When we first registered the business in 2018, it was under the name Studio Kuro. At that point, “starting a business” mostly meant showing up at the Trash & Treasure craft fair with a small table and a handful of handmade journals. There wasn’t a long-term vision yet — just making, selling, and seeing where things might lead. And for a while, things drifted like that. We were working, but without a strong sense of direction.

Then the pandemic arrived and everything paused. Materials became hard to source, routines fell apart, and life shifted. In 2021, after a difficult period that required us to make a decision, we chose to continue. We renamed the business Kuro’s Workshop, built the website, and began learning how to run a business from the ground up. 2024 was the year we committed fully — and we’ve been tired ever since.

There’s a lot of advice about how a business is supposed to grow — find your niche, narrow your audience, define a target profile. And honestly, that has never matched our experience. The people who show up here don’t fit into one category. We’ve had pre-teens ask (very politely) to join adults-only classes because they genuinely wanted to learn. We’ve had college students who wanted something to do with their hands other than swipe a screen. We’ve had grandmas and their grown grandchildren sitting side-by-side, making books together. We’ve had best friends — a professor and a police officer — laughing through thread tangles at the same table. There is no single “type” of person drawn to this work, and we don’t want to pretend there is.

Alongside the workshops and journal-making, we also returned to book conservation — something we both came from professionally, but had stepped away from. Working for the institution was full of politics and control battles. The books weren’t treated like something loved — just items to be managed. Now, we work directly with the owners themselves — people who bring in their family Bibles, dictionaries, childhood books, and other books that simply mean something to them. The work feels different when the person who loves the book is sitting across the table from you, asking for help. It reminds us why we learned to do this in the first place.

We know we’re not a conventional business. The world is moving fast — digital everything, all the time — and we’re teaching something that requires your hands, your patience, your attention. The people who come here know why they’re here, even if they never say it aloud. So instead of trying to appeal to everyone, we’re choosing to grow through recognition — the quiet kind. The right people find us, come back, and sometimes bring others. We care more about building something real than building something big. The right people stay. And that’s the point.

Teaching is now a steady part of our work. Every group is different, and each class teaches us something new about how people learn and how we can support that process. We adjust as we go — sometimes by shifting pacing, sometimes by demonstrating more carefully, sometimes by stepping back and letting someone work through the step on their own. It’s not a fixed method, and we don’t expect it to be. The workshops continue to shape itself as we teach, and we learn along side it.

There’s a concept we carry with us: ichigo ichie — this moment, this gathering of hands and work and conversation, happens only once. No matter how many books we repair or how many workshops we teach, the people in the room, the stories in the air, the atmosphere of that exact day — it won’t come again. So we try to meet it fully while it’s here.

We don’t know exactly what Kuro’s Workshop will look like in five years, and we don’t feel rushed to define it. The business is changing as we change — shaped by the projects we take on, the classes we offer, and the people who find their way to us. Things are still forming, and we’re letting the process unfold rather than forcing it into something it isn’t.

We weren’t sure this would work. But here we are, and here you are. Thanks for proving us wrong.

We’ll see you at the workbench.