Japan's parcel industry has spent years asking recipients to feel considerate about missed deliveries. Second attempts fall when choosing is easier than not choosing, and when the shop, not the driver, offers the choice.
Read this dispatch ↗Naomi NakamuraJapan Japanese · English · Korean (working knowledge)
Parcel carriers measure progress by app registrations and digital self-service. In Japan's ageing towns the customers who depend on us most will never use either, and a service designed around them works better for everyone.
Japan's busiest destinations treat visitors' large suitcases as a crowding problem for buses and local trains. It is better treated as a logistics problem, solved by forwarding luggage as the normal choice and priced so the network can carry it at peak.
A leadership conviction
A customer's habit is part of our network, as real as a sorting hub. I would rather change it by offering a better choice than by a lecture or a fee.
Parcels carried, year to March 2026
392 million
Revenue of ¥318 billion across 1,180 depots
Parcels needing a second attempt
7.9%
Down from 13.6 per cent in the year to March 2022, with no recipient fee
Pickup lockers in service
5,600
At stations, supermarkets and municipal offices, up from 1,050 in 2021
In home delivery the most useful marketing changes what a customer does before the van leaves the depot, not what they think after it arrives.
I am the chief marketing officer of Kazemachi Home Delivery, a fictional Osaka-based parcel carrier listed on the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. We carried 392 million parcels in the year to March 2026. Most were sent by online retailers to people who never chose us: they chose a shop, and the shop chose us. A recipient meets our brand at the door, in a text message or at a station locker, and decides each time whether we are a convenience or a nuisance.
I came to parcels indirectly: ten years as an account executive and planner at an Osaka advertising agency, four running customer research at a Fukuoka catalogue retailer whose undelivered parcels came back by the thousand, five marketing a southern Kyushu railway to visitors from abroad, and three and a half leading marketing and loyalty at a domestic airline, including the spring of 2020. Each taught me something about people who travel, wait or receive things.
When I joined Kazemachi in April 2021, 13.6 per cent of our parcels needed a second attempt, and the cap on drivers' overtime that took effect in April 2024 was three years away. We would have to carry the same parcels with fewer driver hours, and much of that depended on customers choosing differently: a locker instead of the doorstep, a window chosen the night before, a price that reflected the work. That is the marketing I answer for, measured in second attempts avoided rather than awareness scores.
Second attempts down from 13.6 to 7.9 per cent
Evening-before notices, one-tap choices and 5,600 lockers cut the share of parcels needing a second attempt from 13.6 per cent in the year to March 2022 to 7.9 per cent four years later, saving about 2.1 million driver hours a year, with no fee charged to any recipient.
A price revision explained in public
In April 2024 we raised over-the-counter rates by an average of 9 per cent and contract rates by 12 per cent, and published the three causes. One large online marketplace moved 19 million parcels a year to competitors. Revenue per parcel rose from ¥668 to ¥733 and operating margin from 2.9 to 4.6 per cent.
No links in our own text messages
After impersonation texts drove 41,000 calls a month to our contact centres in mid-2023, we removed every link from our own text notices. Calls about suspect messages fell 72 per cent by December 2024.
Travellers' bags moved off the bus
Kazemachi Travel Baggage forwarded 1.46 million bags in the year to March 2026, up from 380,000 three years earlier, mostly for visitors from abroad who booked at an airport or station counter on arrival.
Current focus
I am preparing a board proposal to make a pickup point the first checkout option for our five largest online shippers, and extending our contracts with 23 mountain and island municipalities for a service that keeps the paper slip and the telephone line.
Conversations I welcome
I intend to stay at Kazemachi through the next stage of our checkout work. With the consent of our president and board, I would consider one outside directorship at a listed Japanese company in consumer services outside parcels and logistics, and I could give it about twenty-four days a year. I also accept a small number of invitations to speak to marketing, retail and tourism audiences.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
Kazemachi Travel Baggage Co., Ltd.Director of the wholly owned luggage-forwarding subsidiary, in an executive capacity · 2022–present
Formation
Bachelor of Arts in SociologyKitanomori University · 1998
Master of Business Administration, evening programmeHarumachi Graduate School of Business · 2010
When Naomi argued against charging recipients for a second attempt, she did not ask the board to trust her instinct. She asked for two years and named the figure that would prove her wrong. That figure never came. She brings customers into our board discussions as evidence, not as a slogan.
Tetsuya HirabayashiFictional President and Representative Director, Kazemachi Home Delivery Co., Ltd.The full record ↗
Contact
I intend to stay at Kazemachi through the next stage of our checkout work. With the consent of our president and board, I would consider one outside directorship at a listed Japanese company in consumer services outside parcels and logistics, and I could give it about twenty-four days a year. I also accept a small number of invitations to speak to marketing, retail and tourism audiences.
