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Naraz Design

eCommerce

Hoshikuzu

A storybook brand site for Hoshikuzu, an indie kawaii studio building a four-character "Starfolk Family" universe of comics, plushies, and limited-edition collectibles. I designed and built the full site — narrative-driven landing experience, multilingual content system (JP / EN / ZH), comics reader, video shorts, art gallery, newsletter capture, and shop hand-off — all tied together by a slow, hand-made, mostly-at-night atmosphere.

Hoshikuzu
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Case Study

Hoshikuzu needed more than a storefront. The studio sells plushies, blind boxes, vinyl figures, and prints, but the brand lives or dies on whether a stranger feels the world before they see the price tag. The site had to read like a picture book and behave like a content platform. I designed the visual language end-to-end: chaptered scroll structure (世界 → 家族 → 物語 → 短編 → 作品 → について), drifting stardust-cloud parallax, swaying-lantern webm loops, and a typographic system that lets Japanese, English, and Chinese sit side by side without one language dominating. Every section opens with a chapter mark and breathes — the goal was for the scroll itself to feel like turning a page. On the build side I set up:

A trilingual content layer so comics, art, and copy can be published once and surfaced in JP / EN / ZH A comics module with episode covers, ordered chapter navigation, and Firebase-hosted artwork pulled per-locale A "Moments" short-film section served through Cloudflare Stream for fast playback on mobile An art gallery driven from the same content system as the comics Newsletter capture (monthly letter from the family, bilingual) Shop hand-off to the commerce surface at /shop SEO + Open Graph + Twitter cards tuned for collectible-toy discovery (plushies, blind boxes, designer toys Canada)

The result is a site that converts by mood first and product second — visitors meet Otou, Okaa, Anika, and Mu-Chan before they ever see a checkout button, which is exactly the funnel an IP-led collectibles brand needs.