Thanks to all at NYAF!

We wanted to just take a minute to thank all of you that came out to see us at the New York Anime Festival. We heard lots of encouraging words from many of you and we really appreciate that. We just hope we don't disappoint on the 3rd - we've always said we're starting small, so while you'll see more at the store than you did at NYAF, it's still going to take a little time to build things up. We've only been around since February, and we've taken this store from absolute zero to the web site, the booth at NYAF and a physical store opening on October 3 in that time, so there's been a lot of progress and we think we've done pretty well. But there is still going to be a lot of room to grow once the store is opened. We hope you'll continue to support us in our goal to become the #1 destination for Japanese street fashion in the United States - it's not going to happen overnight.

This was our first festival as a store, and while we're completely exhausted, we had a lot of fun and we learned a lot too. This was sort of a test run for the store in a lot of ways, and we'll use what worked and modify or chuck what didn't. We also had a lot of people coming to us with new business opportunities, and hopefully some of those will bear fruit in the future. And we need to acknowledge all you guys still asking about jobs - we do appreciate the interest, and we've been telling everybody the same thing: just not yet.

Wish we could have wandered around more and seen more of the show itself, but we were just too busy! We did catch a few minutes of the fashion show earlier today, and we got to see AKB48 walk by our booth on Saturday :) (That's them in the photo above, not that you can tell.)

Well, now it's time to refocus again on the store opening on the 3rd. We still have a huge amount of stuff to do and basically no time to do it. But we've announced this date everywhere, so it's basically October 3rd at 12:30PM or bust. We'll do our best to open up a nice store.

We'll have a lot more details on what to expect from the opening and the store itself in the next few days.