Established in 1979, we started our painting business as Ohori Paint Shop.
Japanese lacquer, or urushi, has been used in Japanese life and culture for 9,000 years and is still seen today as a craft representative of Japan.
However, changing lifestyles have caused a drop in the demand for lacquerware, and the industry is now drastically declining. In December 2003, we changed our company name to Duco Co. Ltd. and began a new business painting lacquer on metal and glass materials to better fit the modern lifestyle. We use 100% natural urushi lacquer for our products. Its refined texture and the unique patterns it creates completely harmonize with nature and bring energy and elegance to any space.
We began focusing on the base material that the lacquer coats and wanted to choose something other than wood, which we had used up until then. After repeated chemical experiments, we finally succeeded in developing completely new lacquer materials in which the properties of both urushi and the base material blend. We found that transparent materials such as glass and acrylic or metal materials such as titanium work well with urushi. What we created was no longer simply a “lacquer + base” product, but a new lacquer in both function and design.