The niche older fashion brands I used to enjoy here are no longer as accessible, in part due to these forwarding services; items are priced higher for foreign buyers who still underpay compared to their domestic supply, and items are becoming harder and harder to find at all as they no longer circulate the domestic market, they just get permanently removed from it. This is despite little change in the market price of such items in other markets/currencies.
Japan is a bargain for the dollar-holder and the market is choosing to price out local interest.
At a previous employer this was a problem we identified (and larger retailer customers) had recognised, although for other reasons. We had developed a size recommendation system for them, that used real product measurements in every size and a method of obtaining your body measurements from fully clothed photos. We also offered a statistical average measurement set for those who couldn’t/wouldn’t take photos of themselves (privacy was important to us, and there was no need to undress).
We were able to give details about fit comfort across many measurements for each size, but this feature was basically unused. 99% of users used the statistical average body of themselves instead of themselves, which actually exacerbates the body type problem.
Another interesting thing about the industry and the grading process we learned; many retailers had no measurements for their own clothes except the reference size. This was much more common of higher end brands.
1 last thing; some global brands actually have the same size name on the same product represent a different size in different region (eg an SKU in size S in US may have different measurements to the same SKU in S in Asia)
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No, but flexible with timezones
Technologies: Go, Typescript, PHP, Python, AWS, GCP. Others too
Resume/CV: https://www.galaco.me/assets/CV.pdf
Email: josh [at] galaco.me
Senior full-stack engineer living in Tokyo. 10 years experience. Experience in multiple AI startups delivering fast product on top of internal ML models. Looking for a startup that has a vision of what to solve and knows their market; ambiguity and ideation stage is great, I'll help get your product off the ground.
Thanks for the info, but I did pause this, not through Google Play, it was via the UI. I received an automated email from them that my subscription had been paused as I expected and will resume in 1 month unless I cancel (I can’t cancel because the cancel UI doesn’t exist in whatever status my account is somehow in).
It’s funny that Claude Pro says this isn’t a feature, because their chatbot gave me instructions on how to unpause via the UI (although said UI does not exist) so the bot seems to know it’s a feature.
This started a couple of days ago, before this announcement for 4.5 and code v2, so I already waited for it to be fixed.
As much as I hate to say it, I don’t have a large twitter following the only method I have to raise awareness of this issue is to try to piggyback on a big announcement like this in HN, that will have visible discussion, so I don’t always have the luxury of just chilling and waiting indefinitely.
If you pause your subscription, Claude.ai breaks. I paused my subscription, and my account immediately transitioned to free. It has removed my invoice history, and attempts to upgrade again fail with an internal error. Their chatbot is telling me to navigate to UI elements that don't exist, and free users do not have the option of human support.
So I'm stuck; my sub is paused, and I cannot either cancel, or unpause and cannot speak to a human to solve this because the pause process took away all possibility of human interaction.
Japan is a bargain for the dollar-holder and the market is choosing to price out local interest.