Haruki Nishimura opened Reed Vault Gate in March 2019 in a narrow shopfront on Fuyacho-dori, two blocks north of Nijo Castle. He had spent the previous six years working as a product formulator for a mid-size cosmetics company in Osaka, and the thing that bothered him most was not the chemistry. It was the packaging. Every batch he helped develop shipped in a single-use plastic bottle that would be used for three weeks and discarded. He left that job in autumn 2018 and spent the following winter converting the Fuyacho space, stripping the walls back to bare plaster and building the dispensing counter himself from reclaimed cedar.
Haruki Nishimura trained as a product formulator at a cosmetics manufacturer in Osaka, where he spent six years developing body care lines before growing frustrated with the volume of single-use plastic the industry produced. He left in autumn 2018 and opened Reed Vault Gate on Fuyacho-dori, Kyoto, in March 2019. He built the dispensing counter himself from reclaimed cedar. Outside the shop, he keeps a small vegetable plot in Yamashina and is quietly obsessive about fermentation. He has been making his own miso for the past four winters and insists it has made him a better judge of slow processes in general.