Redpants is Dead. Long Live Redpants.
Effective immediately, Redpants LLC (“Redpants USA”) has been shut down.
All orders received prior to the closure have been shipped unless I've specifically contacted you to let you know that something was still pending or backordered, and those will ship as soon as they’re ready.
All business going forward will be handled exclusively by Redpants 合同会社 (“Redpants GK” or "Redpants Japan"). Redpants GK is a distinct legal entity registered in Yokohama, Japan. It and Redpants LLC are two completely separate companies so nothing will carry over between companies. This includes order histories, newsletter subscriptions, and so on. Orders placed on the old Redpants Japan website (Order numbers RPJP-xxxxx and invoices sent by Redpants Japan) are unaffected as those were with Redpants GK, but a new order number format will be put in place. Any warranties for Redpants products that include a warranty card are also unaffected, even if purchased through Redpants USA.
The change shouldn’t affect anyone that’s shopped at Redpants in the last several months. Most of the changes that are now in effect have been slowly rolled out due to the Trump Tariffs (of if you’re in the US). I’d been documenting and sharing information about the Trump Tariffs and shipping issues they’ve caused as far back as last August, and I’ll be recapping that to help keep people aware of it in another Blog post after I’ve published this one.
The new website and Online Store will look very similar to the old ones, but are in fact completely new. As of this writing, the new shipping system isn’t fully finished so there may be some issues during checkout. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you run into any issues or need help with anything. I don’t have the online booking system for my Guided Tours set up yet so just email me and I’ll take care of it the good ol’ fashioned way of communicating directly. I’m sure some links will be broken throughout the website but I’m going through everything - page by page - to test them all, make revisions to the content, and tidy things up in general.
Beyond that, the biggest and most obvious change will be the inclusion of Japanese all over the place. I was going to make a second website just for Japanese, but given how massive the Redpants website has become over the years, I figured it’d be easier to do it progressively as I can find the time to invest in it. I’ll try to split the two languages apart eventually and clean everything up, but that’s a massive task and I’ve already got enough on my plate!
My original plan was to keep Redpants USA doing the same as it always has, and use Redpants Japan to sell to customers just within Japan, Asia, and Oceania, for manufacturing and supply of Redpants products to Redpants USA, and for other projects that I'd be doing locally within Japan. Unfortunately, things didn't work out too well. The hassle of running two companies, duplicate expenses for a lot of things, and the whole mess in the US with the Trump Tariffs made the situation far too difficult and I finally decided to pull the plug on Redpants USA, the company I started a decade ago and built up from nothing.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes and all that, I guess.
The good news is that Redpants lives on with its Japanese counterpart. I've recreated much of the original Redpants website to be used by my Japanese company, so the huge amount of information I've compiled and shared over the years won't be lost. The heart of Redpants has always been providing tons of free information to make Aston Martin ownership easier for everyone. After all, the goal of Redpants has always simply been to make Aston Martin ownership reasonable. With how busy it got, I had to leave my career behind just to keep up with it, and that brought a whole other slew of challenges but it ultimately led to where I am today. So, for better or worse, I’m proud of what I’ve been able to do despite the bittersweet closure of Redpants LLC.
I genuinely appreciate the support I’ve gotten from everyone over the years that I ran Redpants USA, and I hope I continue to earn it going forward with Redpants Japan.