10% OFF Everything & Donation to Amnesty, MSF & UNICEF

Because business should also be about doing the right things

Last year, we decided to boycott the Black Friday/Cyber Monday event by not offering any discount, but charity donation to Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International.
If this event was a success that received great support from the vast majority of our fellow customers, we listened to those who said that it is not necessarily consistent to offer 10% discount on some items every month and nothing for the #BFCM.

So for this edition, and because we have now recurring charity events throughout the year, we've decided to do both.
We're offering 10% OFF everything, and we will donate 5% of all our #BFCM sales to Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International and the UNICEF.

We'd like to take this opportunity to come back to all the charity events we run since 2018's #BFCM in numbers.

So, we run a charity event every month for a period that goes from 36h to 72h. During those events, 10% of all orders is donated to charities. What precisely happens is that all orders are tagged with a "charity eligible" tag, and once we have reached a decent amount, we proceed to donation to each charity through bank transfers.
In order to keep tracks of all orders we receive on Seido's websites, we have developed our own tool that automatically fetches all orders eligible for a charity donation and keeps records of all donations we made.
The graph below is a simple screenshot of the tool we use internally and that shows how much, when and to which charity the money went.

Amnesty International, UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders all received 199,500 YEN for a total of 598,500 YEN donated over a period that starts January 1st and ends November 11th.
This only takes into account our donations to charities, not the donation to various non-charity NPO (such as the Aikikai for example).

We would also like to clarify that Japan, as many other countries, offers the possibility to partially deduce donated money from company taxes. However, it is important to note that Japan is not very "charity-friendly" and the conditions are far less motivating than in most European countries, for example. This might explain why Seido is one of the main corporate support for Amnesty International in Japan (yes, with only 2000 USD... it shows how less they have and how much they need our support!).
All in all, we plan to have less than 30% of the total donated in deduction, and that's only if we make enough profit to be eligible for a deduction, which might not be the case.

All members of the Seido team share core values that are deeply linked with the Budo ethics in the sense that we believe it is our duty to "contribute to social prosperity and harmony, and ultimately, benefit the people of the world." We strongly believe that the support we bring to craftsmanship and local production is part of the solution, and that's the very reason Seido exists.

If you would like to know more about our ethics and our charity program, please feel free to read our dedicated "Seido Charity Programs page". You can also check last year's news regarding the Black Friday/Cyber Monday's event and the honest report we published after the event.

We thank you all for your continued support and we are looking forward to meeting you on the mats!