About Cherry on the Moon
We are Denise and Riley: a small design and development studio living in Tomamu, Hokkaido, where we also operate Wakaranai Lodge.
A tourism business, not just a tourism portfolio
Our studio is based in Tomamu, a mountain community in central Hokkaido. Alongside Cherry on the Moon, we operate Wakaranai Lodge—a small ski lodge welcoming travellers from Japan and around the world.
That means booking platforms, transport questions, weather, seasonal information, guest communication, and multilingual expectations are not abstract marketing ideas to us. They are part of our daily work.
The two of us
Design · illustration · identity
Denise brings the visual character to the work: identities, typography, layouts, illustration, print, and the small details that make a business feel recognizably itself. Originally from Germany, she also brings native German insight when a project genuinely needs it.
Development · strategy · systems
Riley handles web and application development, technical planning, search foundations, integrations, and the systems behind the design. Growing up in the United States and now operating a lodge in Hokkaido shape how he thinks about the way international guests understand Japanese businesses.
Most projects pass constantly between us. Strategy affects design, design affects development, and what we learn running the lodge affects all of it.
At the end of the day, we are both artists. Sometimes that happens at a computer; sometimes it happens in the kitchen, in the garden, while fixing something at the lodge, or somewhere near the top of a mountain.
We do not separate creative work very neatly from the rest of life. Everything feeds everything else.
Experience across borders
Before building Cherry on the Moon in Japan, we worked across web development, application development, design, and marketing in both the United States and Europe.
That mix matters. We can think about the identity and feeling of a business, then follow the work through information architecture, responsive development, search foundations, analytics, and the real systems a team needs to operate.
Why Cherry on the Moon?
The name began as a bit of a joke during a summer we spent picking cherries in Canada. We started work around two in the morning, before the heat softened the fruit, and picked through the night beneath the moon.
Denise has always loved the moon, so Riley started singing her a ridiculous little song while we worked:
“At the Cherry on the Moon, there’s room for two—me and my cherry princess.”
Somehow, the name stayed. Over the years it gained another meaning: the cherry on top, only more on top—because it is on the moon.
That feels like what we try to add to a business: not decoration for its own sake, but the final bit of clarity, character, and care that makes the whole thing feel complete.
Why we do this
We care about independent businesses because we are one. We know what it feels like to balance ambition with real budgets, limited time, and a long list of practical jobs that still need doing.
Our role is to find the most useful solution—not to sell the largest possible project. Sometimes that is a complete rebrand and website. Sometimes it is fixing the clearest problem first.
