About us
We're the buyer you'd need to know in Japan
Almost everything you want is technically for sale in Japan. The problem is that buying it requires a local address, a Japanese card, the language, and enough knowledge of the market to tell a good listing from a bad one.
That's the whole job. We do the part you can't do from where you are, and we don't charge you until we've shown you exactly what we found.
01 — How this started
Seven years apart, one year together
FindLuxuryJapan is a year old. What went into it took considerably longer.
- 01
The seven years before
None of us knew each other. Half the team was inside Japan’s resale industry, appraising, grading and authenticating goods every day. The other half was in Silicon Valley building systems that identify and verify products at scale. Two versions of the same problem, worked on separately for years.
- 02
The problem we kept hitting
We watched buyers fly in and shop without the local knowledge to price a piece or read a grade, which is a difficult position to be in as a visitor and not always one sellers treat kindly. Others bought from the US and Europe at two and three times what the same piece was listed for in a Tokyo shop. Plenty just gave up. The knowledge to do it properly existed, but it lived in a handful of people’s heads and moved at the speed of phone calls.
- 03
A year ago
We brought the two sides together and started taking requests. The Japan side decides what’s worth buying and confirms the condition. The US side built the software that turns a common request from a week of phone calls into a few minutes.
02 — Why you can trust the answer
Our team spent their careers doing this professionally
Anyone can forward a parcel. The value is in knowing which piece to buy, at what price, in what condition. Our buyers learned that inside the companies that run Japan's resale market, and here's what each of those backgrounds gets you.
Mercari
Japan’s largest marketplace
We know which sellers are worth buying from and which listings to walk away from.
Komehyo
Japan’s largest pre-owned reseller
Your condition grade comes from people who appraised and graded goods for a living.
Brand Off
Luxury resale specialist
European luxury gets checked by someone who authenticated it professionally for years.
Daikokuya
Long-standing Tokyo reseller
We can reach dealers and auction houses that never list anything online at all.
Plus the software that makes it fast
Our engineers in Palo Alto turned that experience into a matching system, so a common piece is identified and priced in minutes instead of waiting on someone's inbox. When it can't find a confident match, it hands the request to a person in Japan rather than guessing.
03 — How we work
Three things we won't do to close a sale
We earn nothing until you approve a piece, which is exactly the incentive that makes agents push. These are the lines we hold anyway.
We’ll talk you out of a bad buy
Sometimes the honest answer is don’t. If everything we find is priced badly, or you can get the same piece cheaper closer to home, we’ll tell you to keep your money.
We’d rather you pass than settle
Photos, the reference and the grade all reach you before any money does. If something about it doesn’t sit right, declining costs you nothing.
We walk away from what we can’t verify
A piece we can’t confirm as genuine never reaches you, however good the price or however certain the seller sounds.
04 — Talk to a person
There's almost always someone awake
Between Japan and California we cover most of the clock, so you aren't waiting overnight for an answer. Ask us whether something is findable before you commit to anything.
Within 3 hours on urgent requests