Company history

In February 1931 Chuji Aoi — twenty-seven and from Toyama — went independent by buying the Nakano branch of Maruni Shokai, the installment-credit merchant he had worked for. The installment trade was then dominated by men from Ehime, and Aoi, a Toyama outsider, started from the margins of the industry. That he had already saved ¥11,000 — perhaps ¥36 million in today’s money — when a university graduate’s starting salary was ¥60 a month says as much about the fat margins of installment lending as about the man: he went out on his own knowing exactly how the industry’s profits were made. He built a distinctive store model that clustered outlets close together along the Chuo rail line to maximize the rounds of the door-to-door collectors, and in May 1937 incorporated Marui with ¥50,000 in capital.

The company reopened after the war — even as its Nakano head store sat under illegal occupation — and a 1952 trip to the United States, where Aoi encountered American credit-card culture, set the next move. In 1960 Marui issued its own store credit card, reaching 50,000 cards in the first year and beginning to move the ledger-keeping of installment selling onto a new form. It was the moment a labour-intensive installment business began turning into one built around information systems — a statement of intent to change a prewar model from the inside — and the origin of the card business that would later run on online credit checks and in-store instant issuance.

Through the 1960s Marui broke out of being a federation of small installment shops along the Chuo line and shifted its centre of gravity to stores in front of the major downtown terminals. The 1962 opening of the Shinjuku store was a concentrated bet of $1.1M (¥400m) by a company then capitalized at just $1M (¥360m) — an investment larger than its entire capital. Founder Chuji Aoi told the company it was “the thing that will decide our fortunes from here on,” and with installment payment as his weapon of differentiation he pushed into a downtown market ruled by long-established department stores such as Mitsukoshi and Isetan. In an age when department stores dealt mostly in cash or single-payment credit, Marui’s installment terms captured the demand of young customers who could not buy expensive goods outright.

Between 1966 and 1971 Marui closed ten small stores to concentrate resources on its main outlets, and in 1970 it overtook its rival Midoriya to lead the installment department stores in sales — a one-generation reversal of the Ehime-born establishment that had long dominated the trade. Having brought computers in-house in 1966, ahead of the industry, Marui ran an online credit-inquiry system from 1974 and, from 1975, began issuing credit cards on the spot in its stores. That a young person could walk in and leave with a card in hand made the downtown store itself a channel for winning cardmembers — a structure competitors took years to match, and the base of what became twenty-six consecutive years of rising sales and profit.

In the 1980s Marui caught the boom in DC (designer and character) brands early and filled its floors with high-priced fashion. Priced from tens of thousands of yen upward and combined with the card’s installment terms, DC merchandise let young customers buy what they otherwise could not, and three elements — the card, the flagship downtown stores, and DC brands — reinforced one another into a model unusual for its time. DC-brand sales more than tripled in three years, from $130.5M (¥31bn) to $737.2M (¥107bn); Marui reached its twenty-sixth straight year of higher sales and profit in 1987 and passed ten million cardholders in 1988. Founder Aoi, characteristically, resisted the praise — “measured against my creed of running things thin and long, being talked up like this is not something to be glad of,” he said — tightening the reins precisely when things went well. And in 1981, quietly, he had already turned the same cardmember base to a new use, consumer cashing — the move that would come to define, and nearly undo, the next two decades.

The cashing business Marui had entered in 1981 grew into the group’s true engine. Using unmanned machines in its stores, it offered small loans to the young at roughly 27% — the “gray-zone” rate that then sat between the ceilings of the Capital Subscription Law and the Interest Rate Restriction Act — repurposing its cardmembers’ attribute data and instant-issuance machinery as the credit base of a lending business. Defaults were held low; by fiscal 2005 cashing alone earned $592.8M (¥65bn) in gross profit a year, a single business propping up more than half of the group’s roughly $408.5M (¥45bn) in operating profit, while the loan balance swelled to $2.3B (¥250bn).

In 1993 the collapse of the asset bubble broke the streak of rising sales and profit, and retail entered a long decline. As the young cut back on luxury and new low-price, high-quality formats — the likes of Muji and Uniqlo — rose, the old model of DC brands and installment payment no longer worked. With the department-store business weakening year by year, the burden of holding up consolidated profit fell ever more onto cashing, and the two motions — retail’s decline and finance’s expansion — settled into place inside one company. A business that quietly assumed a stable regulatory environment was building into itself a constitution fragile to the one thing it took for granted: a change in the rules.

After more than a decade of weak results — even weekly “sales meetings” running from three in the afternoon to ten at night found no fix — Marui in August 2003 launched a reorganization that ran four measures at once: a call for 700 voluntary redundancies, the transfer of 5,500 staff to subsidiaries, the introduction of merit pay, and an ERP overhaul of some $86.3M (¥10bn). The management of the day had diagnosed the long retail slump as institutional rigidity. But running all four together changed employees’ employment status, evaluation, pay, and work systems in near-parallel across 2003–2004, and unprecedented confusion followed on the floor; the reform, so named, worked to break the very trust of the employees it needed. Third-generation president Hiroshi Aoi later called the results dire and abolished merit pay in 2007 — a retreat just four years in — an experience that turned him from top-down system design toward a dialogue-based style.

Marui’s house card carried a structural flaw long known internally as the “age-thirty problem”: its core twenty-something customers shopped less at Marui once past thirty, and their card use fell with them. Having obtained a special VISA license in March 2005, Marui began issuing the Epos card in April 2006 — usable anywhere VISA was accepted, yet still issued on the spot in its stores — turning a card tethered to Marui’s floors into a general-purpose one. The timing was forced: in January 2006 the Supreme Court ruled gray-zone interest illegal, and the revised Money Lending Business Act that December left Marui, carrying $2.1B (¥250bn) in cashing loans, hit twice over — by lower lending rates and by claims to refund past illegal charges. Over the fifteen years to March 2021 it wrote off ¥124.7 billion in cumulative interest-repayment provisions.

The rebuild was as much about method as money. President Hiroshi Aoi, chastened by the 2003 reform, put dialogue with the front line — not top-down redesign — at the centre; ESG, he later said, “came like a boat across the water,” letting him reset the company’s axis from cashing dependence toward reconciling profit with social problems. In retail he shifted the stores from buy-and-sell consignment to a fixed-term-lease, shopping-centre model in 2015, compressing fixed costs while stabilizing income; in 2012 he even moved staff from the shrinking retail side to the growing card business. Combining lease rents with Epos’s financial income, and adding co-creation investment in ventures from 2018, Marui strung together eleven consecutive years of profit growth through the 2010s, with fintech becoming the pillar of group profit.

In May 2025 Marui Group unveiled a “Management Vision & Strategy Story 2031,” timed to its centenary in 2031. Its thrust is a deliberate contraction of retail: to stop running large department stores and instead open compact “self-run units” on the upper floors of others’ commercial buildings, drawing crowds on their own strength. Closing the unprofitable Kashiwa Marui and steering resources to small stores in unentered cities such as Nagoya and Sendai, Marui aims to lift return on equity back above 10% for the first time in thirty-four years, and targets an ROE of 15% or more and EPS of ¥200 or more by 2031.