CEO Yukinori Okamoto on goof’s journey so far, and where it is heading.
I want many people to invent print that is free from convention and common assumptions—print that reaches people’s hearts and makes society a kinder place.
“Print media exists only because it has a purpose”
For a long time, print was one of the main media connecting people with one another and with society, and it was indispensable to economic growth.
I grew up in the small print shop my grandfather founded. I was told, “This one sheet is helping to finish that road,” and I learned that print is valuable not as “making things,” but because it has a purpose—to inform, to guide.
Where print and digital first came together
It was the early 1990s, and I was working at a startup that set out to democratize education through the internet. The internet itself was not yet available to everyone, and caught between the ideal that “digital will make people’s lives richer” and the reality, we went through round after round of trial and error in search of innovation.
We could see the potential of personalization, but it was hard to achieve with the digital technology of the time. So we repeatedly tested print materials, versioned for different learning habits, as supplementary teaching aids. In every segment, students who combined both media improved by an average of 20 points more than those who relied mainly on one. The program’s finely balanced mix of digital and analog contributed greatly to the company’s growth.
It reminded me how important it is to understand the purpose clearly—here, building learning models tailored to each student—and to use media correctly. That experience, more than thirty years ago, is what opened my eyes to the value and appeal of print that makes the right use of digital.
Turning know-how into a platform for new needs
For more than 25 years, since we first began offering services built on digital printing, we have worked to understand the essence and purpose of the challenges our customers face, transformed printing by working with the best technology of each era, and solved a great many problems. When it comes to delivering print innovation, I believe we have become the only one of our kind in Japan.
Having faced so many different challenges and built up so much know-how, we can now see a new landscape. Needs that arise precisely because people and society have mastered digital. Conventional printing that cannot keep up with the growing diversity of reasons to use print in the first place. The reality of the CO2 and waste it produces. goof understands all of this, and aims to provide a platform that anyone can join and use freely.
We believe a platform that lets anyone use print anytime, anywhere, without any waste will raise the value of print and broaden the places it is used, as the companies and people who take part work toward—and practice—the co-creation of careful, kind communication. Through print’s complementary relationship with digital, people connect organically with one another and with society, and seek one another out. Let us work together to build a kinder society with less anxiety.
CEO, goof Inc.Yukinori Okamoto