Value retention and non-resident demand in a Japanese second-hand luxury market: evidence from four years of multi-channel transaction records

Purpose Second-hand luxury is among the fastest-growing Asia-Pacific retail segments, yet who sustains these markets, and through which channels, is rarely measured from complete records. This article provides a revealed-behaviour account of a Japanese second-hand luxury market from complete transaction records, with a channel-by-residency segmentation method built for this setting. Design/methodology/approach The study analyses a proprietary 348,745-record, four-year (2018–2021) multi-channel transaction dataset from a major Japanese second-hand luxury retailer. Buyers are segmented on 2 near-disjoint bases, channel and residency, into 4 cells and 12 personas, validated with multiple robustness checks; a gradient-boosted model characterises the corporate channel. Findings Non-resident buyers carry 74% of consumer revenue (47.9–65.5% under stricter procurement exclusions). Across the COVID-19 travel halt, the travel-dependent segment collapsed while domestic persisted, and the corporate side is a fast, predictable wholesale-clearing channel (AUC 0.88, recovering a median 54% of list price). Research limitations/implications Evidence is from a single retailer; buyers are name-keyed; and the tourist-versus-daigou composition of cross-border demand is bounded, not resolved. Practical implications Retailers should concentrate service and authentication-heavy assortments on cross-border segments, monitor the duty-free transaction share as a real-time, co-incident demand indicator, serve high-value repeat non-resident buyers, some of whom may be procurement-pattern, as key accounts and treat wholesale clearing as a quantified salvage value. Social implications Second-hand luxury is a fast-growing circular-economy channel that extends product life. This study shows which goods sustain the deepest cross-border resale demand and identifies the observable, non-resident share of that demand from complete transaction records, without assuming tourist, surrogate-shopper or environmental outcomes that transaction data alone cannot establish. Originality/value The article provides rare transaction-complete evidence on cross-border resale demand in an Asia-Pacific luxury market, drawn from a non-public dataset capturing non-resident purchasing and channel disjointness that self-report cannot observe.