Takarajima Senkou
Is a small dyeing workshop founded by Chiharu Ogomori in 2001. Her focus has always been in finding a balance between traditional handcraft and modern-day lifestyle.
In the pursuit of the way to create products dyed only with natural materials by hand sustaining the tradition, while making it an equable business, she established the scheme of maintaining middle-size production volume through OEM (dyeing products made by other apparel companies).
Chiharu says:
What we try to produce are affordable everyday products with a touch of handwork, but not expensive pieces of art. It is because we want more people to discover the value and charm of hand-dyed garments by wearing them on daily basis.
I believe this is one sustainable way of increasing the supporters of traditional craftsmanship.
To materialize this vision, we strive to keep up with the latest market demand through constant research and development. While maintaining the quality and characteristics of handwork, we also try to standardize the production process with figurative data to provide the clients clear indicators of required cost and time, as well as to improve the operational efficiency.
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When I look back, it all started when I was looking for a job and couldn’t find the workplace that achieved both maintaining traditional skills and commercial output.
It was the time when everything was becoming digitalized, everything including the market climate, customer values and business practices was changing drastically.
The traditional dyeing and textile making industries were shrinking, losing young workers and customers at the same time.
What had happened to Indigo dyeing, the priceless skill with a history of thousands of years? It was becoming no longer familiar or available in our everyday lives.
I wanted to make clothes that I wanted to wear, made with the natural materials and by hand, yet affordable.
What could we do to bring handcrafted clothes back to everyone’s daily wardrobe?
Every time I dye fabric with natural materials, I am - still today - moved by the straightforward beauty and the intriguing character of the outcome. Still, what can I do to show this to the users? How can I have people actually feel it?
One of my answers to these endless questions was the middle scale natural dyeing workshop.
Natural hand dyeing can be the medium connecting us in the modern-day living back with the nature. I have an image of the products I dye with my hands to speak for themselves, just as a century-old tree can say so much by just standing quietly.
Our humble factory in the rice fields is like an alchemic lab to me, where my passion and visions come into shapes of gracious little garments, that might find the way in your wardrobe one day.
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