After Kiddy Land, we decided to go to Shibuya for dinner. We arrived at Shibuya station and wanted to see the famous Hachiko statue first. Hachiko is a dog and the story became famous in Western countries because of the movie with Richard Gere “Hachiko – A dog’s story“. It was great seeing the statue in person.

Alan and Hachiko the dog

After that we went to the most famous crossway in Tokyo which is just HUGE! There are so many people crossing the street at once, it is just amazing to stand there in the middle of the crowd and watching them.

famous crossway in Shibuya, Tokyo

Shibuya has lots of restaurants, it was hard to choose one

many restaurants present their dishes in front of the restaurant, the dishes are made in plastic

to order those noodles, you need to choose your meal in front of the restaurant at the vending machine and pay right there. Then you go inside and get your order. Apparently Wentworth Miller from Prison Break visited this place before as his picture eating their noodles hang in the window display.

while looking for dinner we saw my favorite car, a white Lamborghini

we chose a cozy Japanese restaurant serving different BBQ dishes

After dinner, we had to go to LOFT, which I heard a lot of before and was nearby anyway. LOFT is a huge shop, total 7 floors, with lots and lots of stationery and anything else you can imagine related to office, school, hobby, toys, home and more. We took lots of pictures inside, have a look:

rows and rows of stickers

we found some of our DIY clay sets there as well

lots of cute chops

notebooks and memo pads

cute greeting cards

cute bento boxes

and more bentos, chopsticks, cutlery and more

all kinds of cute kitchen ware

it wasn't too busy there, was quite nice walking around inside

Alan with a huge yellow Mameshiba

they even had Lolita dresses and other costumes

the stationery floor

When you are in Harajuku, visiting Harajuku Daiso is a MUST! Almost everything costs only 100 Yen, which is about 0,82 Euro or US$1.07. Even big things like bento boxes are so cheap there. They have almost anything you can imagine: kitchen ware, stationery, DIY stuff, candy, cleaning supplies, plants and much more.

Harajuku Daiso

Entrance of Daiso, the security tried to stop us taking photos, but we were faster

one floor full with stationery

everything was really cheap

lots of candy and kitchen ware

even cleaning supplies have cute characters on them

Daiso is a huge attraction for tourists, we saw lots of them there

cute felt iron-ons

we had those 6pcs eraser set before but it is sold out now

lots of kawaii letter sets

we bought a basket full of goodies for you guys! We plan some contests/lucky draws and more for you!

Next, we went to Kiddy Land which was just amazing to see! This shop is the BEST SHOP we have been during our whole trip! 7 floors filled up with toys, plushies, stationery, licensed products and anything else you can think of. I think, I just better show you some pictures (but don’t be mad at me if you want to go to Tokyo immediately after seeing them):

one floor full with Hello Kitty stuff

another floor for San-X characters

would you be able to choose any of those pencils? It would take hours to just check them out!

we saw this crazy lady inside the shop

just one of many sticker shelves

and more Hello Kitty items

lots of hairclips to choose from

We got up early again because we wanted to see so many things again First we went to the Meiji Jingu Shrine near Harajuku. This park and shrine is famous for it’s Sunday’s traditional Japanese wedding ceremonies, tea ceremonies and other ceremonies. As it was a Sunday, we had to go there.

on the way to the subway station

me in front of the entrance to the Meiji Jingu park

inside the park

traditional hand washing before entering the shrine

Me in front of the shrine. It was a weird because it felt like you are in a Japanese martial arts movie, the scene was so typical for this kind of movies.

and finally we spotted the first wedding ceremony

another wedding couple. It took about 5mins + 5 people

traditional Japanese wedding couple. It was really hard to guess the women's age because they wore so much make up.

they have special cars which can lift the roof for the bride. It took quite long to get her in the car

Alan and me in front of the shrine

we went to a restaurant in the park to get some refreshments and found this ice cream vending machine.

After that we went to Harajuku, the most famous shopping district in Tokyo. We were very excited to see this place because we heard so much about it and we were also planning to search for some new products and inspirations for our shop.

on the left Harajuku station and on the right the shopping district

entrance to the craziest shopping street in the world (I dare say)

in front of every shop girls are promoting products

we saw this funny guy dressed as Little Red Riding Hood

the streets were super crowded

and of course cute products everywhere, this shop even had a pink plane inside

and then we surprisingly found this pretty quiet park in the middle of Harajuku

there were some really pretty blooming trees

typical Japanese garden with pond; and another wedding couple (they even got a red carpet rolled out for them)

I actually planned to check out Forever 21, but look at those crowds, there was no chance I could find or try on anything.

people, people and more people

Our planned schedule for today was very busy and our day started very early in the morning. We had to get up at 5am to visit the famous Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. When we left the hotel we were surprised by ice, snow and heavy wind. We were used to warm spring weather and were surprised by this sudden change. First we went to the subway station to buy our tickets and we found this:

subway map for Tokyo, can it be any more confusing?

Tsukiji fish market

super fresh sushi at the restaurant next to the fish market. This is a MUST DO! Soooo yummy!

Next, we went to fabric town in Nippori to check out all the fabric shops. I heard lots of good things about those shops and I expected a lot and I was not disappointed

Nippori fabric town

Nippori was really pretty, we saw some beautiful blooming treees there.

we went to Lemon first, they have lots of cute stuff for kids

some super cute children t-shirts

And then we went to THE fabric shop: Tomato! Have a look at those pictures:

fabric shop Tomato

5 floors crammed with fabrics

lots of cute fat quarters

they had lots of licensed fabrics from Sanrio and San-X

cute patterns to iron on clothes

After that, we went to Akihabara, THE shopping district for all the geeks in Tokyo! To be honest, I didn’t enjoy it that much, too many guys (geeks) who are playing TV games all day long (you can see that), but I guess it is heaven for any guy.

shopping mall in Akihabara

guys trading cards (aren't they too old for that?)

After that, we went back to Shinjuku to go to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. They have 2 very tall towers with an observation deck. We wanted to see Tokyo at night from above. Here are some gorgeous pictures we took:

Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building

view from the observation deck

Shinjuku from above

Tokyo tower from far away

at the end of the day we went to Starbucks to get a coffee and check out the Japanese menue

Today we left for Tokyo, Japan in the morning and arrived there in the afternoon. We booked a hotel near the main train station Shinjuku. The reason why we chose this hotel was that we wanted to have a very convenient located hotel so we could explore Tokyo easily. It was our first trip to Japan and we were very excited. I don’t want to write too much, but show you our trip in pictures:

our hotel room in Shinjuku. The hotel was really nice, but hotel rooms in Tokyo are very small.

after our arrival we went to the nearby shopping mall Takashimaya Times Square

First we checked out Tokyu Hands which we heard a lot about before

Tokyu Hands had some really cute bento boxes

they also had a huge collection of cute stamps

after our shopping we went to have our first Tokyo sushi dinner. We love eating sushi in Hong Kong.

the sushi was SOOO good, we were surprised that it could be so much better than Hong Kong. I even like sea urchin (the yellow thing in the left corner of the box)

our sushi chef, he made us some really delicious sushi and we were even more excited to be in Tokyo.

The official Hong Kong distributor of Re-Ment visited us at our office today because we are very interested in selling Re-Ment products in our shop. If you don’t know who or what Re-Ment is: Re-Ment is a famous Japanese company making miniature sets of food, licensed characters, animals and more. They would fit perfectly into our collection and we are sure our customer will love them as well. Of course we plan to order from Re-Ment directly in the future (we usually order directly from the manufacturers without any middlemen involved), but for now, we want to test the market and order smaller quantities first. Below you can see some of my favorite Re-Ment sets:

miniature kitchenware set with pandas

cute miniature gingerbread houses

Alice in Wonderland keychains

miniature animals baking yummy food

very realistic looking miniature sushi

my favorite: very cute miniature cake charms

Re-Ment miniature set with strawberries

10 different sets with the strawberry theme

Today 2 years ago we got our first order in our shop! It seems such a long time ago and it’s hard to imagine that time now. We are at almost 2,000 orders now and we came so far since that day. I am very gratefull for the success of this business and we are very happy with our work. I enjoy my job every day and never feel any regret starting it. Our customers are great people who are very kind, friendly and also very patient when a package doesn’t arrive within days. Thank you soooo much for everything! We promise we will work very hard to make this business bigger and offer even more cute products to everyone around the world. Thank you!
Your modes4u-team (Sandra, Alan and Bonnie)

I just realised that I totally forgot to write about some great news: We are going to be published in a book! The French author of the book called “Greediness in dough polymer” (that’s her translation from French, I am sure there is something wrong with it haha), contacted me and said she would like to publish some of our product pictures and our shop name in her book. The book is about polymer clay and what you can do with it. Here is a link to the publisher’s website: EPLibrairie and here you can have a look at the author’s own blog: Atelier Cup of Tea. As you can see on her blog, she uses our animated polymer clay banner. Her name is Valerie Beulet. We will get our own book copy once the book is published. I will definitely post pictures of it on this blog as soon as we get it.

We made a new animated Polymer Clay Banner for our shop. If you like, you can copy this banner and use it on your blogs/websites etc. We also have an animated Kokka fabric banner, which can be downloaded here: Kokka banner (right click and save image) Feel free to comment below and tell us where you show our banner. Thanks!

Today I discovered in our Google Analytics account that we got some traffic from a blog called “ckbean“. I was curious what they were writing about our shop and searched for any references about us on that blog. I found out that the blog is in Chinese and the writer of this blog is an old workmate of my husband. “Bean”, that’s his English name, wrote a blog post about our business and explained a bit how we started our business a few years ago. If you can read Chinese, here is the link to the blog post: modes4u on ckbean.blogspot.com