ModeLoop — Development Story

01

CLIENT

About the client

ModeLoop — one of Japan's leading players driving fashion D2C.

ModeLoop Japan Co., Ltd. operates a new fashion D2C business combining subscription rental × curation × swapping. With around 30,000 members since launch, it is one of Japan's leading subscription-fashion companies.

The business model: 'rent several curated packages monthly,' 'swap online if they don't fit,' 'buy if you love them.' It is a circular D2C platform answering modern fashion consumption that is shifting from owning to experiencing.

Subscription membership scale

30,000+

Monthly auto-billing success rate

99.9%

Swap-completion lead time

Avg 3d

BUSINESS FLOW

Member subscription experience (4 steps)

①

STEP 01

Sign up

Choose a monthly plan
Register payment info

②

STEP 02

Choose a package

Curated box
Pick by brand & color

③

STEP 03

Receive rental

Via the delivery calendar
Receive on the chosen date

④

STEP 04

Swap or continue

Request swaps fully online
Or simply continue

02

CHALLENGE

Design challenges to solve

Four structural requirements the platform had to meet.

None of these are about technology choice — they are conversion rate, ops effort, payback, and customer satisfaction — business requirements directly tied to them. A from-scratch build had to satisfy all of them at once.

Challenge 01 — Try-on experience

Offer a 'wear before you buy' experience and you can improve purchase conversion

On off-the-shelf EC, the try-on rate is under 5%. Worries about wrong size or style hold back purchase intent. Offer a monthly rental experience and you improve conversion and customer LTV together.

Challenge 02 — Swap/return flow

Handle swaps and returns fully online and you can cut over 100 ops-hours a month

Relying on phone/email support, ops effort at 10,000 members reaches over 100h/month. Design a fully-online flow and you can scale membership 3× without adding ops staff.

Challenge 03 — Subscription billing ops

Automate monthly billing, dunning and cancellation, and you can run the subscription business with zero ops staff

Build manual Excel collection, dunning calls and cancellation handling into the design and you face a fixed cost of over 100h/month. Integrate deeply with Stripe Subscription and you can operate with zero manual intervention.

Challenge 04 — Inventory rotation

Visualize rental-cycle efficiency and you can recover the initial investment 1.5× faster

Get inventory-cycle design wrong and apparel stock turns at < 6×/year delays payback. Visualize the rent→swap→re-lend cycle and you can achieve a 12×/year rotation.

03

ARCHITECTURE

Architecture we built together

Turning fashion D2C into an 'extensible foundation' across four domains.

We extended the four axes that legacy EC platforms can't handle — 'subscription billing × rental × swapping × browse UX' — on top of EC-CUBE 4, Japan's market leader, with 35+ custom Entity layers. The fashion-D2C-native experience was built in-house from scratch.

EXECUTION

8mo

Duration

32person-months

Total effort

Domain ①

Foundation choice

Challenge

Build a new SaaS from scratch or extend an OSS base — balancing launch speed with custom requirements

Solution

Adopt EC-CUBE 4, the domestic market leader, as the base

Rental/subscription/swap add 35+ custom Entities under app/Customize/, balancing standard-EC stability with custom-requirement flexibility.

Domain ②

Subscription billing

Challenge

Monthly billing, cancellation, dunning and refunds must run robustly — one failure directly erodes member trust

Solution

Deep Stripe Subscription integration + monthly auto-execution via cron batch

Each Order keeps a stripe_charge_cancel_refund, fully securing refund traceability.

Domain ③

Rental / swap

Challenge

On an EC base with only one-off-purchase models, period management, swaps and re-lending must be handled

Solution

Package + RentTime + ExchangeItem + CancelOrder custom Entity layer

Implemented with Doctrine ORM, guaranteeing the fully-online flow within a single transaction.

Domain ④

Fashion UX

Challenge

A fashion-D2C browse experience — Brand/Color/Coordinate must be intuitive to operate

Solution

Brand/Color/PackageCategory/Tag multi-axis faceted search

A favorites box (CustomerFavoritePackage) accumulates per member, improving the accuracy of the next suggestion.

FRONTEND

TTwig

Bootstrap 4

SCSS

Gulp

BACKEND

PHP 7.1+

Symfony 3.4 EEC-CUBE 4

Doctrine ORM

INFRA & PAYMENT

MySQL

Nginx

Docker

Stripe Subscription ✉Swiftmailer PTCPDF

04

IMPACT

The value the platform creates

ModeLoop Japan Co., Ltd.'s 'business growth' accelerates.

This foundation is not about technical metrics but fast launch of a new D2C business, zero-ops subscription operations, optimized inventory rotation — business outcomes it generates continuously.

OUTCOME 01

Fast launch of a new D2C business

By adopting EC-CUBE as the base, a foundation that can ship to production in 8 months from scratch. It balances the stability of standard features with the flexibility of custom requirements.

OUTCOME 02

Full automation of subscription billing

With Stripe Subscription integration, a foundation that runs collection, dunning and cancellation with zero manual intervention. Ops effort stays constant even as membership grows.

OUTCOME 03

Optimized inventory rotation

Centralize rent→swap→return, and a foundation that shows the rotation rate on the management dashboard in real time. Payback 1.5× faster.

OUTCOME 04

Differentiated fashion UX

Browse across brand/color axes and re-suggest from a favorites box — a next-generation D2C experience. Get ahead of the shift from owning to experiencing.

STAKEHOLDER

👩

Subscription member

End user

Typically

Buy without trying → wrong size → returns are a hassle, so people just give up

At ModeLoop

Decide after wearing via monthly rental; if it doesn't fit, request a swap in one web click

Business impact

Expanded fashion-experience opportunities

The reassurance of deciding after wearing takes hold, and LTV keeps rising

STAKEHOLDER