CREAL 1.5 - Everything About Cereal Kendama's New Shape

It was a long time coming - but when we decided to bring back Cereal Kendama in 2019, we knew we had to work towards an improved shape.

While the CREAL shape was custom and designed to our preferences, it had honestly fell behind all the other shapes in the market. After obtaining those shapes and studying them, we started working on a design that we were comfortable with, but still representative of the kendama landscape today.

After months of prototyping, we landed where we are today - CREAL 1.5, a Cereal Kendama shape updated for modern play, while maintaining the comfort we love.

Bigger Tama = Bigger Cups

With our new Cereal Kendamas, we introduced a 61mm tama (3% bigger than the average). This improved the grip for older players with bigger hands and allowed for better control. However, with a bigger tama, we needed bigger cups in order to not feel like the tama was dwarfing the ken.

That in mind, we increased our cup sizes by almost 10%. The result - a larger surface area of contact, and better lunar balance.

Bigger Hands = Wider Sarado

Being an adult playing kendama has always been a challenge due to our bigger hands. The main problem being not able to fit our fingers in between the sarado and the sword for gunslingers. Thinning the sword can solve this problem, but it can result in a more brittle sword.

Our solution, widen the sarado. Widening the sarado adds weight due to the higher volume of wood used, improving lunar balance and at the same time allowing larger fingers to sling more comfortably.

Bigger Tama = Longer Spike, Wider Sarado

From contact points during tricks, to landing spikes - we considered all states of the kendama when designing this shape. One of the considerations was how nicely a tama would sit when on spike either in ken or tama grip.

As our tama grew bigger, we felt that widening the sarado and lengthening the spike allow it to sit better, and so we did it. This resulted in less fall outs when launching from tama grip and more controlled earth turns when launching from ken grip.

Base Cup Hole - Stay the Same

Our decision to make a base cup hole has always been focused around improving lunar balance. This is why our base cup hole is larger than most in the market - we pushed the limit while maintaining the risk of a more brittle base cup.