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 can't stand reading more than a paragraph of a typical press release of a BigCo written by lawyers or PR specialists. Unlike this essay, those are intended to obfuscate, not to inform.
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.
Not awkward, the sentence you call out. Beautiful, rather, and whether it is an artifact of translation or not, no matter. You didn't mean awkward in a pejorative sense; this is just an affirmation.
Of course! What makes this letter effective and relatable are all those little things that wouldn't have passed the ordinary editorial, legal, or PR filters, if it were written by a typical corporate CEO. If I was teaching at business school, I'd have my students read this as a model of effective stakeholder communications. I think Mr. Watanabe is a shokunin (you know, in the Jiro Ono sense) of the chalk business.
This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough.
It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much envision somone making that chalk in a garage and selling it to universities/individuals.
I also think that it's somewhat short sighted to assume procurement by the employer is needed. Especially in "brainy" jobs it's pretty common for people to be willing to spend their own money for tools they use on the job. If my school only provides chalk X I'm pretty much willing to spend some of my own money for the better chalk if I can't change their mind.
Maybe they were just "too big" and targeting a commodity market instead of going for the smaller premium market.
> 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 can't work" – well, duh).
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.
And then there is an economic issue: their currency has been so strong for so long, it simply wasn't worth for most medium-to-small companies to invest in tricky oversea expansion for a very long time. Things have changed a bit there, but the cultural perception has not shifted much.
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.
And then, of course, there is the recent history of train-crash expansion in the '80s. That didn't end well, and some of the lessons they learnt was not to try too hard to expand abroad.
> 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 so on) or to Japanese products in particular (such as limitations on how much Japanese-language material can be broadcast). I don't know what it means to say that they "simply cannot match China on equal terms;" it's only recently that Japan's economy's size was surpassed by that of China and even then it has a number of advantages that China does not (much higher per-capita income, a more stable regulatory environment, lower levels of corruption, etc., you get the idea).
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.
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.)
> 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 that many Japanese companies are simply not interested in selling their goods internationally, because they don't need to. They can make plenty of money without dealing with the complications of selling their products in other countries. Many are small businesses and are content with making enough money to cover payroll.
That's very true. Fuji is notorious for this - they build fantastic cameras/lenses but until recently there was little advertising and they were difficult to source outside Japan. They're also very bad at keeping US customers in the loop about their supply issues.
I really enjoyed the bit in the crash bandicoot blog that was posted recently where the author mentioned how the Japenese execs from Sony were completely against bringing crash to Japan. They tweaked the looks of the character slightly and the execs bought in right away.
US demand and overseas markets can't cancel out Supply and Demand and market forces.
- Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market. Each year there will be less customers and less profit world wide.
- He could have sold the machine to another entreprenuer? Their company makes 45 MILLION sticks of chalk. They're getting their materials at a high bulk discount. Another company can never match the price point. They'll end up selling the same chalk at double the price.
- And expansion into the USA is laughable. Try expanding into an existing market with well established players (crayola) that is shrinking and on its way out.
- And this is the USA we're talking about, we prefer cheap products to quality ones. The only time it seems we invest in premium products is when they are an American brand, made in America.
> Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market.
I am a math professor. Most of us prefer chalk, and have no desire to go to whiteboards, smart boards, Powerpoints, what have you. I think that there is a fairly durable market for chalk.
Moreover, over the last five years I think that awareness of Hagoromo (and more generally, of high-end chalk) has been growing. You see it for the first time when visiting some other university and think "Wow, what is this? I must have some!" This led me to buy several boxes of it at $35 a pop. My out-of-town guests, who give lectures in the research seminar I help to run, get treated to the good stuff.
As a student, I preferred chalkboards to whiteboards because they were easier to read. It seems that most of the time, unless the professor had an exceptionally well working dry-erase marker, the lines were too thin and light for me to read them, no matter the color.
I remember thinking that the whiteboards were an improvement at first, but that quickly changed when I realized I couldn't read what was written on them anymore.
Unfortunately there simply aren't very many math professors. An average American school district has 200 teachers, all of whom would have used chalk until recently, that's a lot more than there are professors in a university math department and there are many more school districts than universities.
I agree that there is a durable market for chalk, but not at this kind of volume.
You're treating it like a commodity product focused on economies of scale (comparison to Crayola). As an outsider reading about it the last couple of weeks they did have good quantities but it feels like a repositioning as a quality leader makes sense.
So switch the focus from cost leadership to differentiation (quality) in Porter terms.
I'm pretty sure the customers mentioned qualify as typical customers that are willing to pay a hefty premium for a product they love.
tl;dr: scale down, focus on quality, charge more > shutdown
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.
It depends on who you talk to, I've seen renovated university study spaces with fresh chalkboards. When I asked the staff why they chose chalkboards instead of whiteboards, they said that it's cheaper in the long run because cleaning and replacing whiteboards is awful and expensive. Chalkboards are significantly more durable.
Not to mention I've never had a piece of chalk dry out.
Seems whenever I try to use a whiteboard, the first 5 markers I try don't write and I have to spend 15 minutes hunting for spares.
And if you have a "sort of working" marker, which is what I'd usually end up with, it won't write very dark and the whiteboard text has worse contrast than a chalkboard.
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.
Which themselves are being, albeit slowly, replaced by mobile technology, surface-type screens, computers attached to projectors, etc. I imagine the market for chalk are all die-hards, like say, vinyl record enthusiasts today. If you were to use internet outrage as your own metric you'd think it was a huge market. Its not.
Chalk is two generations behind at this point. Its probably not too great to be breathing in all day either, at least for some of the population:
The study, published in the journal Indoor and Built Environment, ruefully concludes: "Though real-time airborne chalk dust generation was found to be low in this study … and did not contain toxic materials, chalk dust could be harmful to allergic persons and may cause lacrimation and breathing troubles in the long run and certainly is a constant nuisance in classrooms as it may soil clothes, body parts, audiovisual aids and study materials."
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.
>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.
Yeah but in order to manufacture that computer and projector you needed vast amounts of energy, water, minerals, plastics, rare earths, compounds that don't exist naturally in our planet, pollution disposal, such as heavy metal contamination & arsenic compounds, waste acid, strong bases.
In fact the cost things like PECVD or dry etching is so disproportionate compared to drilling a hole in the ground, that I'm willing to bet a computer is the equivalent of hundreds of years worth of a blackboard with chalk.
Exactly. Having worked on vacuum systems for physical vapor deposition, I can assure you that there's an enormous amount of energy going into gently wafting the materials onto other materials. (The wide area glass coater I worked on had a 2MW substation running dozens of 150-200kW power supplies (not full tilt all at once, obviously).)
Really, I recommend anyone look into this stuff. Just to get silicon to the purity and precise structure to just start chip fabrication:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_process
Imagine the whole supply chain, from smelting metal for wires and cases to plastic molding to storage, economies of scale truly are vast.
Sure but that one time cost has a 10 year depreciation. A lifetime of chalk is endless mining because you go through it so quickly. You're constantly buying chalk. You're not constantly buying projectors.
>that I'm willing to bet a computer is the equivalent of hundreds of years worth of a blackboard with chalk.
As someone who grew up near a limestone mine, I think you greatly underestimate how much work it takes to get rocks from the earth. I've seen some of the largest machines in the world working there. Its an huge operation.
I think the statement following this is much more important and interesting to HN:
> The tendency has become more and more prevalent under electronic auction systems.
While incidents like this are often used as examples of the failures of technocracy, I think the problem is elsewhere. A decision process has been out-sourced to a machine that is not smart enough yet to make a good decision. The decision might be good in a very localized and easy to measure sense (cheap), but lacks an understanding of other economical signals.
When I read this article, I felt a sharp pain, as it sounded as if it could be directed at our company [1]. Acquiring pricing for local governments through online reverse auctions is what we do.
Your observations are poignant. There is strong incentive to treat everything as a commodity these days. Part of our business is in helping buyers structure their RFQ documents so that the product or service can be competitively sourced. In the government sector, however, we rarely participate in this process.
Governments must purchase based on their state and local laws, which often ties their hands. A local school system may want to purchase better quality chalk for a reasonable premium, but the laws pertaining to procurement frequently prevent them. It's a really bizarre circumstance where public perception of government waste has resulted in laws that eliminate buyers' ability to cut deals that are better for everyone. I'm not saying it's impossible; it's just much easier for a procurement officer at a local government to follow the standard process (which prioritizes price) than it is to fight for quality.
There are pockets of innovation, however. Our eRA platform stands out because we offer the ability to incorporate non-price factors in to our ranking algorithm. This gives a buyer the ability to "weight" one bidder over the others. We developed some of our most advanced features jointly with local governments in Arizona. I'm not sure I should name names, but there are people doing really great work out in Arizona.
We have even considered founding a separate not-for-profit organization whose entire purpose would be to assist local governments in improving their procurement laws so that there would be a better balance of good sourcing practices and the ability to incentivize quality over price where appropriate. That's a huge challenge though. You frequently end up directly opposed to special interests with very deep pockets and a financial incentive to keep procurement laws just as they are.
If you instruct a machine to optimize for the cheapest price; it will do that.
The failure is in the instructions given, not the introduction of machines.
> If you instruct a machine to optimize for the cheapest price; it will do that
if (x < y) { // } is a simple optimisation.
The classic "you optimise for what is or can be measured rather than what is important."
There are ways around this of course by setting minimum quality via an objective third party (MIL-STD's for example) but that process introduces a whole new can of worms.
That much should be clear, my (unfortunately) implicit question is: how can we instruct a machine to optimize for the very intangible things everybody seems to love so much about this chalk? What about the more subtle economic things (like signals of economic climate and value of quality).
I once worked for a guy once who claimed he could sole-source a peanut if he had to. Many of them boiled down to colluding with the supplier to find a set of properties that were unique to their particular peanuts; things like soil pH, average temperature of the area they were grown in, not too much rainfall, not too little rainfall. Most purchasers were neither educated sufficiently to question these kinds of specifications, nor were they particularly interested; they also wanted to find the path of least resistance through the process. We probably could have bought most anything we wanted. Later we had a DOE grant get audited and there was some nervousness on our parts about some of these shenanigans that might be found. The guy just chuckled and said nearly everyone has to play this game to some extent. His major complaint about our books was that our overhead costs were above average, and he helped us make a case to the Uni for lowering it. Didn't see that one coming.
For an item like chalk though, my employer now has an arrangement with one of the big office-supply companies who specialize in tolerating (and charging extra for) gov't nonsense. Lately it's been CDW-G, I think. They provide a walled garden of approved products (which don't include the kind of good quality chalk in question) and a semi-streamlined purchasing process. It works great for the purchasing dep't, I'm sure, but it sucks for end-users because it introduces the same kind of uncertainty that a purchasing organization is supposed to fix. For example, the prices quoted on the website are not the actual prices of the products, and the products have variable discounts; this and the latency inherent in dealing with the purchasing process makes budgeting and price-shopping difficult to impossible. In my very small dep't we usually have budget projections rounded to the nearest hundred even for small items like chalk/dry erase markers because doing otherwise is a waste of time. We spent a lot of time a few years ago, working around the purchasing system just trying to get decent chalk before fatigue eventually set in and we just gave up and installed whiteboards.
I do not understand the reference to Arrow's Paradox in a discussion of procurement policy (almost certainly related to my lack of knowledge). Can you elaborate?
Sure --- there's a neat paper by Franssen (2006) that demonstrates the formal equivalence between optimization problems and the social policy problems Arrow was concerned with. Basically, Arrow says that some constituents will always lose out under any social policy. Franssen showed that you can swap out "composite cost metric" for social policy and "components of the cost metric" for constituents, and the same arguments apply.
Here's the full citation. Turns out I misremembered the year (2005).
Franssen M (2005) Arrow’s theorem, multi-criteria decision problems and multi-attribute preferences in engineering design. Research in Engineering Design 16(1):42–56
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 with the desirable properties to a gov't purchasing agent such that s/he can buy the right stuff.
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.
The trouble is that the places that sell chalk to universities don't rate chalk like this. Like I said in another post ITT, we derped around for a couple years before we just gave up and installed the damn whiteboards.
I'm totally unaware of conventions used in public purchases.
Isn't an "electornic auction system" just a database anyone can spam - the actual decisions are probably made by humans? My hunch (might be incorrect) that the auction system creates a barrier of disinterest where the official has very little else to go with than the prices quoted. In this case it's not that the machine is stupid - it's way worse, the system stops actively humans doing what humans are particularly good at - separating wheat from chaff based on experience and intuition - if the official will never use the chalks and has no idea what the impact of the product will be.
The problem is that there is no known alternative really. If you just the government official decide, it breeds corruption.
Or at least it used to. Perhaps with the modern IT systems we could create a solution that delivers the transparency to the process - the official would explain his/her choices publicly, and the public would have an opportunity to argue...
i bet on the other side there are teachers complaining about the quality of chalk they end up getting. this is nothing but a case of the employee responsible for inputting the auction parameters being a lazy bastard and not talking to the people that used the product he is buying in great quantities.
it's all a matter of doing your job right. despite the fact that a machine will help you with some portion of it.
that didn't appear to be the main reason, his volume dropped in half since its peak because technology is moving beyond chalk and blackboards.
besides, it is common for many businesses to fall back on the excuse that their quality justifies their price without proving that their competitors are not delivering what is requested.
if you are over delivering and doing well that is fine, but if you are over delivering and losing money your not doing it right and the market will correct you one way or another
just the milkman the chalkboard has been obsoleted.
I think it's neither sad nor happy, it just is. People make the tradeoff between quality and cost, and it's simply down to their tastes. There's no metric to use to say what the right tradeoff is.
About 20 years ago they should have created a grading standard for chalk so they could have avoided their commoditization, or at least only compete with others at similar quality (and presumably margins). Similar to organic standards.
Yes, this is what I wanted to say. Quantify what makes them great. After reading the article and the comments, I still have no understanding of why or what makes them so great.
Thicker sticks. Coating on the outside of the chalk. Different formulation to make it smoother and less dusty.
Basically, the chalk seems to be optimized for writing Kanji strokes which need to vary in thickness and weight.
And, yes, he did miss the boat in the US. I have never heard of this stuff before they went under (not completely true: my Japanese teacher complained about the quality of American chalk all the time--I should have twigged in). I would have bought crates of this stuff when I was teaching.
Hopefully the Korean company he sold the machines to won't be quite so insular.
I don't think there is any concise secret formula that one could just copy to paper and readapt.
The article gives the impression there was a specific highly custom production system where the materials were selected for the machines and the machines were fit for the materials. And the machines were apparently jury rigged adaptations which probably lack detailed blueprints. Sounds a bit hard to formalize, after the fact, without quite a laborious effort.
I'd bet that, if he made some Youtube videos explaining the recipe, and the way it changes based on the local situation (and manufacturing equipment), as well as some videos giving a tour of the manufacturing equipment, some enterprising Makers would find a way to whip up a "Make your own Chalk" machine.
While it wouldn't be perfect, such a machine could be standardized or improved, and quality could be iterated on by people who care about it until they could make their own chalk that was better than what they can easily buy.
Heck, just the recipe might be sufficient for people to do that.
At first, we considered selling the whole company, enabling the Hagoromo brand to survive and helping overall chalk sales. But we could not find the right deal for the company.
I'm sad that I have been forced to close down my company. But I am pleased I have been able to contribute to education by providing high-quality chalk over the last 50 years.
Commendable passion to a bigger cause, but sometimes that isn't enough. Very touching note.
> Commendable passion to a bigger cause, but sometimes that isn't enough.
How is it "not enough"? He ran a successful business that brought joy and utility to millions for 50 years. Sure, it ends on a sad note - but such is life. That is success if I ever saw it.
Chalk makes me feel weird when I use it. Tactically it just rubs me the wrong way and gives me the same chills I get from fingernails on a chalkboard. Just thinking about it bothers me :\
However, it is nice to read about people who have a passion for what they do, and this man seems to have passion in spades.
This man expresses such a passion for chalk...chalk of all things, and it's inspiring. I could see someone reading this and becoming an artisan chalk maker as a result(I kid, but its probably true). Even I kind of want to run a chalk business after reading it.
Ecclesiastes! A good book, and I think a lot of people in our field could relate to it a little:
"Then I hated all my labor in which I had toiled under the sun, because I must leave it to the man who will come after me. And who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will rule over all my labor in which I toiled and in which I have shown myself wise under the sun. This also is vanity."
It probably is the source of those particular words in Modern English in that particular arrangement. Something very close appears in Wycliffe's Bible and starts like this:
Alle thingis han tyme, and alle thingis vndur sunne passen bi her spaces.
I'm sorry for this man having so many health problems. But I can understand otherwise how to make chalk in the pacific japanese coast burning tons and tons of japanese oyster shells could be less profitable and much more dangerous since 2011. I wish him well.
What I meant was that fax machines are still in widespread use by all demographics in Japan, so getting a lot of faxes doesn't indicate much about the age or aversion to progress of the senders.
And some people just don't have appreciation for business which value quality, culture, ethics and respect for employees. They are busy with their own arrogance.
It was rather refreshing at a time when I can't stand reading more than a paragraph of a typical press release of a BigCo written by lawyers or PR specialists. Unlike this essay, those are intended to obfuscate, not to inform.