About Us

Tokyo Pen Shop was founded in 2008 in the entryway of a one-bedroom apartment, and has been growing ever since with the support of customers like you. The goal of TokyoPenShop.com is to bring the experience of shopping in a Japanese stationery store to the whole world. We warehouse and ship our products from Fairfield, Iowa in the United States.

Kimberly cares deeply about making fine Japanese stationery goods accessible to those who don't live in Japan. After finishing her M.A. in the midwest, and finding it difficult to access Japanese pens and notebooks online, she and Frank founded Tokyo Pen Shop. Having been both a student and teacher of Japanese, she cares about the unique needs of those studying a character-based language. The fine precision detail required a finer pen, and the quest for the perfect pen began.

Kimberly got into e-commerce technology a little by accident. Her first job out of school was in a technical role at an e-commerce start-up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She then went on to work in other technical roles for the worldwide Apple Online Store for Apple Inc. until 2013, when Kimberly and Frank both left their ‘day jobs’ to work on Tokyo Pen Shop full time.

Frank was an early convert to fine Japanese pens (Kimberly can be very persuasive) and hasn't looked back. Even though his background is in hardware engineering (he also worked for Apple until 2013), he enjoys working on www.tokyopenshop.com and other software tools for the business.

We are all so grateful for the support of our customers, who have allowed us to combine our love of merchandising Japanese stationery with technology. Thank you for all of your support!

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