Start small. Verify. Then widen.

AY LLC was founded in 2023 in Katsushika, Tokyo. It began with a single tea stand.

Standing behind that counter taught us a few things: how much it matters that supplies simply arrive, and how frightening the day they do not is; where paper and spreadsheets stop working for orders and stock; and how much effort it takes to bring goods in from overseas.

None of those problems were ours alone. Other restaurants had them. Other importers had them. If we had already found our way through, we reasoned, that path was itself a business.

The wholesale business, the trading business and the software business all came into being in that order. Not diversification drawn on paper — the reverse side of problems we hit on the floor.

We intend to keep it that way: to build only what we would use ourselves, and to sell only what we have checked ourselves.