Summary
Asayoruis a maid café based in Arcadia, California. Since 2021, they have made their appearances at various anime conventions such asAnime ExpoandAnime Los Angeles. From the variety of uniforms, themes, and accessories, to the overall layout of the café, the founder, Sae does not cease to amaze her customers.
GameRant was given the opportunity to sit down with the head maid about how she brought the gems from Akihabara, all the way to California. Just like authentic maid cafés, all maids have their own social media for supporters to follow, as well as a website that regularly updates, making the experience more personable.
Q: What made you decide to start your ownmaid café?
Asayoru:Asayoru was born from our love of maid cafés! One of our founders, Maid Sae, studied abroad in Japan and got to experience traditional maid cafés first hand. Since then, she has gone on several trips to Japan and has visited several different maid cafés, including@home,Maidreamin,Afilia Café, andAkiba Zettai Ryouiki!
Q: Somewhat related to the first question, what steps did you take tomake it happen?
Asayoru:When she came back from her travels, Sae started her own college club-based maid café with her co-founder, Emily, calledZotCon Maid Café. They dived into the local maid café scene and learned that most maid cafés areconvention/event-based, but there were no physical locations open at the time. Several cafés had tried before and failed, due to unique reasons and circumstances.
Sae and Emily threw themselves into marketing research to figure out how to deal with all these different factors, and two years later the idea forAsayoruwas born!Asayoru Maid Caféwill be situated in the East LA area, close enough to several convention locations but also not too close to have our guests stuck in LA traffic. We are confident to present delicious meals and drinks that aren’t just “good enough for a themed café”, but actually delicious enough for you to want to come back! We are working hard to make sure our décor isn’t too tacky or too simple but somewhere that can make our guests feel comfortable, and is also #Instagram worthy. We also have a bunch ofreally cute and passionate maidswho can’t wait to start this journey with you!
Q: What went into thedress designsand overall theme of the café?
Maid Sae:I looked at many differentuniformsfrom popular maid cafés in Japan, and also into lolita fashion! I’m not quite a designer, so it was an amalgamation of aspects I liked, but we also made sure it would be easy to upkeep (since we do get ketchup and chocolate on them often) and reasonable for day-to-day wear. I wanted to stick with the iconic black and white as it is the most flattering for all people, and would provide a blank canvas for all the colorful accessories the maids add on!
We chose the name before we chose the theme, so the celestial theme came naturally for a café named “day night”. The idea of aplace to provide comfortto people no matter day and night really resonated with us, and is truly what we aim for when we welcome our Masters and Princesses home.
Q: How did you go aboutrecruiting people? This can be employees, contractors, visual artists, etc.
Maid Sae:A lot of original members, like my fellow CEO and the main artist, were alloriginallyfrom my college maid café! We started picking up traction onTiktokandInstagrampretty fast after we started, so recruiting always happened really organically. By the first time we opened applications to the public, we already got around 60 applicants by pure word of mouth. We’ve been slowly upping the difficulty and complexity of the applications to hopefully best help us find the most fitting candidates.
Q: In your opinion, what makes a"good" maid?
Maid Sae:A good maid is agood entertainer and server! Both qualities are important for the most optimal maid café experience. Having a sense of what should be prioritized makes the experience flow better for customers. Being a good conversationalist, and being able to adapt to any situation on the fly are also really important. And finally, a passion for maiding really shines through to customers!
Q: In your opinion, what would you define a “maid” as? Example:entertainer, hostess, mascot, etc.?
Maid Sae:A maid I think embodies a lot of things. Our maids are entertainers, hostesses, the brand image they have curated became a representation ofAsayoru; in a way, they are kind of like mascots, and most of all, they are servers. Similarly to theDisneycast members, maids uphold and enhance the magical experience of the café. We also wanted to allow our maids' personalities to shine! We have a very diverse cast with a huge, wide range of interests and personalities.
Q: You frequent Japan quite a bit. Do you ever plan to or think about opening up moreestablishmentsoverseas?
Maid Sae:We definitely have our hands full right now with just our little establishment…the amount of events we do at home base, and conventions we go to booth and perform at, keep us super busy. We’ve gotten lots of offers to franchise to different states, but I don’t foresee it happening before I perfect the business model and training regiments. We’re still so new (only two years old!) and since we are one of the first of our kind in the industry, there’s still much to learn and adjust tobefore we expand!
Q: What advice would you personally give togirlswho want to become maids?
Maid Sae:I highly recommend having a good amount ofrestaurant experience! We serve a high volume of guests on a day-to-day basis, and being able to manage multiple tables and knowing how to prioritize certain tasks, comes with experience. you’re able to learn dances and research conversation topics, but server experience is hard to learn from someone just telling you what to do.
Besides that, I recommenddoing lots of researchbefore joining any maid cafés! In recent years there have been a lot of new pop-ups, and there are unfortunately lots of people out there who want to take advantage of young female-presenting folk. Check to see who owns the café, what their goals are (brick and mortar? Traveling convention café?), how long the staff have been with them, if they are being paid/compensated properly, etc.
Q:Asayoruis based offauthenticJapanese maid cafés to give audiences an accurate and fun experience! What key details did you make note of to include? Did you decide to change or add anything?
Maid Sae:We definitely wanted to keep the overall flow, types of spells, andplate decorationthe same to provide the most authentic experience. We decided to only keep certain Japanese phrases, so as not to alienate non-Japanese speaking audiences, and to avoid being weeaboos.
To provide the most authentic Japanese maid café experience, we maintained the core elements such as plate decoration and types of spells. We decided to keep a few Japanese phrases in spells, such as “Moe Moe Kyun”, which is the crucial identity of a majority of Japanese maid cafés. Explanations for spells and writing/drawing on plates are typically done in English. This decision was made so that we would not alienate non-Japanese speaking audiences and to avoid embracing astereotypical “weeaboo”image.
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