Your Overseas Partner Across Cultures

What is a “Sibling”?

Your counterpart. A partner in crime. Someone who feels familiar and close to home.

With roots in both the U.S. and Japan, we understand where you’re coming from and help bridge cultures through a shared language and perspective.

When you have a Sibling, you always have someone to lean on—a trusted partner who stays close, no matter the distance.

Our Approach

Cultural differences aren’t barriers—they’re opportunities to create new value.

We believe that being curious about our differences is the key to expanding our understanding and appreciation for the world.

Born from a deep interest in decoding cultural nuance and building brands that resonate across borders, Sibling works closely both as a local partner and as well as an overseas extension of your team.

Having lived experiences in both cultures, our approach is a personal one—one grounded in empathy, collaboration, and a deep commitment to understanding our clients.

Our Story

(01)

Adapting to a new market or culture is a significant undertaking. It takes determination, patience, and digging into contextual details—in language, history, aesthetics, and behavior—to truly understand and connect to a place.
We’ve seen this challenge time and time again, with Japanese companies arriving in the U.S. with global ambitions and challenger mindsets, trying everything they can to be recognized in a new market.
Yet often, something doesn’t quite click. It’s not just marketing or translation. Something more subtle and foundational beneath the surface. A cultural gap.
(02)

For us, this challenge is deeply personal.
Having grown up between the U.S. and Japan, our own experiences of navigating two different languages and cultures have shaped how we see the world. It’s trained us to recognize invisible gaps: subtle nuances and points of disconnect that are often difficult to articulate.
It’s not about one side being ‘right’ or ‘better’ than the other. It’s simply that a gap exists, and that it needs to be understood before it can be bridged.
(03)

These are the moments we realize, this is what Sibling is for: to offer perspective and guidance to help brands navigate and build across cultural gaps, turning friction into something meaningful. Something exciting.
And that takes real human insight to guide what is culturally fluent, socially relevant, and creatively compelling. Because before a brand is seen and sold, it needs to be understood, felt, and chosen.
By bridging these gaps and inspiring connection, we hope to foster greater understanding in the world, so that differences become a source of common ground, not division.

Our Team

Founder

Mari Iwahara

Brand Designer & Strategist

Mari is a Japanese-American brand specialist with a love for decoding cultural nuances and exploring cross-cultural spaces. As a Japanese-American nisei born and raised in New York, Mari grew up navigating both cultures and languages which informs her empathy-driven approach to working with clients.

She began her career as a brand designer at global branding agencies such as Landor and Red Antler, working with clients across a range of industries and scales from Fortune 500 companies to emerging startups. She later joined Google Jigsaw to lead their rebrand efforts and manage in-house brand creative.

In 2022, she founded Sibling, a cross-cultural branding agency that supports Japanese companies entering the U.S. market. Through this work, she focuses on translating cultural nuance into compelling brand expressions, leading initiatives that bridge business and culture across borders.

Rie Ehara

CX/Retail Strategist

Following a career at a securities firm and VC fund specializing in retail investments, Rie went on to establish her own independent consulting practice.

She has since led consulting initiatives analyzing business and consumer trends across Japanese and U.S. markets, providing retail strategies across the entire value chain from concept development to e-commerce, product development, marketing, and spatial design direction. In 2018, she relocated to the U.S., where she now primarily supports local companies with strategic advisory services.

With hands-on experience operating D2C retail businesses in both Japan and the U.S., Rie is currently involved in launching an incense brand (SOTO Project) and a matcha brand (NAKAI), leading brand direction and U.S. market entry for both.

Collaborators

Our network is comprised of like-minded bilingual branding professionals, or ‘Siblings’, who contribute based on project needs and matching expertise.