May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage
Month and all month long Cheddar News is
shining a light on trailblazers and leaders who
are changing the game in different industries.
Cheddar News. He
sat down with Danny Tang, founder and CEO of Box.
So a subscription box for traditional Japanese snacks
to find out the inspiration behind his business.
Take a look,
I do wanna talk about your background. You were born and raised in New York City.
You went to Stanford University,
you worked at Google and you got up and moved to Tokyo.
Tell me about that journey.
Yeah. So a lot of that was
not something that my parents are really happy with.
To be honest, um like I, I got to understand which they're happy about and all that.
But then
um after I got a job at Google, I was working for a year in like digital marketing
and I was like, oh, this is good and the company is actually treat you really well.
But I was young. I was like 23 at the time
and I was really hungry for like experiencing what the world can offer.
And that one year ended up turning into four.
And then my whole life changed when I lived in Japan for four years. Let's talk about.
Yeah. So I
like, didn't also intend to be an entrepreneur.
Um And in fact,
a little kind of funny back story about that
is when I was starting to get into entrepreneurship.
And my father tried to convince me
wise because he himself, he was an immigrant refugee from Cambodia and,
and my mom and he was a small business owner in the eighties.
And like, it's a hard life, but I was like,
I want to feel ownership. I want to feel impact in what I do.
And so like having had that experience in Japan for
four years where I got business flown in Japanese,
I got to eat a lot of amazing food and stacks.
I'd never seen outside of Japan.
Um kind of led me little by little to when I moved back to New York 10 years ago. Now
to have this idea of like, well, why not kind of bridge that,
why not help ship this to America and beyond and throughout the world.
I'm glad you said that because that leads me to my next question.
What do you think was missing in the culinary landscape?
And you're like, I have an idea and I think it's going to do well,
a big part of it was that when I moved back from Japan to New York,
I had this bit of reverse culture shock where
not only could I not find a lot of delicious food and snacks that were here,
but a lot of people had a somewhat one dimensional view of Japan.
They saw Japan as like
this country where people ate sushi every day or,
or, and it was just full of,
I was like, none of that is true.
And
um let me see if I can help open people's minds a
bit by exploring all these different regional kind of family business acts.
These like kind of generational products
that we frankly just don't even have in America,
even American products don't have the like 200 year old history.
Some of these family businesses we work with are
actually older than the United States of America.
They've been around for over 300 years.
Can you tell me more about how sourcing is with these families in Japan?
It's so that, that part is so interesting to me.
Yeah, it's, uh, it's no easy small feat.
In fact,
a little secret early on was in the very
beginning when I was a bootstrap solo founder,
kind of trying to get these products was I got a lot of them retail.
I think a lot of people do that at first.
But then like with always the goal eventually of
making these direct relationships and little by little,
I had to build that trust with a lot of them.
So I kind of cold emailed a lot of them cold, called.
A lot of them always using, like,
kind of as perfect Japanese as I could to make them feel comfortable about it.
And, um, and at the first of course, they were like, what is this,
this guy in America? They're like, who?
Yeah, they were like, what is a subscription box? It's not even a thing in Japan.
Really? At the time, this was like 2016.
At that point,
everything was like kind of working with them remotely because I
didn't have the funds to go fly and meet them.
And so I then got to meet them in person.
They saw how much we had grown, we'd go out drinking together,
which is a common thing in Japanese culture to build that trust and little by little.
They were like, oh wow, this guy is legit, but also
he's really spreading our kind of story throughout the world,
not just our products,
but also we always say their kind of company name and who they are
and even tell their stories and the culture that we put in the box.
Last question, this may be the hardest. What's your favorite snack?
Uh
I have tasted like thousands of snacks at this point
because we taste test everything else in a box.
But
I gotta say that probably my favorite snack
is got to be this really innovative snack from
Nagano Prefecture. Only this one maker can make it. It's a pattern process.
It's called a white strawberry
and it's a free stri strawberry that is then re infused of liquid white chocolate.
After all the water content is removed. So individually wrapped.
I love that too. Yeah, they're beautiful. They're delicious.
They're really shareable and gift
you rip it along
and uh it looks like just like a normal free of strawberry. But then,
oh my God.
Yum.
All right. Thanks to
do
and Dan Tang founder and C A Box.