Moon Creative Lab is a venture studio that powers the creation of new businesses for Mitsui & Co. and beyond.
In an environment where anything is possible, experimenting fast guides our direction.
2022 was an exciting year for Moon. It was a time of reawakening with what Moon Creative Lab has been set out to do: light the way for creative potential.
We relied heavily on our Moon value, “Experiment Fast,” to help guide us as we adapted to the challenges of an ongoing pandemic and help us make better decisions so our ventures could thrive.
Rather than seeking perfection or waiting until everything is presentable, we encourage everyone within our organization to build to learn, test, and iterate the way forward to find new solutions to challenges. Through experimentation we are able to better translate early ideas into tangible, low-fidelity prototypes in order to learn faster, engage others in the process, and make smarter decisions from the feedback we receive.
We recognize that we are all on this shared journey together. Through sharing our key learnings, challenges, failures, and successes over the past year, we’ve been able to find new answers together.
These are the stories of how experimenting fast has shaped our year.
We hope that through these stories, we’ll show you just how much progress we’ve made together.
“Experimenting fast to me is really trying to prove or disprove something that you want to understand with a sense of urgency. How quickly can you get to that understanding that requires the least amount of time and the least amount of risk.”
Vlad Almonnord, Design Director
Reflections from our Chief Marketing Officer
Dear Reader,
In 2022, the world mourned the loss of the legendary Japanese fashion designer, Issey Miyake. Miyake was known for his fearless approach to experimentation in his designs which uniquely combined traditional handcrafts with the newest technology driven by research and development. While Miyake left a big hole in the creative world, his legacy of gender-neutral, classic yet future-forward fashion philosophy lives on.
“My office is more of a research laboratory than it is a design studio; we are constantly making all sorts of experiments." Issey Miyake
At Moon Creative Lab, we are also inspired by experimentation and in 2022, we did plenty of it. As travel opened up post-pandemic, we were able to lean into opportunities to work together literally side-by-side. We held workshops, design sprints, and a number of in-person events with the creative and startup communities at our Spring Terrace Studio in Tokyo, Japan and our 660 Studio in Palo Alto, California.
In this year’s Moon Annual Report, I’m so excited for you to dive into these experiments. You’ll hear the voices of our talented Entrepreneurs-in-Residence and Moon Mates as they share the stories of how experimenting fast has shaped our 2022 journey. You’ll see all the progress we have made together over the past year and maybe get a peek into what is to come.
We also hope to inspire you to ask yourself, “What experiment could I do this coming year that will have an exponential impact on my work or life?”
Because similar to Issey Miyake’s thinking, we love to be free to explore, research, and evolve. And isn’t that what experimentation is all about?
Happy reading!
Mary Ann Gallo
Chief Marketing Officer
*KYOTO PRIZE “One Life, One Thread, and One Piece of Cloth: The Work of lssey Miyake” (2007)