A Brand Launch Needs More Than One Hero Film
Building a complete visual foundation for KOKO Kawane's launch
Launching a brand rarely means creating just one piece of content.
A website needs photography. Social media needs short-form video. PR and campaigns need their own assets. And across all of it, the brand has to look like the same brand.
All of it has to be ready before launch day.
When KOKO, a Singapore-based café and pâtisserie group, came to Eiwa Media ahead of the launch of KOKO Kawane, they already knew the story they wanted to tell: premium matcha rooted in the people, craft, and landscape of Kawane, Shizuoka.
What they needed was not simply a video production company. They needed a visual foundation for the launch.
Start with what the launch actually needs
KOKO came to us about four months out.
Rather than working from a fixed production package, we built the scope together through conversation. What would the website need? What should the main film communicate? Which moments would work as short social content? And what imagery might turn out to be useful once the campaigns started taking shape?
The final production was a branded documentary film, two short-form videos, and around 70 edited photographs.
The important part was not the number of deliverables. It was that they were designed to work together.
One production, many touchpoints
For KOKO Kawane, that meant capturing far more than beautiful tea fields.
We photographed the landscape, portraits of the tea producer, the harvest and production process, small details of the craft, and matcha being prepared and enjoyed. Alongside that, we filmed the people, environment, and process behind the product for the documentary and the shorter video assets.
Those assets now appear throughout KOKO Kawane's website, supporting different parts of the story rather than sitting as one standalone campaign.
That is where planning pays off. Instead of commissioning a hero video, then finding the website still needs photography, then realizing social needs more material, one production can build a cohesive library around a single story.
Flexibility is part of the plan
Not everything can be planned.
Kawane is mountainous, and the weather turns fast. During our location scout we had bright sunshine in the morning and heavy rain by the afternoon.
That shaped the schedule. We built in contingency and set three potential principal photography days around the harvest period, which gave the production room to adapt without losing the deadline.
The same applied on set. A shot list gives structure, but it should not stop the team from noticing what is actually happening in front of the camera. Some of the most useful assets are not the ones a mood board predicts.
Flexibility does not mean working without a plan. It means leaving room to respond when reality changes.
Producing in Japan while the client stays abroad
KOKO's team stayed in Singapore throughout the shoot.
Handing a production to a team in another country takes trust. The client needs to know what is happening on location, whether the schedule is holding, and whether the creative direction is coming through in the work.
Working in both Japanese and English let us deal directly with people and locations in Japan while keeping KOKO informed in English throughout. We shared updates from the field and handled the day-to-day decisions locally.
For international production, the real value is not translation. It is giving the client visibility and confidence when they cannot be on set.
As KOKO later described it:
"Despite the international engagement across the countries we were respectively based in, the collaboration felt entirely seamless and boundaryless."
Preparing for a launch?
If you are launching a brand, product, or location and need photography, film, and digital content produced in Japan, you do not need every deliverable figured out before we talk.
Tell us what you are launching, when it needs to go live, and what the content has to achieve. We can build the production around that.
And when the launch is only the beginning, we can keep supporting the brand as it grows.
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