Better Quality for Collectible:
Good Maki-e works come from someone who has talent, skills and indomitable spirit, with the genuine materials, natural refined Urushi, genuine gold powders and others are all indispensable. We have been selling Maki-e on pens for more than 12 years and our ideas have never changed since then. We carefully select our Maki-e shi, Maki-e artists and let them understand our goal and we let them fully display their talents on the works.

Fine jewelry does not use any gold plated metals or CZ to replace genuine diamonds. Fine jewelry is not made by volume, as it is made by hand piece by piece. We want our Maki-e works to be loved by serious collectors as well as
the art lovers as their most unique collectible fine jewelry. For this purpose, our
Maki-e shi uses genuine materials and authentic techniques only, as those so called manmade “Urushi” does not have the characters of Genuine natural
Urushi has, and those so called “modern techniques” can never help Maki-e shi for good works. Every good Maki-e shi has different tastes and styles, and all of our Maki-e shi do. And that’s why I believe we should specially introduce our
Maki-e shi to our customers, serious collectors and the art lovers whenever we have a new design to introduce so that they know what they are having.

Our Big Headaches since last year:
Our two big headaches are the inflation and the dollar devaluation. Japan
imports 99% of labor intensive natural Urushi from China or Vietnam, but the labor in China is not cheap anymore and the price for Urush keeps going up recently. Maki-e shi use genuine gold powders which cost them about twice as much as the gold price in the market. The gold price as we see every day has gone up to $1,8456.00/oz (Aug.19,2011) today vs. just under $1,000.00 a few years ago. Because of this reason, our Maki-e shi have been forced to charge
us around 20% more recently, which we fully understand and appreciated. However, the worst happening to us has been the dollar devaluation. One dollar could buy Y125 yen until a few years ago, but now one dollar can only exchange for Y75 yen based the rate in the market on Aug. 19,2011 that the rate was
76.00 yen vs. one dollar! If we had to pay Y125,000 yen to our Maki-e artists a few years ago, we just wired them $1,000.00 to cover it. But now thanks to the guys, who created the dollar devaluation and the global inflation, the same Y125,000 yen plus 20% inflation is Y150,000 yen, which needs us to wire them $2,000.00 or more today exactly 100% cost up for us since the past few years!

Even though our cost going up by100% forces us to adjust our sales prices, we are trying our best to keep our prices as low as possible by cutting our margin
to where we can barely survive in order to carry out my original desire to keep
the art survive well forever, and we need as many art lovers and collectors as
we can. We are told that the inflation is global and the dollar will keep going
down, and we should invest in gold as a safe haven from inflation. And I think
that collectible art is also a kind of safe haven for the art lovers or collectors to invest should leave it to your good judgment.

You are always more than welcome to give us any questions about the art, and you can expect our immediate reply whenever we are available. We sincerely hope that you’ll enjoy the art with us for many years to come.

Bernard Lyn
Dani International Corp (est. 1974)
danitrio@gmail.com