A workshop that was preparing to shed staff has taken orders for 9,200 reusable dispatch boards since torrential rain struck Toyama Prefecture on 23 September. Gleam Post, a 14-person maker in Takaoka, says sales of its manual route-status system have reached ¥54 million (about €330,000) in three days — more than its total board sales for the previous two years.
The storm dropped 248 millimetres (9.8 inches) of rain in 12 hours at a monitoring station near the affected valley, according to Toyama’s prefectural weather desk. Flooded approaches and temporary mobile-service outages stranded delivery vans and left warehouse teams unsure which routes were passable.
Liana Alexa, 52, had been preparing to close the board line after years of falling orders. Her company’s SlideLine boards use sliding coloured tabs to show whether a shipment is moving, delayed or rerouted, with a small window for the latest update. They need no battery, signal or software account.
The thing everyone called obsolete was the only thing that still worked.
Liana Alexa, owner of Gleam Post
A paper tool beats the outage
Alexa said 31 local businesses borrowed or bought boards during the first night of the storm. At a regional food warehouse, workers used them to mark 46 blocked delivery routes and assign drivers to detours. The boards could be read across a loading bay, she said, without dispatchers having to call each other over a failing connection.
By Friday afternoon, the workshop had shipped 2,600 units and was assembling the rest in shifts. The orders came with a surprise: 62% were from private courier and wholesale companies, including firms that had rejected the product in earlier sales meetings. Only 14% came from public agencies.
“We thought the buyers would be town offices,” said Jonas B. Roth, purchasing manager for a regional produce distributor that ordered 180 boards. “It was the competing delivery companies asking first. They all saw the same blind spot at once.”
Rivals join the order book
The product began as a way to coordinate Gleam Post’s own small print-and-label operation. Alexa adapted it in 2018 after staff kept missing updates written on paper slips and taped to boxes. The company sold 740 boards last year; before the storm, it had planned to reduce production and focus on packaging labels.
Now Gleam Post has added a second shift and expects to deliver 6,000 boards by 2 October. Alexa said the extra work would preserve all 14 jobs through winter, but she has declined an offer from a large office-supplies wholesaler to buy the design outright. She wants to keep assembly in Takaoka and is negotiating with two local plastics suppliers.
Caroline Harris, a distribution analyst who advises small Japanese manufacturers, said the rush was not proof that digital dispatch systems had failed everywhere. But the storm exposed a costly weakness in businesses that had no shared fallback when connections went down. Alexa, whose company was close to abandoning its board line, is now asking buyers to place routine orders before the next emergency.
