May 2026 Updates
Hello hello! Time to set aside a bit of time and put up a Blog post and update everyone on what's been going on behind the scenes at Redpants. Um, and to give myself a chance to actually sit down so my legs can take a break. The biggest thing (for me and my family, at least) is that we've just finished our move into our new home! I mentioned giving my legs a break because our new home is a typical, modern, urban Japanese house, which means it's somewhat narrow but three stories tall with pretty steep staircases. Needless to say, I've climbed a LOT of steps during the last week and a half while moving things into the house, figuring out where to put stuff, and getting everything set up. On a few occasions I'd been going hard enough to have flashbacks of when we climbed Mt Fuji last year.
While not completely done, the majority is finished and all that's left now is fixing some issues left behind by the renovation company, getting the internet set up (I'm using my phone as a hotspot until then), organizing things so I know where everything is again, figuring out how the dishwasher works, mapping all the light switches, arranging my office so I can find that damned pen I just put down, and... okay yeah, there's still a lot to do. But at least the hardest parts are over and I can get back to work!
The reason I mention the move isn't just to share something that's important to me and my family, but also because it will affect things going forward. The main thing for customers is that the return address for orders that have already shipped out has changed. As the Redpants Terms & Conditions states, a customer must contact me via email before returning an order - one of the reasons for this is that I provide return instructions, which includes a return address. If something is returned to the wrong address, there's nothing I can do about it.
More important for most people is that I no longer have to walk 10 minutes just to get to my car and I can work on it at home, which wasn't possible in the apartment we'd been renting the last few years. That arrangement was a massive logistical burden and it was just too much on top of everything else I’ve had to deal with. Since most people use Redpants as a source of information, this means I can actually go back to making DIY Guides and videos to share with everyone.
For those keeping track: yes, that is the umpteenth time I've said that over the last decade.
Order Confirmation Emails
In my last Blog post I discussed an issue with order confirmation emails not being sent out. I've finally tracked down the issue and resolved it. It was actually a bigger issue that was preventing the website from giving an order completion confirmation at all - the only indication that an order was successfully placed was a "payment received" email from the payment processor, which may or may not have been noticed by the customer and led to some people making duplicate payments, which I then had to go into my payment processor to refund and manually update the order to show that it had indeed been received.
Having resolved that, there shouldn't be any issues going forward, but please do tell me if anything seems off so I can look into it and get it sorted for you.
Emails in General
Just a quick followup on another thing in that last Blog post - I'd mentioned that I moved the Redpants Japan website to a new platform when I closed down Redpants USA. The original Redpants Japan platform's contact form was tied into the platform itself. So, if you emailed me using the Contact page on the original Redpants Japan website, please use the new Contact page or email me directly. Replying to an email that was sent on the original platform won't get through to me.
In addition to that, I rarely check my Redpants USA email account now that it is closed. To contact me, please use my Contact page or email me directly. My email address is rich@redpants.jp (the much-loved .lol domain has been relieved of its duties and given a much deserved though begrudgingly accepted retirement).
Newsletter
As things get more settled down, I plan to start sending out a monthly Newsletter sharing what’s going on. These will probably be very short - mainly a few snippets of info that tie back to a Blog post that will have the bulk of the information including news and updates, recently-published content on the Redpants website, products that have been added to the Redpants Online Store, videos I’ve uploaded to the Redpants channel and the Redpants Unzipped channel on YouTube, and so on.
Even if I can actually manage to follow through with all that, the most I’ll be sending out a Newsletter is once a month (maybe twice if I’m feeling feisty), so please don’t worry about signing up - the number of emails you get from Redpants will be absolutely minimal.