Considered homeware, made to last seasons.
Haruki Nishimura spent seven years as a buyer for a mid-size department store in Osaka before leaving in the autumn of 2018. The job was not bad, exactly. But the buying process was driven almost entirely by margin targets and seasonal floor plans, and the things that ended up on the shelves were often things nobody had actually tested in a kitchen. He kept a running list of items he would have stocked instead. By early 2019, the list was long enough to become a shop.
The first version of Oak Vault Line was a table at the Kyoto Antique Fair, held the third weekend of each month at Toji Temple. Haruki sold cutting boards, a few ceramic pieces from a kiln in Shigaraki, and some linen towels he had sourced directly from the Nara mill. The table sold out by noon on the first day. He opened the online shop in June 2019 with fourteen items. Twelve of those fourteen are still in the catalogue, either in their original form or in a revised version after he found a better supplier.
Today Oak Vault Line operates from a small warehouse and packing room in the Fushimi district of Kyoto. There are two full-time staff and one part-time packer who comes in on Tues…
Haruki Nishimura spent seven years as a homeware buyer for a department store group in Osaka, where he developed a habit of testing products at home before recommending them to the floor team. He left in autumn 2018 and started Oak Vault Line the following spring, initially as a market stall at Toji Temple in Kyoto. He sources most of the catalogue himself, travelling to kilns in Aichi and Shiga and to the linen mill in Nara two or three times a year. Outside the shop, he cooks most evenings and keeps a small notebook of things that broke, chipped, or disappointed him in the kitchen. Which is, more or less, the product development process.