Founder’s Story
Every Pain Point and Joy of Proxy Shopping
It started with one suitcase
In 2011 I started Global EZshop alone, from Hong Kong. My daughter was five months old. To save on airfare I always took the pre-dawn budget flight, landing at Kansai before sunrise, leaving my suitcase at the hotel desk and heading straight into the Shinsaibashi and Umeda department stores. The suitcase was my office; the streets of Osaka were my battlefield.
An eye is the only thing you can't fake
The hardest was queueing for Issey Miyake BaoBao — standing from 7:30am to 9, legs numb, watching a single “reserved” chair suddenly sprout three or four line-cutters, a counter clerk’s “the white is sold out” landing like a verdict. I learned one thing: people who cut the line never beat people with an eye. So I started betting on my own judgement, stocking the pieces most shoppers couldn’t read yet but I sensed would blow up.
After buying, I’d step into a quiet side street, put the bag or coat on myself, take a mirror selfie and post my honest styling notes to the Facebook Page. Anything I’d worn myself drew a string of “+1” in the comments within five minutes. Customers weren’t buying the bag — they were buying “an eye Snowbebe had already vetted.”
From one person to a team — and into wholesale
When the shop hit thousands of orders a month, I made two decisions people called stubborn: building my own WooCommerce site, and never doing hand-to-hand meetups. I wanted data to make my decisions and my time spent on service. Years later when COVID hit, peers still taking orders one by one over WhatsApp mostly froze — my system had been running for years.
One person’s stamina has a ceiling. I found two core buyers in Kyoto and Tokyo — a student who never lied and was meticulous enough to warn me unprompted that “this colour runs darker than the website,” and a Tokyo local who knew the etiquette and was crystal-clear about money. I don’t screen buyers on résumés, only on character. With them, for the first time I could sit at home in Hong Kong and wait for the “got it” photo.
Some customers were buying in volumes that no longer looked like personal shopping — they were restocking. Over half a year I built a wholesale client base, mostly small-shop owners in China's second- and third-tier cities. They didn't care about the lowest price; they asked three things: Is it authentic? Can you supply steadily? Is someone there when things go wrong? Those three answers were the core competitiveness I'd spent twelve years building.
Twelve years, one principle: confidence
For twelve years my method was one word: confidence. Any shortage or delay, I tell the customer first and arrange the refund immediately. Once a shipment was held at Japanese customs for nearly three weeks — I phoned every affected customer one by one, not a group message. The goods arrived safely, and those three weeks of proactive contact actually raised my repeat-customer rate. A crisis became a trust multiplier.
“The hardest part of proxy shopping was never sourcing or difficult customers — it was betting your money on your own eye, every single time, before you had any system, team, or safety net.”
After closing Global EZshop in 2023, I founded Equal Voice Lab Limited and created Michi (道). I wrote those twelve years into a book — and opened up the most valuable asset of all: the network of on-the-ground shoppers in Japan. Michi isn’t here to replace proxy shopping; it’s here so the shoppers worth trusting can be found.
Agnes · Founder, Equal Voice Lab Limited
Former Founder, Global EZshop · Japan Proxy Shopping Since 2011
I'm Agnes. “Snowbebe,” the name customers knew all along, is my pen name.
Author of 《視界之外》(Beyond Sight) — from 7×24 Japan proxy shopping to AI-guided reinvention. Get it at equalvoicelab.com/publications
