We have been a Gold supplier on Alibaba.com for 2 years now and we decided to stop promoting our wholesale business there. We are just too busy with our existing customers and our retail shop and don’t have the time anymore to accept any new wholesale customers. Therefore, we decided to shut down our Alibaba Gold supplier account and focus on our online shop instead. I am sure we will not regret this decision.

we got this Gold Supplier badge from Alibaba

Our bento boxes are getting more and more popular and therefore we decided to add some new bentos to our shop. We got some adorable new cute bento boxes in today. There are new bentos with bears, pigs, frogs, cute animals, donuts and more in yellow, pink, blue, red and green. Those bento boxes are great for kids to bring lunch to kindergarten or school, or for adults to office. We even got some matching cutlery sets. If you have a company and are interested in our bento box wholesale deals, please contact us by email.

Japanese bento box with cute bears

kawaii bento box with bears and colourful donuts

pink piggy cutlery set

cute frog bento box

blue bento box with bear family

We just got the newest wholesale fabrics catalog from Kokka Japan today! It is the Spring 2010 catalog with the newest designer fabrics by Kokka. If you are interested in the wholesale catalog, please contact us by email.

newest Kokka Wholesale Catalog Spring 2010

We got the newest licensed fabric catalog 2010 from Kokka this week and updated our Kokka wholesale catalog. Please contact us by email if you are interested in getting this catalog. Please only contact us if you have a registered business. This catalog includes all the newest Japanese fabrics from Kokka including Trefle, Push Pin, Eau de Mer, November books, Story books etc. Below you can see some of the fabrics already available in our shop: 

Little Red Riding Hood fabric

Cinderella Japanese fabric

Peter Pan Kokka fabric

Bremen Town Musicians fabrics from Kokka Japan

cute deer fabric Eau de Mer by Kokka

pink cupcakes gauze fabric from Japan

Today the courier delivered the Kokka fabric swatches we chose yesterday at the Kokka office. I have to say: LOVE LOVE LOVE them! The fabrics are super cute, great quality and the colours are so brilliant and colourful. Now, the hard job begins to choose which fabrics we are going to order for our shop. If you have a shop and you are interested in Kokka fabric wholesale deals, contact us by email. I took some pics and you can see the fabrics below:

cute Kokka fabric with deers

Kokka fabric with cute animals and garden

cute Kokka Fabric with mushrooms

Matryoshka doll Kokka fabric

I was looking for a supplier for the popular fancy stationery brands from Japan for quite a while now. These brands are: Q-lia, Mind wave, Crux, Kamio, Coolpool, Cram Cream etc. I wanted to order directly from Japan to make sure that we get the best price possible and also the newest items as soon as they are available. It took me really a long time to finally find a direct business contact in Japan for these brands. They even have an office in Hong Kong to present the brands and I set up an appointment to check out their office, talk about how to work together and most importantly, see their products. So today, Alan and I went to their office, which is surprisingly just a 5min drive by taxi from our office, and met with the boss. She was a very nice lady and we talked for 2 hours about our future collaboration and she also gave us tons of catalogs with all the super cute stationery items inside. We also visited their warehouse and picked up quite a lot of items to put them quickly into our shop. We are going to order from them very often from now on because these cute, kawaii items are just the perfect match for our kawaii shop. And the quality is just amazing, no comparision to the China made items. If you have a business and are interested in wholesale prices, please contact us by email for the huge wholesale catalog. The items can be shipped directly from Japan to your company.

cute pink Kamio memo pad

kawaii Japanese memo pad from Crux

cute animal erasers from Japan

Today a very good customer from France visited us at our new office. They placed a few orders already and wanted to finally meet in person and discuss future collaborations with us. I also showed them some items from our showroom and they took them with them to show to their customers. My customer is a buyer for big companies like Carrefour in France, therefore this business opportunity is really great for us and them as well. I am really looking forward to keep working together with them in the future.

Today we celebrate the 1 year anniversary of our kawaii shop modes4u.com!!! YAY! Exactly one year ago we launched our new kawaii shop and it has happened a lot since then. The start was slow, as it is hard for every new online shop to get visitors, and more importantly CUSTOMERS. We invested a lot of time and effort into making our shop more “Google-friendly” and did a lot of internal SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to bring our shop to the top search results in Google. It was a good decision as our shop is now listed very well for important keywords we have. Therefore, the number of visitors and customers grew steadily since the beginning and we are almost at the 200th order mark now. Another very good decision was to allow our wholesale customers to order directly online instead of ordering from catalogs. This way, our wholesale customers are able to see what items we have in stock right now and can make their bulk orders and get the items fast. I expect a lot from our cute shop for the 2nd year: A lot more visitors, customers and of course ORDERS.

To a great, successful and fun 2nd year!!!

Your modes4u-Team

I got a visit from 2 representatives from Alibaba.com today. Alibaba is the biggest sourcing website for finding suppliers in China and Asia. Until now we had a free account there to promote our company and products to possible customers in Europe and USA. We get enquiries almost every day but having a free account has a big disadvantage: the number of products is limited to 50pcs only. A friend of mine got a Gold Membership last year but never activated it because of personal reasons and he offered me to take over his membership for free. That is a really generous offer because usually these memberships cost around 40,000 HKD (~ 4,000 EURO) per year.  I promised him to send him a cheque if we find a lot more customers with this new account. So the guys from Alibaba came to check out my office and verify the business address. I will get the new Gold Member account within the next few days and I will be able to upload and promote as many products I have. Keeping my fingers crossed to find more potential wholesale customers for my business.

An old customer of us visited me today in my office. He is from Germany and wanted to see our current products. Last year in April he visited me for the first time, I wrote about it here. He was our first visitor visiting us at our new office. Today, he ordered some items we had in stock and we may be also helping him to make a new online shop and optimize it for Google. His current shop isn’t suitable for Google and Alan will be able to optimize it for him. Alan is really knowledgeable about Google Search Engine Optimization and a very skillfull programmer. Anyone interested in Search Engine Optimization SEO, please have a look at his website: SEO Expert