Can Do Brand Guidelines: A Saitama Single-Price Chain, a Star in Its Name and a Detective Dog

A franchise system before a first shop.

Can Do began as a company before it was a shop. Japanese Wikipedia and the company’s own history both date its founding to 3 December 1993, when Hiroshi Kido set up Kabushiki Kaisha Can Do in Toda, a city in Saitama Prefecture just north of Tokyo. Japanese Wikipedia says a franchise system was in place by January 1994, and that the first shop under the company’s own name, the Warabi Higashiguchi store by the east exit of Warabi station on the Keihin-Tōhoku line, opened in 1997. That first shop has since closed, the same article says.

The company describes its business as selling household goods and processed food in its own shops and wholesaling to franchisees, and its brand page names kitchen, stationery, household and health goods. In June 2000 the head office moved from Toda to Itabashi, in northern Tokyo. In June 2001 Can Do’s shares were registered on JASDAQ, the over-the-counter market; it moved to the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2003 and to the first section in November 2004, according to its corporate history.

Growth in western Japan came through purchases. In 2007, Japanese Wikipedia says, Can Do bought Crystal Shop, a single-price chain based in the Kansai region, renamed it Le Plus and later brought its shops under the Can Do name. In 2009 it took over 14 shops of the Orange chain in Osaka, Nara, Hyogo and Aichi. A chain that started in the Tokyo commuter belt used these deals to build its network in Kansai, the same article says.

In February 2011 Kazuya Kido became president, the company history records, and in April 2012 the head office moved again, to the Shinjuku Front Tower in Kita-Shinjuku, where it remains.

A star, a slogan and a dog.

Can Do treats its 20th year as a turning point. On its corporate site the company says it rebuilt its corporate brand at its 20th anniversary as a “second founding,” with a new logo and a new slogan. Japanese Wikipedia dates the new logo, written Can★Do with a five-pointed star between the two words, to December 2012. In February 2013 the Shin-Yurigaoka OPA store reopened as the first shop built to the new brand specification, according to both the company and Japanese Wikipedia.

The slogan that came with the rebrand is “Mainichi ni hakken o,” which translates roughly as “a discovery in every day.” The company’s brand page builds on it with lines about finding something useful, something fun or something good value in kitchen, stationery, household and health aisles. The slogan also gave the chain its character. In September 2013 Can Do introduced Hakken Wandu, a dog mascot whose name, written with the character for dog, puns on hakken, discovery, and so on the slogan itself, Japanese Wikipedia says. Japanese Wikipedia describes him as a dog who admires Sherlock Holmes and wears a detective’s hat and scarf, carrying a magnifying glass to discover new things; animated shorts featuring him have run on the company’s YouTube channel since 2013.

The range has moved beyond a single price at times. The company history records new price bands introduced in directly run shops in April 2006; Japanese Wikipedia says those higher-priced lines ended in 2013 and that a set of four higher price tiers returned in July 2020. In November 2022 the company opened what it calls a lifestyle-proposal shop, “New Can★Do,” at AEON Mall Fukuoka. Trade paper Ryutsuu News reported in October 2023 that a further store in this format had opened on 19 October at the Marunouchi OAZO complex in Tokyo’s Chiyoda ward. Self-checkout tills followed from February 2025, the company says.

Design and documentation.

Japan’s discount stores, value-apparel chains and drugstores tend to present themselves above all through the shop floor. At Don Quijote, Japanese Wikipedia describes a method called “compressed display,” with goods packed in so tightly that the store becomes half a maze, and price cards written by hand: each store employs its own POP writers, whose lettering the chain calls Donki moji. In these chains the sign on the shelf often does more identity work than the logo above the door.

Own-brand ranges are the second layer. Large groups sell their own lines under names that sit alongside the store name rather than replacing it; Pan Pacific International Holdings, the parent of Don Quijote, lists ranges such as Jonetsu Kakaku, launched in 2009, and EDRP, whose packs are printed in black and white to cut costs. Mascots work in the same way. Don Quijote’s penguin, Donpen, dates from 1998, and in 2021 the company set rules for how the character may appear in signs and illustrations.

Store names are usually plain. Some come from a founding family or an older family shop, others from a borrowed idea: the Don Quijote name comes from Cervantes’s novel, according to a company FAQ quoted by Unseen Japan in 2022. Many chains also run a second name for a format or a market, such as Don Don Donki for stores outside Japan.

Behind the stores sit corporate websites that set out founders, parent groups, timelines and stock-exchange listings, often in both Japanese and English. This guide uses those pages for dated company facts, adds encyclopaedia and press sources where they exist, and describes each chain only by what it sells, how its stores look and who owns it, with no claims about the products themselves.

A listed company inside the AEON group.

The biggest change in Can Do’s ownership came in 2021. On 14 October 2021 AEON announced a tender offer to make Can Do a subsidiary, Ryutsuu News and Impress Watch reported that day. Both reported that Can Do would stay listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange; Impress Watch added that the Can Do brand would be kept and that Can Do took a neutral position, leaving the decision to its shareholders. At the end of September 2021 the chain had 1,155 shops, Ryutsuu News reported.

The deal was completed in two steps. Japanese Wikipedia says AEON held 37.18 percent of the voting rights after the first offer in November 2021, and reached 51.16 percent after a second offer and the purchase of a family asset-management company. Can Do’s own history records it becoming an AEON subsidiary in January 2022; Japanese Wikipedia gives the date as 5 January 2022. Can Do’s shares remain listed, on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Standard market since the exchange’s April 2022 market reorganisation, the company says.

Inside the group, Can Do shops sit in many AEON shopping centres, though Japanese Wikipedia notes that some AEON centres house rival single-price chains and that Can Do also trades in malls outside the group. Since 2018 it has had a franchise agreement with the home-centre chain DCM, which places Can Do shops inside DCM stores, the same article says. Japanese Wikipedia also records that Can Do began supplying Christmas decorations and wrapping to AEON and AEON Style stores in November 2022, and that in July 2026 Can Do shops began selling snacks and drinks from AEON’s Topvalu own-brand range. A subsidiary, Axis, set up in September 2014, took over the single-price goods wholesale arm of the supplier Saera that December, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The store count has kept rising in the figures published. Japanese Wikipedia gave 1,311 shops at the end of April 2024; the company’s profile page lists 1,355 shops at the end of February 2026, across directly run and franchised stores. Overseas, the company history records franchise shops in Mongolia and Thailand from December 2015.

For a design guide, Can Do shows how a single-price shop can carry a personality through a small typographic device, a star in the name, and a mascot built from a pun on its own slogan. Compare Daiso and Seria, two other Japanese single-price chains. For this guide we use a warm orange, a yellow and cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Can Do’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.