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ZOZO runs a big online fashion mall in Japan called ZOZOTOWN, where people buy clothes and accessories from many brands, and it also runs WEAR, a fashion social app.
ZOZO is Japan's biggest online fashion marketplace. If you want to buy clothes, shoes, or accessories from hundreds of different brands in one place, ZOZOTOWN is the site many Japanese shoppers open first. Think of it as a giant shopping mall on your phone: ZOZO owns the building, the brands rent space and sell their stuff, and shoppers get one checkout, one delivery box, and one place to browse.
The company makes money mainly by taking a cut of each sale on ZOZOTOWN. Brands pay ZOZO a commission when their clothes sell, and they also pay for extras like prominent placement and marketing tools. ZOZO does not carry much inventory itself — it is the middleman, not the store owner — which keeps the business relatively light and lets it grow without buying warehouses full of unsold sweaters. It also runs WEAR, a social app where people post outfit photos and follow each other's style, which feeds fashion-hungry shoppers straight toward the ZOZOTOWN checkout. ZOZO started life as Start Today, founded in 1998 by Yusaku Maezawa, who built it into a fashion powerhouse before stepping back and eventually selling control to Yahoo Japan's parent company, which is now LY Corporation. The business has had its bumps: a famous 2018 experiment gave every employee a robotic measuring suit to collect body data, and the company also ran into customer complaints and regulatory scrutiny over a subscription program. Rather than pure fashion whimsy, the core business is a marketplace with real scale and loyal traffic — a hard thing to replicate.
Its biggest challenge is that Japanese fashion e-commerce is crowded. Amazon and Rakuten sell plenty of clothing, and physical stores still dominate how Japanese people shop for fashion. ZOZO's answer is brand depth, delivery speed, and the WEAR community that keeps people coming back. The business throws off cash, and over the years it has used buybacks — including roughly eight percent of its shares in one recent program — to return money to investors, while continuing to invest in its apps and logistics.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026