Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

I read the whole letter and loved the tone of it! It jumps at you right away that: (1) Here&#x27;s a guy who really cares about his business, its future, his employees. (2) He talks candidly about the reasons for closing up: his declining health, sales volumes, even including awkward sentences like &quot;<i>So chalk is more environmentally friendly, I think.</i>&quot; I am now a fan of Hagoromo.<p>It was rather refreshing at a time when I can&#x27;t stand reading more than a paragraph of a typical press release of a BigCo written by lawyers or PR specialists. Unlike this essay, those are intended to obfuscate, not to inform.

This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine&#x2F;recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough.<p>It&#x27;s also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much envision somone making that chalk in a garage and selling it to universities&#x2F;individuals.<p>I also think that it&#x27;s somewhat short sighted to assume procurement by the employer is needed. Especially in &quot;brainy&quot; jobs it&#x27;s pretty common for people to be willing to spend their own money for tools they use on the job. If my school only provides chalk X I&#x27;m pretty much willing to spend some of my own money for the better chalk if I can&#x27;t change their mind.<p>Maybe they were just &quot;too big&quot; and targeting a commodity market instead of going for the smaller premium market.

The main reason, apparently: &quot;These days, local governments focus on bid prices rather than quality.&quot;<p>High quality commodities are considered nowadays luxury and not bare minimum. Quite sad, really.

About 20 years ago they should have created a grading standard for chalk so they could have avoided their commoditization, or at least only compete with others at similar quality (and presumably margins). Similar to organic standards.

OPEN SOURCE THE MAGIC CHALK RECIPE AND MACHINE PLANS

Two passages stood out.<p><i>At first, we considered selling the whole company, enabling the Hagoromo brand to survive and helping overall chalk sales. But we could not find the right deal for the company.</i><p><i>I&#x27;m sad that I have been forced to close down my company. But I am pleased I have been able to contribute to education by providing high-quality chalk over the last 50 years.</i><p>Commendable passion to a bigger cause, but sometimes that isn&#x27;t enough. Very touching note.

Chalk makes me feel weird when I use it. Tactically it just rubs me the wrong way and gives me the same chills I get from fingernails on a chalkboard. Just thinking about it bothers me :\<p>However, it is nice to read about people who have a passion for what they do, and this man seems to have passion in spades.

This man expresses such a passion for chalk...chalk of all things, and it&#x27;s inspiring. I could see someone reading this and becoming an artisan chalk maker as a result(I kid, but its probably true). Even I kind of want to run a chalk business after reading it.

From the article it looks like the buyer in South Korea will learn how to continue on with the chalk. I suspect we will see it on the market again.

It&#x27;s amazing that they had just one set of machines to make all their chalk. I hope the South Korean version would be successful.

reading that made me think of the Byrd&#x27;s song<p>To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven

I&#x27;m sorry for this man having so many health problems. But I can understand otherwise how to make chalk in the pacific japanese coast burning tons and tons of japanese oyster shells could be less profitable and much more dangerous since 2011. I wish him well.

I hope he shares his recipe.

When he said that people sent a flood of faxes, it made me totally cool with no more chalk.<p>When your customers are still sending faxes, that pretty much sums up your dire situation.