WAZAO-IPPON

WAZAO-IPPON is a fishing brand built around the Japanese bamboo rod and the craft culture surrounding it. I handled technical direction, backend development, and design for their e-commerce site.

The top page loads an infinite stream of square image tiles, using a rhythm closer to a social feed than a conventional storefront. WAZAO-IPPON publishes dense editorial content: field notes, essays on craft, and cultural history. Rather than forcing that material into a category-heavy index, the homepage lets visitors move through the archive visually and discover products and stories side by side.

Articles on the site can embed product links directly within the body text. Because the editorial content carries much of the brand context, the purchase path needed to stay close to the reading experience without interrupting it.

The cart opens as a slide-in drawer rather than a separate page, so adding, reviewing, and checking out never breaks the reading flow.

The site runs on Shopify Hydrogen and Oxygen in a headless configuration: product data from Shopify, editorial content from microCMS, unified through a custom frontend. Shopify Hydrogen was still an emerging technology at the time of build, with limited production examples in Japan — the implementation required working closely with early documentation and building out patterns from scratch.