Howlt

Howlt is the art and design platform of Haruki Higashi, a Brooklyn based artist whose About page lists Nike, Marlboro and McDonald’s among his clients. The shop sells tees, iPhone cases, tote bags, latte cups and a risograph zine under three labels, Howlt, Howlt Coffee and a licensed David Shrigley range, inside a site that also holds a works portfolio and a New York journal. Built on Gatsby and Contentful, with Shopify handling cart and checkout.

Website Design

Black, white and two accent shouts. The interface runs on black and white, with a near black at #121212 for type and a warm off white at #fcfcf9 for panels. Colour appears twice only, a red #e21000 and a yellow #f5c31c, both kept to small marks.

Four custom faces, three of them proprietary. Type is set in Howlt, the studio’s own sans, with Domaine Text for serif passages, a face called Twm for display and Feijoa Medium Italic loaded as HowltItalic. No system stack appears.

Everything is a thumbnail grid. Works, Journal and Shop share one template, a dense grid of square images with a title and category line under each. The shop is distinguishable mainly by its price line.

Shopping Experience

Thirty one items under five category tags. The shop holds 31 products tagged Accessories (20), Tees (5), Bags (3), Home Goods (2) and Books (1), and a second tag set for brand, filtered from above the grid.

Most of the grid is sold out. Nine items carry a price and the other 22 show SOLD OUT in its place. Prices run from $17.49 for the Howlt Coffee Tumbler to $50.64 for the Have a Smile tee, the uneven figures pointing to conversion from yen.

Product pages read like exhibition labels. One image sits beside a paragraph of description and a bullet list of materials, followed by PREV and NEXT arrows stepping through the catalogue. There is no review block and no size chart.

Checkout is Shopify, shipping is regional. Shopping Info lists VISA, Master, Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Paypal. Shipping is 500 yen in Japan and free over 10,000 yen, $5.00 in the USA and free over $100, and $8.00 elsewhere.

Brand Storytelling

The shop is one wing of a portfolio. Navigation gives equal weight to Works, Journal, Shop, Cafe, About and Contact, framing the store as one output of a practice rather than the point of it.

The journal indexes neighbourhoods, not products. Its tags are Brooklyn and Manhattan districts including Bushwick, Dumbo, Park Slope, Williamsburg and Soho, beside art culture, food drink and lifestyle.

Credentials are listed, not narrated. About carries a plain exhibition record from 2006 to 2019 and a press list naming IdN, Etapes, HYPEBEAST and several MdN titles.

Notable Features

Two cities in one footer. Brooklyn and Fukuoka addresses appear with map links and daily hours of 11 AM to 6 PM, qualified as “Irregular holidays”.

A bilingual switch on every page. A JA and EN toggle sits in the footer and the whole tree is duplicated per language, product copy included.

A blunt returns policy. Shopping Info states that “Orders cannot be cancelled under any circumstances”, limiting exchanges to wrong or defective items reported within seven days.