This is Ryo from Spectrum Tokyo.

Today, July 4th, 2025, Spectrum Tokyo celebrates its 3rd anniversary!

To be honest, it still feels like just 3 years, but we’ve packed so much in and have been pressing the accelerator pedal the entire time, that we’ve progressed much further than our original 3-year plan anticipated. Actually, I’ve forgotten what that 3-year plan even was.

All of this is thanks to everyone who visits our content and events and enjoys them, the speakers, writers, and staff who respond to our unreasonable requests, and the sponsors who let us do what we want to do. Thank you so much.

Thanks to everyone, our monthly meetups and annual festival have been hugely successful, and we’re constantly coming up with new ideas for creating various spaces and experiences. Our magazine articles continue to be updated at our own pace without worrying about web media conventions since our founding, but we keep adding more dense, real articles that you can’t read elsewhere, and recently our English version has been gradually gaining readers from overseas.

We’re not very good at moving strategically and have been winging it all the way, but as we gain more experience, we’re gradually increasing the resolution of what we want to do.

In the midst of all this, with various circumstances overlapping, we’ve decided to spin off Spectrum Tokyo, which was one business within the company, as “Spectrum Tokyo Inc.” independent from Flying Penguins Inc., our parent company.

Most of you probably didn’t know how we were operating in the first place, but until now Spectrum Tokyo has been operating as one business of Flying Penguins, a design company where I myself was also an executive. This time we’ve spun off Spectrum Tokyo to become an independent company.

After running Spectrum Tokyo for about 3 years, we’ve established a good flow as mentioned above, and we judged that it would be better to operate as a more independent organization involving various companies and organizations in our activities going forward, so we decided to become independent.

Under Flying Penguins, we were allowed to operate without any constraints, and we received tremendous support to get us on track. When operating media and events as an internal business like ours, the parent company’s business needs tend to become the purpose and KPIs, but we didn’t approve of setting easy targets and tried to be more creative (but in the end we never quite settled on them either…). However, when we aligned the thoughts and philosophy about design that Spectrum Tokyo (or rather, me) holds with those of Flying Penguins’ management, there wasn’t much difference, and I think we were able to walk the journey together carrying various questions about the future of design, resulting in a mutually beneficial outcomes in general. In this context, they gladly sent us off with our decision to become independent.

We can never thank everyone at Flying Penguins enough, and since Spectrum Tokyo has definitely received much more, we hope to continue our relationship as good partners.

What’s up next?

Currently, Spectrum Tokyo mainly operates on two axes: media business and event/conference business, and we’ll continue doing this. Rather, we want to do even more various projects going forward. One of them is the “Yoitoi Summit” coming up in two weeks.

We think we are a team that’s excels at designing spaces where people gather, so we plan to expand various businesses around that axis. We’d really like to think about the participants’ experience and design spaces that can create meaningful activities and encounters. This is no different from before – we want to earnestly continue creating events that everyone enjoys.

Also, while I can’t say it yet, we have several new business concepts beyond meetups and conferences. I have a very good feeling about this, so please look forward to it.

In addition to our own projects, we’re also considering supporting and producing for partners who have challenges with space design. If you have concerns about event planning or operations, please contact us (please give us work, haha).

We’ll continue various activities, so please follow our social media or register for our newsletter at the bottom of the site (we’re starting this soon).

Please continue to look forward to Spectrum Tokyo’s activities!

Ryo Sampei
Producer / Designer / CEO
Spectrum Tokyo Inc.

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Upcoming Conference Schedule

Design Matters Tokyo 25

Date: September 13-14, 2025 (Sat-Sun)
Venue: DMM.com (Roppongi) + Online

Spectrum Tokyo Festival 2026

Date: February 7-8, 2026 (Sat-Sun)
Venue: DMM.com (Roppongi)

*We are calling for sponsors for both events! Request materials here