Folding 17 online shops into one mall, ZOZOTOWN (2004)

What folding its own storefronts bought

The heart of this decision was not a turnaround forced by financial crisis but the choice to fold, by its own hand, a still-growing buy-and-resell storefront and rebind it into a single consignment mall. Scrapping seventeen live shops and remaking them as ZOZOTOWN meant accepting the risk of a temporary hit to existing sales. President Yusaku Maezawa appears to have put the skeleton of the business — a fashion-focused mall where the operator holds the store vetting and the editorial control — above near-term revenue. The character of the shift shows in its continuity: the buyer’s eye Maezawa had sharpened while carrying inventory under the buy-and-resell model was carried straight over into the vetting and world-building of a consignment mall.

Consolidating onto a single domain did not, in itself, generate sales. Rather, what followed — United Arrows joining the next year, bringing ZOZOBASE in-house in 2006, and a consignment commission set well above the market rate — accumulated on top of the consignment model and editorial design laid down in 2004. Where Rakuten Ichiba chased scale by handing its merchants the pages and the running of their stores, Start Today chose to hold both logistics and editing in its own hands. In folding its existing storefronts without regret and fixing the design philosophy of the business first, this decision sketched, early on, the prototype of a platform that later arrivals would find hard to copy.