Most of our business partners are located in Japan or the US, so it is always very special when they come to our office in Hong Kong during their business trips. This week Shigeo from San-X visited us. We have known him for many years already, but of course we don’t see him a lot in person, so it was nice to meet him again. It was the first time he saw our current office and was very impressed how big it is. Of course he also enjoyed seeing how many San-X products we stock and took a lot of pictures of our warehouse. The next time we visit Japan, Shigeo wants to show us the San-X warehouse. That would be totally awesome and a dream come true for us.

And as we thought it should be kind of mandatory for a San-X employee to take a picture with Rilakkuma we photographed Shigeo, Sandra and Alan with our huge office mascot.

Alan, Shigeo and Sandra with our huge Rilakkuma office mascot

Shigeo from San-X takes picture of our warehouse

If you see a super fancy cake in the modes4u office, it’s usually birthday time. This week we celebrated Alan’s birthday with looots of chocolate. The cake we got him was so incredibly rich that everybody was just happily smiling after finishing it. It was already Alan’s 4th birthday cake!!! Isn’t that amazing? What a lucky guy to get 4 cakes. However, our cake was definitely one of his favourites.

Rilakkuma was celebrating with us of course. Our huge office mascot can’t be missing on a festive occasion like this and had to be in our team picture as well. He is just so huge and draws so much attention to him that you barely notice the chocolate cake next to him.

Happy Birthday Alan!

Alan with his chocolate birthday cake

The cake was so full of chocolate that it was really hard to cut it

Our team including office mascot Rilakkuma with the cake - if you can find it

It was an exciting week for the coffee lovers in our office. Until now they mainly relied on instant coffee to satisfy their caffeine needs, but this will be yesterday’s news from now on. Because this week a Starbucks coffee shop opened right next to our office. It was a big thing for us, as there hasn’t been one in the area where our company is located. So the whole team took a little trip to the coffee shop on the opening day to enjoy a high quality coffee… or a chococlate drink for the non-coffee drinkers. It was really busy there as everybody wanted to check it out.

But just one day after the opening, Starbucks already lost the modes4u team as a daily customer. Because then a wonderful Nespresso coffee machine arrived at our office. Now we’re in coffee heaven and don’t even have to leave the building. There are so many different coffee capsules and also many different variations from Latte Macchiato to Espresso. Once it was set up everybody gathered around the machine to get a coffee. Especially our Chinese colleagues liked it a lot, as it not that common in Hong Kong househoulds to have professional coffee machines like that as it is in Europe.

The only thing that’s missing are some kawaii mugs, as we just have a wild mug mixture with many different designs.Maybe we have to buy some of the cool Rilakkuma Chococlate and Coffee cups we got some weeks ago for ourselves. Wouldn’t that be the perfect combination?

Out team pushed to one side of the new and highly packed Starbucks coffee shop

Our powerful little caffeine dispenser: A Nespresso coffee machine

Everybody gathers around to get a cup of coffee

Karen shows Sylvania how to use the Nespresso machine

Rilakkuma bear cup with chocolate & coffee San-X

Although we moved into a big office last year we already just have little warehouse space left as we get new products all the time. So now we came up with a new idea to use our space more effectively. We bought a lot of grids and built sticker walls at the sides of our shelves. It looks really professional, like in a real stationery shop.  Another advantage: We can find the right stickers much faster, as we don’t have to pull out boxes of the shelves anymore. And of course it is also much prettier than to keep the cute stickers in boxes. Don’t you think?

One of our new sticker walls on the side of our warehouse shelves

Now you can see all the lovely designs very well

it looks soo pretty - and is really handy too

We already wrote about Sandra’s and Alan’s cat staying in our office during their time in Austria. This week it was time for Miu to go home again. But she didn’t leave without having her big moment. And what a good one!

While being quite shy and careful at the beginning of her visit in our office, she got more adventurous with every day and explored every corner there is. Still our photographer Ho was quite surprised when he found Miu laying comfortably on his photo desk. He took advantage of the situation and took some cute pictures of our new super model with our stickers. Miu was quite a natural. Because she didn’t care about the camera and just relaxed. Perfect.

Now she has had her 5 minutes of fame and enjoys her home again. It’s probably for the best, as nobody would pay attention to our products anymore if an adorable real cat was in every picture.

perfect cat posing for the camera with stickers

Miu getting comfortable in front of the camera...and sleepy

our photographer Ho finding the new model in our little photo studio

Today we got a Chinese Pool Table for our office and immediateley had to have a little game during our lunch break. Chinese Pool is very popular among teenagers and young people in Hong Kong and very similar to Pool Billard – it’s all about shooting little pucks into the 4 holes on the table using a cue. There are many different ways to play it and it’s really fun, as you learn it very fast. Even Bianca and I, who have never played it before, scored some points. We had a fun time playing it and had to drag ourselves back to work after lunch. But there is much to do at the moment, as we got new deliveries, e.g. new Japanese Washi Tapes, that we want to add to our online shop as soon as possible.

Chinese Pool Challenge in the office

This is a dream come true for all kawaii-Fans…and children. San-X released a super huge Rilakkuma plush toy. It is 165cm tall and looks just incredibly soft and cozy. Everybody at the office immediately fell in love with it, so we are ordered one as an office mascott. It will definitely be taller than some of our staff members. Don’t you just want to cuddle and squeeze it? We won’t sell the huge bear in our shop because it is for sale in Japan only, but of course we have many other cute Rilakkuma items. They are just smaller.

Huge Rilakkuma Plushie released - isn

This weekend we were moving our office from Kwai Fong to Fo Tan. It took us 3 days to move because we had so much stuff, especially so many products to move. We also had to be very careful with packing the products to make sure nothing gets broken, bent or crushed. It was a really exhausting weekend but we finally made it. Thanks to all our friends who helped us moving, without them we couldn’t have done it. Now we have a much bigger office and warehouse with lots of space for new cute products for our shop Here are some pictures I took during our move:

before the move

our office was quite cramped already

my office table was befind a shelf filled up with bags

our move has officially started

slowly shelves are getting empty

Lok was busy packing products into boxes

we packed most products in big boxes from the Hong Kong Post

the office is almost empty

waiting for the elevator

Alan is disassembling the furniture

in the evening we had a nice dinner with everyone helping us

Thanks for helping guys!!!

Today we signed the new contract for our bigger office I was writing about a couple of days ago. We are really excited about this move because we ran out of space in our current office and we plan to stock a lot more products. Signing the contract was quite some torture for me because the landlord is an elderly Chinese man who doesn’t speak a single word English. Additional, he was super slow with reading all the docouments, signing etc. and he had lots of very strange requests. For example, he took a photo of the keys and started to explain to Alan every single key (of course he mixed them up and struggled to identify them). I was so dumbfounded, I had to take a photo. My butt was hurting because I was sitting on a cheap chair for a whole hour already. I was so glad when this whole procedure was over and we finally had the keys. Next week we will move our office. I will definitely take some photos for you guys again.

explanation of each single key

now, which one is which one??? hahaha

Our office lease is almost finished and we are looking for a new, bigger place to rent. We were checking out many places, most were unacceptable because too dirty/ugly/old or too overpriced. It is really hard to find a suitable, nice looking office in Hong Kong. Rent is ridiculously high in Hong Kong and the office quality often pretty poor. However, today we were lucky and found the right place. It is in Fo Tan, an industrial district of Hong Kong and conveniently located near the highway and the train station. The office is 3 times as big as our current office but we really need the bigger space. Here are some pictures we took today:

this is the new office space

we have windows along 2 sides of the office which is very nice

the entrance to the boss office

this room needs lots of work done before we can move in

unfortunately it comes with this ugly cupboard