Introducing Dream of Japan Rewards: One Points Balance For Tea, Coffee, Knives And Wine

This one has been a long time coming, and I am genuinely excited to finally show it to you.

Dream of Japan Rewards is live. 🎉

One points balance, shared across every shop we run.

One balance

What changed

Each of the other three shops used to run its own separate points programme.

Points earned in one were stuck in that one.

That never made sense to me. It is the same family, and most of the time it is the same people packing your box.

So there is now one programme behind all four shops, and one balance that follows you around.

We built this one ourselves

Here is the part I have been dying to tell someone.

For years our points ran on an app called Smile.io. It did the job, and I have no real complaints about it.

But it was somebody else's box. Every shop needed its own separate programme inside it, which is exactly the problem we wanted to fix.

So we wrote the whole thing ourselves.

No Shopify app this time. No monthly fee. No third party sitting between you and your own points.

You may know that I spent years in the software development world, and I have missed building things.

So this became an exciting project for me personally, and it was so much fun building it from scratch. I just lose track of time when I am coding.

The points engine, the page you see, the emails, the little gold gift that appears on your cart, all of it is ours.

It also means we can fix things quickly and change what needs changing, instead of waiting for somebody else's roadmap.

If something on the rewards page annoys you, tell us. That is now a thing we can actually do something about.

Your points are already there

Japanese Wine Co. is the youngest of the four shops, so it never ran a points programme of its own.

It has one now, and it is the same balance the other three use.

If you have bought tea, coffee or a knife from us, those points already spend here.

How you earn now

One point for every dollar you spend on products, in any of the four shops.

Shipping and tax do not earn points.

If an order is refunded or cancelled, the points for it come back off again. That is the part most programmes stay quiet about.

Order while you are signed in, or just use the same email address every time. The points appear on their own once the order is paid.

What your points are worth

One hundred points is one dollar. There are three rewards to choose from.

Your points never expire.

Once you turn some of them into a discount code, that code is good for 90 days.

Watch a reward go into the cart

You pick a reward. We make you a code. It goes straight into your cart.

No copying anything down.

Isn’t this animation fun? I hope you try redeeming your points to see it in action.

That little gold gift on the bag is my favourite detail.

It follows you around the shop, so you never have to wonder whether the discount is still attached.

If you would rather save the code for later you can, and it will be waiting on your rewards page.

The one rule worth remembering

What is gone, and what is coming

The old programme handed out points for signing up, for a birthday, and for sharing us on social media.

Those are gone. I would rather say so plainly than let you go looking for them.

They were rewarding the wrong thing. Points for a Facebook share are points taken away from the people who actually buy the tea.

So the rule is now simple. You earn on what you spend, in any of our shops, and it never expires.

That said, the fun is not over.

Now that we own the code, we can run one-off bonus campaigns whenever there is a good reason.

Double points on a new harvest. A bonus for trying something from a shop you have not visited yet. That sort of thing.

They will be short, and they will be occasional.

Do you have an idea for a cool way to earn points?

Let us know here. We are listening, and the good ideas usually come from you rather than from us.

The only way to hear about them is to be on the newsletter, or to follow us.

The Japanese Wine Club letter is free, it is where these go out first, and you can leave any time you like.

Or follow whichever shop you actually buy from.

Where to find it

Your rewards page lives at japanesewineco.com/apps/rewards.

It shows your balance, your history, and the codes you have waiting. It is the same balance whichever of the four shops you open it from.

If you have two email addresses with us and your points ended up split between them, send us a note and we will join them into one account.

Thank you for sticking with us long enough to make a rewards programme worth building.