From scattered to unified: Kazumasa Kawasaki’s new website

About Kazumasa Kawasaki

Kazumasa Kawasaki is a renowned beauty artist from Japan. He is the founder of “Kawasaki Academy”, an institution that teaches the “Kawasaki Way” of improving one’s external appearance and inner well-being, ultimately leading to a happier life.

The philosophy of Kazumasa Kawasaki lies in the idea that external beauty and internal well-being (that is, your overall health) should coexist in harmony, and improving one automatically improves the other. In his own words, “If your appearance changes, what’s inside changes, and vice versa”.

In addition to the academy, Kawasaki also founded “Le spa de Kazumasa Kawasaki”, a spa that embodies his beauty philosophies, and a product line that includes fermented plant-based foods and essences made from Japanese herbs.

Since it began in 2013, the Kawasaki Academy has helped over 1000 students, through 30 courses and 4 special programs, to improve their health and appearance and become better, happier versions of themselves.

A scattered website experience

When Mr. Kawasaki approached us in the fall of 2024, he had a problem that seems to come around very often: scattered experiences. His services were all split into many different websites, five to be exact:

• One Wix website for the product catalog.
• One for the spa (“Le spa de Kazumasa Kawasaki”).
• One for the Kawasaki Academy.
• One that details Mr. Kawasaki’s life and achievements.
• One for the “Altis KZ” product line that Mr. Kawasaki oversees.

Aside from having to manage five different websites, our client had another problem on top of that: none of the many websites reflected the luxurious and holistic aspect of the brand. The websites looked outdated. Unlike the solutions provided by Kazumasa Kawasaki, which are timeless in essence, websites on the other hand tend to lose their charm after a few years.

The Kawasaki Way is a method of self-improvement that combines our client’s 3 main business propositions: academy, spa, and product line. This holistic approach was not reflected on the web, and this was one of the main problems that we at YF were committed to solve.

The solution: a custom website made in Shopify

When we agreed to help Mr. Kawasaki turn his many websites into one that better reflects his brand’s identity, we took on a challenge that was unprecedented for us at YF at that time: building a custom Shopify website.

Our concept for the new website involved information pages for the spa and academy, as well as product and catalog pages. Aside from that, we also came up with a fully bespoke design. At the end we decided to build a custom Shopify theme that allowed us to implement a completely custom UI and add ecommerce functionality, all from a single place and using only native features.

The benefits of using Shopify

Everyone knows that Shopify is a tried-and-true ecommerce solution due to its outstanding reputation, but what most people might not know is that this very well-known platform is also pretty easy to work with, even when building something as complex as a custom theme.

Thanks to “Liquid”, Shopify’s language for creating custom themes, it’s never been easier to build dynamic pages without having to deal with complex API integrations. Back in the day, displaying dynamic content like products on a catalog page would involve making an API request to a server and then manipulating the response data, including product information like names, images, etc. Not my favorite thing to do, even as an experienced developer. But thanks to Shopify’s Liquid, this can be done with a few lines of code and no API calls at all.

Aside from being able to work with dynamic data from the store in a very simple and straightforward way, applying our bespoke UI design to the website was also a breeze. That’s because we didn’t have to create everything from scratch, necessarily. Instead, we just had to customize a base theme called “Dawn”, which is Shopify’s most popular free theme, to fit our design needs.

Results

No more hopping from website to website. The new home of Kazumasa Kawasaki on the web brings together the Kawasaki Academy, Le spa de Kazumasa Kawasaki, and the products into a single place that has been fully redesigned to better represent our client’s brand and to make it easier for website visitors to learn about the Kawasaki Way method of living a happier life by improving health and external appearance together.

The Shopify platform makes it easy to update product information, as well as add or remove products, or extend the website’s functionalities by installing plugins, all without having to write any code. Our ultimate decision of using Shopify to build a custom website that combines informational pages with ecommerce functionality allowed us to deliver the new website within a strict deadline of only 4 weeks in preparation for an event, during which the launch of the new website was promoted.

Conclusion

With the right platform and a team that was ready to take on a new challenge, we were able to help Kazumasa Kawasaki turn five different websites into one, unifying their main business propositions in a single place with a modern and luxurious design that was conceptualized from scratch to better showcase our client’s brand identity on the web.

Shopify’s easy to use platform and excellent developer experience contributed significantly to the success of this project, and that’s why it’ll continue to be our top choice when it comes to ecommerce.