Showed a mini Sankome at Design Festa 63

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At Design Festa 63 on May 23rd and 24th (a big indie art and craft fair in Tokyo), Naoyoshi let me place a mini Sankome at her booth. It was printed with Ohaco, the 3D builder I'm working on.

Ohaco poster with a printed Sankome figure on the shelf next to it

Most of the character-and-merch side of Shirokuma, including the brand icon itself, has been made by my wife Naoyoshi. Lately she posts the goods-side things on the KUMAYOSHI account, while the main Shirokuma account mostly covers development-side topics.

Because of that split, this was the first time in roughly a year that anything Shirokuma-branded had been on a Design Festa table, since we showed up at the 61st.

The booth

Wide shot of the booth. KUMAYOSHI's polar bear illustration in the back; a picture book, the Sankome sample, and keychains on the shelf

Naoyoshi had two booths this time, and a sizeable amount of the space went to Shirokuma-side goods. Keychains, the picture book, polar bear figures, that kind of thing. Sankome got a small spot in the corner of the shelf, paired with an Ohaco poster. Apart from the single Sankome sample, every figure on the table was Naoyoshi's.

At past Design Festas I'd also sold polar bear figures of my own, modeled in CAD, but I didn't put any of those out this time. Last time, sales were a bit modest compared to Naoyoshi's pieces... I do love the beauty of those figures, built on smooth G2-continuous curves, though...

A small polar bear figure 3D-printed from a CAD model, with smooth curved surfaces and only the eyes and snout printed in black

Side view of the printed Sankome prototype

According to Naoyoshi, a few people came by and said they wanted the Ohaco-built Sankome, and some of them got curious about Ohaco itself off the back of it. That genuinely made me happy.

Front view: three eyes and a two-tone pointed hat

Ohaco is an app, still in development, that lets you make 3D-printable models just by stacking blocks. The stamp feature for placing eyes just barely landed in time for this Design Festa. I ran the print on the morning of the event itself.

Designing Sankome inside Ohaco, placing eyes with the stamp tool

So in the end I sent over a single piece. I printed it as color-separated parts and glued them together. If the feature had landed a bit earlier, I might have been able to sell a few to the people who said they wanted one...

Ohaco's "split by color" print view, with Sankome broken out into per-color parts

The picture book

The shelf also had The Bear Who Couldn't Make, a picture book Sankome shows up in, and a few people picked up a copy and took it home.

The picture book hanging on the pegboard, with the polar bear illustration behind it and pin badges and keychains around it

The Sankome character design itself went through more than a hundred drafts and a lot of heated back-and-forth between Naoyoshi and me before it settled into the version that ended up in the book.

Compared to figures and keychains, a picture book is a months-long project. Economically it doesn't really pencil out, but I want to give Sankome and the other animals around them a proper world to live in, running on the kind of needlessly elaborate backstory I'd want to read myself, and keep making various things off the back of that going forward.

A single prototype, parked at the corner of someone else's booth, got people asking to buy it. That was the most encouraging signal I've had on Ohaco so far. Grateful to Naoyoshi for taking the sample along and standing at the booth.

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