I’m Siming, the founder of Niconeco Zakkaya (niconeco.com). I started my little shop in 2015. Before I arrived in the US, I had been living in Tokyo for the past decade. I missed a lot of things about Japan since moving to New York City, especially Japanese zakka and stationery. Zakka (雑貨) refers to everything and anything that improves your home, life, and appearance. To me, zakka are those little things that can truly jazz up your life, making memories and inspiring you. Just like that old saying, "God is in the details" it’s hard to forget the Japanese way of cherishing and being attentive to the little things. I always hoped that someday, I would have the chance to introduce this wonderful part of Japan to people from all over the world!

At Niconeco Zakkaya, we are passionate about offering a hand-picked selection of well-designed, thoughtful, hand-crafted items from Japan. Our mission is to bring beautiful and unique tools to inspire creative works. There are times where I don’t even know where to begin with my creative projects, but once I start to play around there will always some new ideas and inspiration that comes along. It’s important to trust the instincts of your own body, which are sometimes faster and more precise than your brain!

We believe that it’s important to appreciate the little things, and that means having great respect for the limited resources of our small planet. We promote respectful relationships with resources like paper and wood, as they are not something to be thrown out. We hope that much of our packaging will be reused, allowing the time and care put in to be experienced more than once!

There are two things that will always a priority for our brand: customer satisfaction, and the quality of our products. For this reason, we always put time, care and effort into our packaging. Our goal has always been to make our customers feel special and inspired when they receive their purchase. After originally using plain tissue paper for wrapping our products, we were very happy to find customized, environmentally-friendly wrapping at a reasonable cost to us. Our customers love our custom tissue paper, and many even re-use it. We are very grateful to have found noissue!