PUEBCO

PUEBCO is a Tokyo company started in 2007 by Hirotaka Tanaka, who had spent ten years at an interior firm before opening his own. The shop and office are in Sangenjaya, in Setagaya, and the name means nothing: it was chosen to be short to type, in the manner of Costco or Texaco.

The range is housewares and bags: market totes and grocery bags, baskets, candles, benches, boxes and trays, with prices that start under a thousand yen. About seventy percent of the materials are recycled or reused; the totes and aprons are cut from parachute and tent cloth retired by the Indian army, and the plastic baskets copy Showa-era shapes. Releases are not seasonal: many prototypes are made at once and more than half are discarded. Exports are over half of sales, across some thirty countries, and in 2024 the brand opened a flagship in Florence.