially love that he treats his machines almost as people, people intrinsically valuable to him. Whereas here, we often treat our people as machines, machines that are eternally disposable.