Why Our Site Is English-Only — And Why We Chose It on Purpose

We recently looked hard at translating shoitotokyo.com into a range of languages. After working through what it would really take, we decided to stay in English only.

That might seem like a strange choice for a brand that ships internationally. In this post we want to be straight with you about how we reached it, because the reasoning says something about how we want to run this house.

How brands usually handle language

There are, broadly, two approaches a fragrance brand can take.

The first is full localization: a separate, properly written version of the site for each market — French, German, Japanese, and so on — kept up to date as the brand grows. Done well, this is excellent. It is also expensive and ongoing. In practice, the brands that do it well are the large ones, usually backed by big groups with dedicated localization teams for every language.

The second approach is to publish in one language — almost always English — and let readers who prefer another language translate the page in their browser. This is the route most respected independent niche houses take. A maker like Hiram Green, for example, runs an English-only site, and is no less serious for it.

There is also a third option that we want to name only to rule out: switching on automatic machine translation across the whole site. It is cheap and instant, and it reads like it. A clumsy auto-translated line — a headline that lands slightly wrong, a piece of copy that has lost its rhythm — does more damage to a brand built on restraint than a clean English page ever could.

What we decided, and why

We did not make this call lightly. We explored a multilingual site in real detail before concluding that, for a house our size, it was not the right move right now.

The core of it is honesty about our own limits. Translating well is not a one-time job; it is a standard you have to hold, in every language, indefinitely. We could not look at a dozen languages and genuinely promise that each one met the bar we hold ourselves to in English. And a half-kept promise is worse than none: a site that is beautifully considered in English and merely adequate in six other languages is not, in the end, the same brand in those six places.

So we made a deliberate trade. We would rather do one language with real care than several without it.

It helps that our readers make this easier than it might sound. The people who seek out independent, small-batch fragrance tend to navigate the niche world in English already — it is, for better or worse, the shared language of this particular corner of perfumery. We are not pretending that English-only asks nothing of our international readers. It does, and we are grateful to them for it. We simply think that, today, our energy is better spent on the perfume and on writing well in one language than on maintaining a thinner version of ourselves in many.

Where this goes next

For now, the site stays in English, and it stays invitation-only. We will keep writing here — these journal posts, and our weekly letter — in one language, done as carefully as we can manage.

This is a decision for where we are now, not a principle carved in stone. If we reach a point where we can localize properly, in a way we would be proud of rather than merely able to ship, we will revisit it. Until then, thank you for reading us in English — and for leaning in.

If you would like our weekly letter on the world of fragrance, you can join us at shoitotokyo.com.