This month, Japanese-based resale-retailer Mercari announced several online and in-store developments to enhance its omnichannel presence in the US.Several years after the company’s first experimentation with a physical location – its first pop-up shop in San Francisco in late 2021 – Mercari opened its first permanent bricks-and-mortar location on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, California.The “Mercari on Melrose” location offers a space for sellers to list items, a dedicated space for DIY classes and events, and a partner pop-up area.Regarding the store opening, John Lagerling, Mercari’s US CEO, stated, “We’re excited to provide a place for people to experience the magic of Mercari in person. Our new store on Melrose brings to life what millions of customers love about our marketplace.”The online resale marketplace also announced Mercari x Japan, a new offering that will open up direct access to inventory from millions of sellers on its Japanese marketplace.As Lagerling explained, “This launch is the first time we are connecting our US and Japanese marketplaces, enabling US shoppers to purchase items from millions of sellers in Japan.“When we thought about the future of resale, cross-border shopping was a natural next step in Mercari’s evolution as a truly seamless global marketplace. Interest in Japanese fashion, toys, and collectables has been steadily increasing in recent years and the strength of the US dollar makes it a great time for our customers to be able to buy directly from Japan,” the CEO said. Indeed, Lagerling’s comment about American consumers’ interest in Japanese resale goods is right on the money. With the depreciated value of the Japanese yen, especially against the American dollar, many US citizens have been flocking to Japan on tourism shopping trips or to online retailers with access to the Japanese resale market in recent years, in search of lower-cost, high-quality vintage goods. Just this May, Rakuten, Japan’s largest e-commerce site, teamed up with eBay to provide American customers more access to these very goods. The collaboration allows eBay to list selected goods from Rakuten ‘flea market’ service Rakuma on its platform, with a Rakuten-contracted vendor managing shipping and US customer service. This enables users of eBay’s US site to purchase some products listed on the Rakuma official shop, primarily apparel and accessories. Will Mercari’s bet on bricks-and-mortar prove bountiful?Mercari was founded and first launched onto the retail scene in Japan in 2013 and launched into the US online retail market just a year later. In 2023, Mercari reached revenue of $1.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion in 2022. The launch of its first permanent brick-and-mortar location reflects the quickly growing interest in the American retail scene for resale apparel and accessories. In ThredUp’s most recent report, the American consignment company predicted that the secondhand apparel market would reach $350 billion by 2028. To provide a point of comparison, this market reached $197 billion and $141 billion in 2023 and 2021, respectively. However, while the resale market is booming, many resale retailers have been struggling to maintain a steady footing on the bricks-and-mortar scene.In February 2023, the American luxury resale platform TheRealReal announced the closure of four stores and two consignment offices to cut costs and improve profitability. The company also laid off 230 employees and reduced the size of its headquarters in New York City and San Francisco. Part of the difficulty in keeping a bricks-and-mortar retail shop operating comes from the ever-growing number of players in this retail sector, from bigger opponents like Michigan’s StockX to more indie players like the New York City-based thrift store Rogue. As retail analyst and GlobalData managing director Neil Saunders pointed out, “The resale space has become a lot more crowded, and eBay has been doubling down on driving sales, so everyone in the arena must be a little more creative about standing out…Whether the [Mercari] store is financially successful in and of itself really depends on the volumes it can generate which, in turn, depends on how compelling the assortment is.”Mercari has a wide product offering available from the Japanese resale market, which is a big point of interest in a trend-following city like Los Angeles. Saunders thinks that may give the brand a notable advantage with its in-store sales.“Mercari sells a wide variety of products online so it should be able to curate a very interesting range that constantly changes and draws people in to see what’s new,” the retail expert explained.“All that said, we know it is hard to make resale work in a physical space. There are a lot of nuances, compared with running a traditional store, and that can make it hard to operate.”Only time will tell how Mercari’s bricks-and-mortar bet will pan out and whether other resale retailers will attempt to take a similar approach as the vintage market continues to expand.