After over a couple of decades in and out of the automotive aftermarket building the top companies in the industry, I felt a void of purpose.
Anybody can generate ideas, but true strategy requires the capability to implement those ideas within strict operational constraints. Over three decades of technical and creative leadership, I have worked side by side with founders and key stakeholders across diverse industries to listen, strategize, and iterate market-leading brands. As a founding member of entities like Skunk2 and Axial, I spent a decade and a half building elite, dominant companies in the high-performance automotive aftermarket and motorsports sectors.
As a brand specialist, I worked side by side with founders and key stakeholders to understand (listen), envision (strategize), and develop (iterate) industry-leading brands, with a lot of good times in between.
Anybody can come up with ideas, but you have to come up with ideas that you can implement with the resources you have.
I worked in several industries, but over the last decade and a half, his focus was on building leading companies and brands, including as a founding member of Skunk2 and Axial, many of which became leaders in their respective segments.
Japanese Food and Culture became my mission
When the pandemic altered the restaurant landscape, I applied my brand architecture frameworks directly to regional Japanese food culture. In the American market, mass food distributors routinely exploit a lack of cultural literacy, selling instant ramen kits and powder bases to establishments outside of dense coastal enclaves. I launched the Taniguchi Ramen pop-up to actively fight this market dilution, producing a traditional Hakata-style tonkotsu entirely from scratch, including all three primary stock components.
Process-driven and able to work across multiple industries
I bring that exact same high-tolerance execution and refusal to compromise to the culinary space.
303 Night Market was an event planned for micro and small businesses in Denver, Colorado. Taniguchi Ramen was a pop-up that started in August 2019 but shut down in February 2020 due to the pandemic. Also, due to the attacks on Asian Americans, I helped raise $14k with Karl Palma to give out to neighborhoods in the form of food (we partnered with GoGoCurry). Your Stomach Loves Us was awarded $5k by GoFundMe. Oishii Desu is one of the largest, if not the largest, online English resources (16-21k to 33-38k unique visitors per month) for Japanese food and culture in the United States.
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Why U.S. coffee shops are rebranding a 70-year-old Japanese aisu kōhī method as “Japanese Iced Coffee,” and what it reveals about how “Japanese” gets used as an unearned premium signal in the West. (Plus a love letter to Vietnamese cà phê sữa đá and Taiwanese sea salt coffee.) Read the full piece →