A daruma doll entrepreneur shares her chats
Fumiko Takahashi uses ChatGPT to create contemporary versions of traditional Japanese dolls, find wholesale partners, and manage her business
Every week, we talk with ChatGPT Pro subscribers to learn how they’re using the product in their personal and professional lives. Today, we want you to meet Fumiko Takahashi, an entrepreneur and artisan who uses ChatGPT to streamline product manufacturing, discover wholesale partners, and bring her designs to life. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Fumiko in Tokyo and learn how she became a champion of Japanese craftspeople. We hope her story sparks ideas for how you can use AI in your own work.
Fumiko Takahashi grew up surrounded by daruma makers. She remembers watching them layer recycled paper over wooden molds and placing weights in their bases so they would bounce back when knocked over. The dolls, a Japanese symbol of luck with deep roots in her local prefecture of Gunma, represented for Fumiko a sense of tradition, home, and continuity — everything she wanted to escape.
At 16, she did. At the time, Fumiko was struggling with the idea that her parents, both teachers at her elite high school, wanted her to follow in their footsteps. Inspired by a phrase she heard on TV — “If you want to change your life, go to India” — Fumiko left for a yearlong exchange program in Pune. There, she lived with a host family whose father was an entrepreneur. Recognizing Fumiko’s penchant for carving her own path, he encouraged her to start a company.
After returning to Japan, Fumiko took her host father’s advice and started a YouTube channel about Indian culture and products. As she learned more about how goods were made and sold, she became frustrated by the number of products marketed as Japanese but manufactured abroad. So Fumiko decided to make local products herself.
Her first venture was a ring brand. Needing something eye-catching for her brand’s booth at a craft fair, Fumiko asked her grandmother to paint a spare daruma doll pastel pink. A tourist immediately offered to buy it, barely giving the rings a second glance. Within three weeks, Fumiko was building Tokyo Lollipop, a company based on the tradition she had once wanted to leave behind.
She has since turned this historically seasonal craft into a year-round design business, hiring traditional craftspeople during their off-season to produce her contemporary daruma designs and train a younger generation of Japanese artisans.
Further melding old and new, Fumiko uses AI on both the creative and operational sides of her company, helping her lead a 12-person team while completing a degree in business at Keio University.
Here are five prompts Fumiko uses as founder and creative lead of Tokyo Lollipop (the prompts have been translated from Japanese):
1. Compare color palettes for a brand partnership
Here’s the homepage of a brand I’m exploring a partnership with. I’d like you to suggest a variety of two-color color palettes that match each of this brand’s colors and create images of those palettes.
[Homepage.jpg]
Why was this chat valuable? “This improved both the speed and quality of the creative proposal process, helping me organize ideas using brand-relevant visual references. We were also able to generate mockups showing how the colors would actually look when applied to the daruma, which made it much easier to communicate my vision to my clients.
This was especially helpful during a period when thinner and paint supplies became difficult to obtain due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. ChatGPT helped us explore color combinations that could be produced within the restricted palette we had access to.”
2. Identify a list of potential wholesale partners
I want to find stores in Tokyo that might be able to sell TOKYO LOLLIPOP daruma wholesale.
Please list souvenir shops, boutiques, and Japanese culture-themed shops, especially in areas with lots of tourist traffic.
Also organize each store’s characteristics and why it seems like a good fit.
Why was this chat valuable? “For a small startup like ours, this allowed the team to spend more of their limited time on relationship-building and closing deals rather than basic research. And it led to actual business deals and wholesale partnerships.”
3. Brainstorm limited-edition product ideas
Please come up with product ideas for a line of capsule gacha toys. Our constraints include price (500 yen), capsule size, cost ratio, and production rounds of at least 10,000 units. I will also share images of existing gacha products I’d like to use as references, and examples that are going viral on social media.
[GachaProducts.jpg]
Why was this chat valuable? “ChatGPT generated mockup images that helped our team communicate about product ideas internally and made it easier to evaluate which concepts had the strongest potential for online buzz and customer engagement.”
4. Calculate product specs for overseas manufacturing partners
[Using ChatGPT Voice]
I’m currently working with a Chinese manufacturer to place an order for gift bags. I’d like you to specify the internal dimensions so that I can tell them the sizes.
We need gift wrapping and gift bags that will fit daruma dolls in the Takasaki Daruma sizes known as 3-maru, 6-maru, and 15-maru.
Also, I want to make bags for a maneki-neko brand called Kaisha Maneki; please assume its internal dimensions are about 23 cm wide, 22 cm deep, and 35 cm high.
Why was this chat valuable? “Instead of having to manually calculate and format multiple packaging sizes, ChatGPT helped organize the internal dimensions for different daruma sizes and product categories so they could be shared directly with our overseas OEM [original equipment manufacturer] supplier. This made it easier to standardize packaging planning across multiple product lines and speed up requests for samples and price quotes.”
5. Draft first-pass contractor agreements
I’d like to create a draft of an independent contractor agreement for a newly hired university student intern. The terms are below.
Also, please let me know if there are any missing details or conditions we should identify beyond the current terms in order to prepare the contract.
[Contractor.pdf]
Why was this chat valuable? “Creating a strong first draft internally before sending documents for professional legal review made the process far more efficient and cost-effective. ChatGPT also enabled us to quickly generate contract templates tailored to different types of team members and collaborators, including designers, interns, part-time staff, and local craftspeople.”
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