Kawachiya was founded in 1971 in Shimbashi, Tokyo, one block from the advertising agencies and publishers that made the area a center of Japan's postwar print industry. For decades the company built its reputation on commission work — however demanding the client, the quality would not move. When print media began its decline in the 2000s, president Ryosuke Kunisawa turned those accumulated skills toward something entirely their own.
The technique at the center of their original brand is tenkin — gold foil applied by hand to the cut edges of a notebook. Only two print shops in Japan have preserved the knowledge to do it at all; Kawachiya is the only one that applies the foil entirely by hand. When the brand debuted at a major stationery exhibition in 2017, the process drew a crowd, and led to commissions from luxury brands and foreign royal households. The Morris series extends the work further: William Morris patterns interpreted through UV resin and gold foil, producing a surface depth that printing or embossing alone cannot replicate.
