For thirteen months, Labalabs has worked as a creative agency for Mini Katana in their secondary YouTube channel, previously known as Meenee Katana and now rebranded to The WakuWaku. Mini Katana, as a brand, focuses on katanas and topics related to the culture around them, including Japanese elements. Their main focus is selling physical katanas. As for the second channel, they intended to promote the katanas business but gather an audience more focused on anime that would subscribe to their newsletter to promote an unreleased digital product (which is not available yet).

Our work with The WakuWaku at the beginning consisted of creating long-form YouTube videos completely related to anime, the main content being about Demon Slayer. Later in the process, they started experimenting with other animes, for which we also produced the videos. And finally, months later, we were commissioned to do localization processes for their Shorts production since they’d start new channels for Spanish and French.

Long-form

The WakuWaku Case Study

We received a monthly scope detailing the number of videos we’d produce and the anime content we’d work with. After that, the work was mostly up to us:

  1. Research the kinds of videos performing well to propose the angles for each video.
  2. Write the script.
  3. Record the voiceover.
  4. Edit the video.
  5. Create the thumbnail.

Each video duration ranges from 7 minutes to 20 minutes. We produced between 4 to 8 videos per month.

Results

Over the course of our work with them (eight months), The WakuWaku grew more than 200,000 subscribers. The frequency of posting was 1 video per week.

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In terms of views, the channel grew around 150 Million views in eight months, of which 9.5 Million views came from the long-form videos we produced—a total of 32 videos.

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The best-performing videos

797K views | 15K likes | 451 comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln4gyej6Hlo

374K views | 9.1K likes | 363 comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4PUVgXYe6M

500K views | 9.1K likes | 174 comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGD8ylJ3ooI

233K views | 4.9K likes | 170 comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B3h7nj4FjU

497K views | 5.8K likes | 519 comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkrM2-_ka-s

195K Views | 3.6K likes | 104 comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x9-9QXHYqY

Localization: short-form

Mini Katana Localization Case Study

We received a monthly quantity of Shorts to localize that we then would manage in a shared database with the client in order to track the needed changes for each video.

  1. Translate the script of each Short.
  2. Record the voiceover.