JapanoMa
A decision-aid platform helping Australian skiers weigh a Japan snow-country home base, from quiz to purchase.
Client
Go&C Partners
Industry
Property / Cross-border Lifestyle Real Estate
Timeline
Feb 2026 – Ongoing
Year
2026
Services
Visual Identity · Motion Design · UI/UX Design · Design System · Frontend Development · Backend Development · API Integration · Database Design · Authentication · Payments · CMS · SEO · Analytics · Deployment and DevOps · Content · Copywriting
01 / The Challenge
Understanding the problem
Go&C Partners wanted to help Australian skiers decide whether to buy a home base in Northern Japan without behaving like a listings portal or a broker. The audience is roughly 184,500 Australian skiers who distrust hype and need honest total-cost figures, due diligence and local execution before they talk to anyone selling. The engagement had a thirteen-week timeline, a two-person Craefto team, a client with no existing brand guidelines, and content still to be written. The platform also had to meet the Australian Privacy Act, Japan's APPI and GDPR from day one, hold up under launch traffic, and hand over cleanly to Go&C as a documented codebase.
02 / The Approach
How we tackled it
We ran a three-week discovery that produced twelve architecture decision records, a scope-boundaries document separating v1 from v2, personas and sixty user stories before writing code. The visual language, Ma Space, treats emptiness as the primary material: a near-monochrome sumi and washi palette with one indigo accent, Shippori Mincho for headings, Satoshi for everything else, and a three-colour-per-screen rule. We chose Next.js with React Server Components and ISR so public pages are CDN-served, Supabase in Sydney for data residency, and Sanity so the client could edit without us. Every decision, and every later reversal, was written into the changelog with its reasoning, so the client inherits the why as well as the code.
Brand moment
A brush stroke, then the ink floods.
The torii outline traces itself like a single stroke, the house follows through the gateway, and the ink floods the fills as the tracing line dissolves. Pure SVG and CSS, compositor-only, and fully inked from the first frame for anyone who prefers reduced motion.
03 / The Solution
What we built
We delivered a production platform with 49 pages and 19 API routes. Visitors take a seven-step lifestyle quiz that scores 29 launch areas across nine prefectures, explore them on a three.js map of Japan, and compare towns side by side. A weekly partner workbook feeds the property pipeline: parsing, haversine area assignment, deduplicated image mirroring, caption-based gallery selection and a Gemini-assisted floor-plan translation pilot. Registration gates listings, quiz and consultation booking; Stripe handles consultation credits and a dormant membership tier. A 33-second Remotion film opens the homepage, and a customer story turns one recorded interview into fifteen chapters with audio, word-timed captions and transcripts. An admin area covers leads, users, reviews, area media, compliance exports and insights.
Tech Stack
04 / The Outcome
Results & impact
JapanoMa launched publicly on 26 May 2026 at japanoma.com.au, thirteen weeks after kickoff, and has been extended every month since. Production load testing drove the site to 2,000 concurrent users with zero failed requests. Go&C now runs its own editorial in Sanity, ingests partner stock weekly, and books and bills consultations through the platform. The quiz, once anonymous, now attaches every completion to a contactable account. Traffic, lead and revenue figures are not recorded in the repository.
13 weeks
Kickoff to Launch
2,000 users
Load Tested, Zero Failures
49 / 19
Pages / API Routes
37
Database Tables
