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The Making of the Omakase launch box, featuring Kill la Kil

When we began planning for our first full-on OMAKASE experience, we realized we needed to find a special match. While we love all sorts of anime at Viewster, we ended up asking ourselves a simple but important question. What could we feature for our launch box that would help us announce our presence to the world -- something iconic, appealing, smart, and bold? It wasn't long before we had our minds made up: we wanted to feature Kill la Kill.

Kill la Kill is more than just one of our favorite shows. Kill la Kill is the first TV series produced by Studio Trigger, whose creative talents have been known for some of the most explosively animated & expressively designed anime of the past few decades. Kill la Kill's overall aesthetic pairs these kinetic visuals with a high-intensity soundtrack that we can't get out of our heads, absolutely bleeding a slick look & feel that we personally love.

One of our first objectives was to curate the best possible box to do justice to one of our favorite shows. (We also rewatched the entire series while working on this part of the project, to get a fresh look and hype ourselves up.) We knew from the start that we wanted to do more than simply select high quality Kill la Kill merchandise; we wanted to create unique and exclusive stuff as part of the curation process. We reached out to several of our partners to make this dream a reality and started developing new ideas at a rapid-fire pace. It wasn't long before we struck gold -- literally -- with our friends at UDON, who just so happened to be releasing the beautiful Kill la Kill manga in North America. We were able to put together a gorgeous, hardcover, gold foil cover edition of Kill la Kill Volume 1 that will never be produced outside of our initial OMAKASE package.

Another top tier item -- the one we're publicly revealing on October 15 -- was born from a discussion we've since come to refer to as the “sly wink” talk. We realized that some of our favorite pieces of anime merchandise from the past few decades were items where design, function, and fashion had intersected -- in other words, the items someone in the know might recognize on the street, but that blends nicely with any outfit and in any setting. The cool, underground feel of recognizing a tie or armband at a concert or cafe always makes us feel like we're exchanging secret handshakes with other members of the huge club that is anime fandom; this sensation guided our efforts for what we consider the showcase piece of the box.

We also wanted to take advantage of another opportunity a partner offered: an early release on a particularly intriguing lifestyle item, which we'll share details about later this month. This item is what we call an “OMAKASE First” -- it will eventually go on sale next year, but our members will get to experience it first. It also just so happens to be really cool!

As we dig deeper and deeper into future boxes and get closer and closer to our ship date, we couldn't be more excited about our launch. Featuring Kill la Kill has been a privilege and a tremendous excitement for the OMAKASE team and it's a great way to kick off something we think will change the face of anime fandom. We hope you'll enjoy these gifts as much as we enjoyed creating them!