Genki Ito Tippsy Sake is the story of an immigrant-trade insider who saw a gap that most Americans did not even know existed: great Japanese sake was hard to buy, hard to understand and often overpriced. Ito, who was born and raised in Japan, launched Tippsy Sake in the fall of 2018 after a small Indiegogo campaign, and built it into what Nancy Matsumoto described as the largest online sake retailer in North America. In 2026, he renamed the company Palate Project to reflect a bigger mission: changing how sake reaches American drinkers. Here is how Tippsy Sake began, how it grew and where Ito is taking it next.
Genki Ito Tippsy Sake: Who Is the Founder?
Genki Ito is the founder and CEO of Tippsy Sake, the Los Angeles-based online retailer that is now known as Palate Project. According to the company’s Our Story page, he has worked in the sake and Japanese food industry for more than 15 years. Seeing a gap between growing American interest in sake and the limited ways to actually get it, he founded Tippsy.
He is not a traditional wine-and-spirits entrepreneur. Ito grew up in Japan, and he came to the American market as a trade professional, not a hospitality veteran. That outsider-insider position gave him two advantages. He understood how Japanese breweries think, and he understood why their products struggled to reach customers in the United States.
Ito is also the public voice of the company. He appears in trade interviews, podcasts and brand content, and his personal story of discovering sake as an adult runs through the company’s messaging. That is a deliberate choice: Tippsy Sake was built around a story, not just a catalog.
Career Before Tippsy Sake: Hawaii, Los Angeles and an MBA
Ito’s route into sake was not a straight line. Matsumoto’s profile explains that he first noticed sake as something especially delicious as an adult, while working in Hawaii for Nishimoto Trading Company, now known as Wismettac Asian Foods.
The bottle that changed his mind was a ginjo sake from Kamenoi Brewery in Yamagata Prefecture. He remembers it as nothing like the cheap, dry sake he had tasted before, with aromas of banana or melon and a juicy texture. He has said that this experience taught him he preferred the fragrant ginjo style, the kind of sake you would drink from a wine glass.
When the company moved him to its Los Angeles office, Ito kept learning about sake while studying part time for an MBA at the University of Southern California. Los Angeles gave him something else too: exposure to startup culture. He wanted to build something of his own, something he could be proud of and that would add value. Sake, a product he knew from the inside, was the obvious candidate.
This background matters for understanding Tippsy Sake. Ito was not guessing about the industry. He had worked inside the import business and had seen how regulations, distribution and communication problems held sake back.
The Problem Genki Ito Wanted to Solve
In Ito’s view, sake was a product with huge potential and a weak reputation in the United States. He noticed that sake lagged behind sushi in popularity, even though the two come from the same culinary world. Many Americans associated sake with sake bombs or with warm sake served at sushi restaurants.
Yet when he poured people a good sake, the reaction changed. As Ito told Matsumoto, people wanted to know where they could buy more. The problem was not demand once people tasted it. The problem was access and education.
Three issues stood out from his time in the trade:
Supply chain complexity. Alcohol in the United States moves through layered distribution rules that differ from state to state. Each layer adds cost and delay, and sake is a delicate product that is better fresh.
Regulation. Shipping alcohol direct to consumers is complicated. Ito has pointed out that even Amazon has struggled with it, which is one reason tech investors did not find Tippsy an easy sell.
Poor communication. Breweries and the American public rarely spoke to each other. Labels written in Japanese, technical terms and unfamiliar categories left newcomers guessing.
Tippsy Sake was designed to address all three: a direct-to-consumer shop, a clear guide to styles and a story that made sake feel approachable.
Launching Tippsy Sake in 2018
Ito did not start with a big venture round. He raised several thousand dollars through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign and launched Tippsy in the fall of 2018. Crowdfunding served two purposes: it provided early capital, and it tested whether people actually wanted an online sake store.
When Tippsy launched, there were few good retail outlets for sake in the United States. According to Matsumoto’s later Substack post, the company used a third-party logistics provider to ship, and Tippsy became something like the sake equivalent of wine.com, offering a wide selection to customers across most of the country.
Over its first seven years, Ito and his team built a product line of more than 500 sake labels. For a category that most shoppers could not name five brands in, that was a significant step toward making sake feel like a real, browsable category.
Making Sake Easy to Understand
The most distinctive thing about Tippsy Sake was never just the shipping. It was the way the site taught people. By the time Matsumoto profiled the company in early 2022, its customer base skewed toward 25-to-35-year-olds, most of them non-Japanese, and the website was built around content aimed at making sake casual, fun and easy.
The site offered a basic seven-lesson guide covering what sake is, how it is made and how to pair it with food. Blog posts ranged from detailed brewery profiles to playful pieces, such as one celebrating Hello Kitty’s birthday with a strawberry-scented nigori. The tone was deliberately relaxed, and that was a strategy.
Ito described the challenge as a balancing act: avoid overwhelming beginners with too much information, but offer enough detail to satisfy aficionados who care about yeast, rice varieties and brewing technique.
Product design followed the same logic. One of his innovations was assorted gift sets of 300-milliliter bottles, which let customers sample several styles without committing to full-size bottles. A “find my sake” quiz suggested bottles based on taste preferences, and Ito told Matsumoto he wanted to build a more sophisticated, data-driven recommendation system. That would require better technical data from breweries, something many brewers do not routinely share because they feel specifications say little about taste.
Funding, Team and Early Growth
By January 2022, Ito had raised more than $1 million in funding for Tippsy, according to Matsumoto. He was candid that the company was not an easy pitch to tech investors. Selling a Japanese product to overseas customers appealed to some, but the complications of alcohol shipping made others cautious.
The pandemic helped. Ito estimated that Covid accelerated the streamlining of supply chain issues by about a decade, and restaurant lockdowns pushed many people to buy products online, including sake.
At that stage the company had a staff of more than 15, operating out of a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in Carson, south of Los Angeles. It was still a small team by e-commerce standards, but it was running a catalog and logistics operation that larger players had avoided.
Looking back four years after launch, Ito told Matsumoto he felt he had only achieved a fraction of what he dreamed of. Asked for his biggest lesson as an entrepreneur, he answered that it was the importance of crafting a good story that resonates with people.
The Branding Behind Tippsy Sake
That lesson shaped the brand. In a company blog post, creative director Hayataro Sakitsu described how Tippsy’s identity came out of conversations with Ito about what the company stood for. One phrase from the founder stuck with the team: the world deserves to experience the euphoria of quality sake. It became the seed of the company’s tagline, “spread the love of sake.”
Sakitsu’s article also shows the larger ambition: making Tippsy the gold standard for sake information in English. The beauty of sake can get lost in translation, especially with labels written in dense Japanese, so the website had to do translation work as well as selling.
The company’s LinkedIn page describes the same goal in business terms. Tippsy wanted to change the perception of sake as an exotic, cheap, hangover-producing drink and turn it into a culture as deep as wine, by democratizing access to selection and information. It even set a comparison point: growing sake into a category as impactful as the $40 billion wine industry.
From Tippsy Sake to Palate Project
In 2026, the company took a significant step. Tippsy Sake became a Palate Project. According to Heritage Radio Network, Ito renamed the company in May 2026 to reflect a new mission: making sake more accessible to American consumers.
The company was careful to explain what was and was not changing. In its rename announcement, it stated that the team, operations and ownership remain the same, and that customer accounts carry over. Visits to the old Tippsy site now redirect to the new one. The reason for the new name was that Tippsy no longer fully reflected what the company does. The goal, it said, is not only to sell sake but to help create a world where the true taste of sake can be experienced and judged honestly.
That is a meaningful shift in positioning. Tippsy was a retailer. Palate Project describes itself as a project: an effort to rebuild how sake reaches drinkers. Its Our Story page frames the mission as transforming sake from an exotic rarity into an everyday staple, and says value is hidden behind broken distribution systems and outdated regulations.
Direct Imports and the Supply Chain Bet
The core of the Palate Project strategy is a different supply chain. Instead of buying through the traditional layers of importers and distributors, the company works directly with independent Japanese breweries. Its website says that long and complex alcohol supply chains raise prices and compromise quality before sake reaches the drinker, and that fewer middlemen mean rarer breweries, better prices and the stories behind each bottle.
Matsumoto’s Substack post explored what this could mean in practice. She reported that Ito’s team expected the model to let Palate Project sell a junmai daiginjo that once cost around $45 for roughly $26 or $27. Ito framed the approach as streamlining the system for customers rather than disrupting it.
Freshness is the other half of the bet. Sake is generally best when it has not sat for long, and many styles that are common in Japan rarely arrive in the United States. Palate Project’s “Fresh From Brewery” series ships limited-batch nama sake, an unpasteurized style normally found only in Japan, in small runs that are shipped cold and expedited. The company describes it as bringing this style to the U.S. for the first time, with a “once it’s gone, it’s gone” model. A recent drop featured the Nito brand from Maruishi Brewing Company, whose four-person brewing team aims to balance seemingly contradictory flavors.
What Palate Project Sells Today
The current catalog shows how far the business has come from its early days.
Direct Imports. Exclusive selections from Japanese breweries, with free shipping when customers buy two direct import bottles.
The Sake Flight. The brand’s starter product: three premium 300 ml bottles, three ochoko cups and a tasting mat for $89, with free shipping (excluding Hawaii and Alaska). It is designed for beginners and is positioned as a gift.
Palate Discovery Project. A quarterly, expert-curated sake box with stories about how each bottle was found.
Fresh From Brewery. Limited-batch nama sake shipped from Japan.
Cup sake assortment. A build-your-own box of single-serve cups for gifting or casual sipping.
Shoppers can also browse by taste instead of technical category. The site groups bottles into profiles such as Classic, Umami, Balanced, Smooth & Dry, Fruity & Elegant, Sweet & Juicy, Flavored and Cloudy. That solves a problem Ito has talked about since the beginning: most beginners do not know what “junmai daiginjo” means, but they do know whether they like something dry, sweet or fruity.
The site also features brewery profiles that include history and location. Rokka Brewing Company in Aomori traces its roots to 1719, and Yahiko Brewing Company in Niigata has brewed since 1838. The company says it has more than 68,700 happy customers.
Where the Company Stands in the Market
Palate Project describes itself as the largest online Japanese sake store in the United States, and the company has been covered by outlets including the LA Times, Drinkhacker and SakeTimes, according to its media section. Matsumoto earlier called Tippsy the largest online sake retailer in North America.
The competitive picture is straightforward. Traditional liquor stores carry a limited range of sake, usually mainstream brands. Importers and distributors serve restaurants and retailers more than consumers. Few players combine a deep catalog, beginner education, direct-to-consumer shipping and exclusive direct imports in the way Ito’s company does.
The challenges are real. Alcohol regulation is fragmented and changes by state. Sake is still a small category in the U.S. compared with wine and beer, and educating customers takes time. Direct imports also depend on working with many small breweries, each with its own production schedule and limits. But the company has several years of customer data, a recognizable brand and a clear story, which are hard advantages to copy.
Leadership Style and What’s Next
Ito’s style is that of a founder who leads with narrative. His own lesson, crafting a story that resonates, runs through the brand. He is comfortable explaining the business in public, through interviews and podcasts, and he consistently ties the company to a mission: spread the love of sake.
He is also willing to change the model when it no longer fits. Moving from a retailer-style brand to Palate Project, and from a standard wine.com-like shop to direct imports and fresh nama drops, suggests a founder who is comfortable evolving after the first version works.
What comes next likely depends on three things. First, whether direct imports can scale without losing the quality and freshness that make them attractive. Second, whether the rename carries over the loyalty and search visibility built under the Tippsy name. Third, whether the Palate Project can turn curious beginners into regular sake drinkers, which is the real measure of making sake an everyday staple.
Lessons for Entrepreneurs From Genki Ito
First, start from the problem you have seen up close. Ito worked in the sake import trade before founding Tippsy. He knew exactly where the supply chain broke down.
Second, test cheaply. An Indiegogo campaign validated interest in an online sake store before he committed larger capital.
Third, teach your customer. Seven-lesson guides, taste profiles and sample sets turned an intimidating category into an approachable one.
Fourth, tell a clear story. Ito named storytelling as his biggest lesson, and the “spread the love of sake” idea shaped everything from branding to product.
Fifth, be willing to rebrand. When the Tippsy name no longer matched the mission, Ito changed it, while keeping the team and operations intact.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Genki Ito?
Genki Ito is the founder and CEO of Tippsy Sake, now Palate Project. He was born and raised in Japan and worked in the sake and Japanese food industry for more than 15 years before founding the company.
What is Tippsy Sake?
Tippsy Sake was an online retailer of Japanese sake based in Los Angeles. It launched in the fall of 2018 and became one of the largest online sake stores in the United States.
Is Tippsy Sake still around?
The company continues under a new name. Tippsy became the Palate Project in 2026, and the team, operations and ownership stayed the same. The old website redirects to the new one.
Why did Tippsy Sake change its name to Palate Project?
The company said Tippsy no longer fully reflected its mission, which goes beyond selling sake to helping people experience and judge its true taste honestly.
How did Tippsy Sake get started?
Ito raised several thousand dollars through an Indiegogo campaign and launched Tippsy in the fall of 2018. By early 2022, he had raised more than $1 million in funding.
What is the Sake Flight?
It is a starter set from Palate Project with three premium 300 ml sake bottles, three ochoko cups and a tasting mat, priced at $89 with free shipping to most states.
What is nama sake?
Nama is unpasteurized sake, a style usually found only in Japan. Palate Project’s Fresh From Brewery series ships small batches of it to the U.S. in limited runs.
What does “direct import” mean for sake?
It means the company buys directly from independent Japanese breweries rather than through multiple intermediaries, which the company says allows rarer selections and better prices.
Where can I buy Tippsy Sake products today?
The catalog is available at palateproject.co.
Conclusion
Genki Ito Tippsy Sake is the story of a founder who saw a gap from the inside, tested it with a small crowdfunding campaign and built it into one of the biggest online sake shops in the country. Along the way, Ito made sake easier to understand, grew a catalog of more than 500 labels and found that storytelling mattered as much as logistics. With the move to Palate Project, he is betting that direct imports, fresh nama drops and honest taste-based curation can finish what Tippsy started: making sake an everyday drink for American shoppers. If the early signs hold, the next chapter may be even bigger than the first.
For more founder journeys, see Freddie Martignetti’s Rosaluna, Marcos del Pilar’s Pro Padel League and Nopalera’s Series A on Denote Press.
