In 2017, our founder Akinori Adachi visited a sake brewery in northern Japan. The brewer — sixth-generation — described how every barrel of sake that left his door passed through eight middlemen before reaching an international buyer. Eight layers of fees, miscommunication, lost provenance. The brewery couldn’t grow. The buyer couldn’t reach the source.

That visit became the question that built DiGiTrad: what if technology could remove the middlemen entirely, and put a Japanese maker one click away from a global buyer?

We started with three vendor relationships in Tokyo. Today, we work with over 250 Japanese makers across the country — from rice farmers in Niigata to engine fabricators in Aichi to sake brewers in Toyama. We visit them. We know their families. We translate not just their products, but their stories.

This is the new global commerce: direct, dignified, rooted in craft.