Kaneko Tea House

Kaneko & Sons has blended tea in the same narrow storefront since 1952. When the third generation took over, they asked for an identity that could carry the shop into new markets without losing the quiet of the original room — shelves of unlabeled tins, a single counter, the smell of roasted hojicha.

Approach

We began with the tins. Every design decision had to survive being printed on unbleached kraft paper with a single pass of black ink. The wordmark is set in a modified old-style serif, letterspaced to breathe; the family seal was redrawn by hand over forty iterations until it sat correctly at eight millimetres.

The identity is at its best where it almost disappears.

Outcome

The system now runs across packaging, stationery, and a small e-commerce site. Wholesale orders doubled in the first six months — the shop attributes most of it to the tins being kept, not thrown away.