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Zozotown Finds E-Commerce Niche in Japan
TOKYO
-- Yusaku Maezawa took a circuitous route into the world of online fashion retailing. As a drummer in a punk band in the Nineties, he got a taste for the business world when he started selling CDs and records first at concert venues and later through catalogues and mail order.
"At one point I turned that into an online shop, and from there I expanded the product range to include clothing. Now, I've quit [the record and music business]," said the 35-year-old, who founded Japan's fast-growing online fashion mall Zozotown in 2004.
Zozotown is now a leading fashion retailer in Japan, a country that was slower than others to embrace the notion of e-commerce. It has nearly 3.4 million subscribers and 1,500 brands, including Beams, United Arrows and A Bathing Ape (Bape). The parent company, Start Today Co. Ltd., is predicting sales of 32.3 billion yen, or $418.84 million, for the current fiscal year, and last May Zozotown initiated its international push with a new site in English, Chinese and Korean, serving over 80 countries worldwide.
Maezawa, who serves as chief executive officer of Start Today, said that although it's still early, the international site seems to be performing well.
"We've gradually started doing some promotion [campaigns] internationally, so depending on how effective that is, we'll [see how it goes] from now," he said. "We've put ads in international magazines, as well as online ads. Of course, because we have a lot of Japanese brands, we get many orders from [elsewhere in] Asia, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and China."
But not all brands carried on Zozotown's Japanese site are also available to be shipped abroad. Currently the international site carries about 700 brands, less than half the number on its Japanese counterpart. And while product quality is high and the rate of returns is low, Maezawa noted that there are still difficulties with selling Japanese clothing to customers overseas.
"Everyone is interested; however, from the viewpoint of Chinese people, it's still expensive," he said. "For American and European [customers], the sizes don't quite work unless [the brands] make things specifically for that [market]."
We're expanding with the aim of including all of the brands that...