Afternoon light from the window moved slowly across the wood grain. He picked up a notebook his father had used. “It wasn’t so much about taking over the company. I wanted these people’s work to have a future.” His story began with those quiet words.
More than a company,
I inherited people’s hopes.
What made you decide to take over the family business?
When I was young, I wanted to test myself in the wider world. I had no intention of returning to the family business. That changed one day when I visited the workshop after a long time away.
A craftsman I had known since childhood was working the wood in his usual place, just as he always had. Watching him, I thought for the first time: I don’t want this work to disappear.
Buildings and machines are not the only things worth passing on. There is wisdom that lives in people’s hands, and pride handed down without ever being put into words. Realizing that was where it began.
“Change, so that what matters can endure.
I believe that repetition
is what becomes tradition.”
In his father’s notebook,
one single line.
What have you inherited that you still treasure today?
My father’s notebook. It is full of order notes and material measurements, not grand theories of management. But in the corner of one page, he wrote: “Think beyond the person who uses it.”
It meant thinking not only about making the customer in front of us happy, but about the time when their children would use it. That single line helped me understand why my father always cared so much about making things easy to maintain.
Whenever I think about a new product, I return to those words. Responding to trends matters, but I want to make things people grow more attached to the longer they use them. That is the core we do not want to change.
Still part of someone’s life,
a hundred years from now.
What kind of future would you like to leave behind?
I would be happy if, a hundred years from now, something we made was still part of someone’s life. It is all right if the maker’s name is forgotten. I hope it feels comforting to touch, something people want to repair and use again.
And I want to leave a company where the young people working here can speak proudly about their work. Skills and stories only reach the future when someone else receives them.
