The Evolution of Bokksu: A History!

Aug 26, 2019by Julia LiMarzi

Last week, Danny (our Founder) gave a little presentation to our team about Bokksu's history. It was for our newest team members, but it really wowed all of us to look back and truly see the vast difference between Bokksu Day 1 and Bokksu today. I thought it was really cool and might be something of all you lovely Bokksu Members would like to see too. So here is how we made it from 1 box type with 6 unique snacks & teas to 3 boxes and 16 snack & tea varieties!

2016: Bokksu Day 1

We began with one box only in May 2016, the Classic Bokksu. It might shock you, but this first box had only six unique snacks and teas! It included a total of 15-20 items and a simple postcard as the tasting guide. It came in our very first custom-designed box, pictured below for posterity. At the time it was a simple cardboard box that folded together. To be completely honest though, even this box wasn't our very first box. Before officially launching in May, Danny was sending boxes to friends and family to test everything out. For that, he used the box pictured in the banner above. Ah, memories.

Original Classic Bokksu Box

2017

As you may imagine, everyone was requesting more variety in the box. We increased the variety of snacks in our Classic Bokksu to ten different items, keeping the total at 15-20. We changed the design of our Classic Bokksu to the first iteration of the two-part box you know today. With more unique snacks and teas, expanded our Tasting Guide to six pages, making a cute little tri-fold. By the way, you can read more on the evolution of our Tasting Guide here.

This was an exciting year for us, and by the end of 2017, we introduced our second box: Tasting Bokksu! It debuted with eight unique snacks and tea varieties, 8-10 items total.

Classic Bokksu Box Tasting Bokksu

2018

Both Classic and Tasting Bokksu saw pretty major expansions this year. Classic Bokksu's curation of unique snacks expanded to 10-14 varieties, with each month having 20-25 snacks total. Tasting Bokksu also grew from eight snacks and teas to 10-14 unique items, one of each in the box. We also had our very first holiday box this December to celebrate winter and the new year.

Holiday Bokksu Box

2019: Bokksu Today

2019 is shaping up to be another big year for Bokksu! So far this year we expanded our Classic Bokksu curation, yet again, to include 15-17 different snacks and teas each month, 20-25 items total. With so many snacks, we also expanded our tasting guide. We decided to do more than that though and created our new "Culture Guide" as we call it. It's now 24 pages stuffed with info on selected snacks as well as Japanese culture. We also just released our second-ever limited edition Bokksu for our Moon Festival Bokksu.

We also launched our latest box: Vegetarian Snack Bokksu. This was by far the biggest request we received, and we were so excited to make it a reality. Still in its first iteration, this vegetarian version of Classic Bokksu includes 20-25 items, with non-vegetarian snacks replaced with more vegetarian snack items curated that month.

So far, I've only covered the physical differences in our box throughout the years, but we've made a lot of important intangible improvements too. In 2019 we were proud to upgrade our saver shipping method for faster free shipping worldwide and now offer free tracking to over 40+ countries (which we hope to expand in the future!). We also started our new monthly surveys this year to improve our curation with your direct feedback.

There are so many amazing Japanese snacks out there, and we have a really great time discovering them and sharing them with all of you. Thanks everyone for making this journey possible, and here's to the future!

Not a Member yet? Join today and be a part of our future :)

What future improvements do you want to see? Let us know in the comments!