The Company That Keeps Trying to Talk You Out of Buying Its $500 Dolls

I've been circling Smart Doll (the line created by Danny Choo, fronted by his character Mirai Suenaga) for a while now, and what finally pushed me to write about it isn't the sculpts or the skin tones — it's the sales funnel. Somewhere in the checkout flow, Smart Doll Store decided that the correct way to sell a ¥72,000 (roughly $500 USD, and that's before clothes) collectible is to actively slow you down and make sure you actually know what you're getting into first. That's such a strange, refreshing instinct for an e-commerce site that I had to dig into how deep it goes.