The Mercan series “Why I Work Here” focuses on the stories of Mercari members in their own words, showcasing each member’s unique background, reason for joining the company, and aspirations for their work at Mercari. For this edition of our series, we asked Shoko Ogata from the Japan Business PR Team to tell her story.

Shoko began her career in sales after university, then transitioned into public relations at an HR tech startup. After that role, life took a turn and she relocated to Paris. Shoko says that she loves the speed at which startups work and the feeling of driving a business forward. So, what made her choose to work in PR at Mercari? We find out the insights she gained from working at companies of different sizes and in different business stages and what she believes to be the true role of PR in driving a business.

A career spanning sales, startups, and public relations

Hi! I’m Shoko Ogata, and I joined Mercari’s PR team in the fall of 2024. Internally, I’m known by my Slack name @ogasho, which is a nickname from my middle school days.

My team is the PR team for the Japan Business, and our main role as PR specialists is to contribute to the growth of the business. We do this by reaching out to and connecting with people outside the company to gain followers who resonate with Mercari’s diverse and ever-evolving businesses and services.

Although I may be a PR specialist, I still don’t have all that much experience working in PR. My career looks a lot different to those of the other members in my team, who have worked in the industry for many more years. My first job after university was in sales. Following that, I worked at major Japan-based venture companies and large multinational corporations with operations in Japan. Working at a diverse range of companies, I gained experience interacting with clients from a variety of sectors, such as real estate and e-commerce. Just before I was about to turn 30, I changed industries and joined a small HR tech startup with only around 10 permanent employees. I was in a team of one, working on PR by myself. PR work involves using effective communication to take vague ideas and turn them into something that helps shape the future of the company and its business, and also create value for the company. I wanted to work in PR because I thought I could make use of my strengths, such as my previous sales experience, and cultivate a more management-oriented way of thinking.

At the HR tech startup, I was willing to take on anything to help the company grow. Outside of my PR duties, I also took on HR tasks, internal communications, and customer support. In fact, my first encounter with Kitahara from Mercari’s HR team, who was my assigned recruiter during the hiring process, was actually a meeting I attended as a client and temporary customer success manager of the HR company (laughs). Not many people at my company had much sales experience at the time, so besides arranging interviews and creating press releases, I used to join sales meetings and even role play business situations with my colleagues.

The speed at which I worked in those days and the feeling of playing a major part in driving the business forward were true to the nature of working at a startup, and were things I had not been able to experience at larger companies. The work I did in that period—the successes and the failures, the highs and the lows—helped shape who I am today.

Two years in Paris shaping future goals 

One factor that led to me applying to Mercari was my experience at the HR tech startup. The other was living in Paris for two years.

From September 2022 to September 2024, the month before I joined Mercari, I lived in Paris with my husband after we relocated because of his work. For the first time in my life, I experienced what it was like to live overseas long-term as an accompanying spouse. Shortly after arriving in France, I switched to working freelance. At the time, I was also thinking about entering grad school, and being a freelancer gave me the freedom to work and live in a way that was only possible during my limited time abroad. I was mainly doing PR work and assisting Japanese startups with recruitment PR remotely.

I can’t even begin to describe the impact living in Paris had on my life, but one major turning point was that I started to rethink my career—living overseas prompted me to consider Japan’s current place in the world and where I hoped to see Japan headed in the future.

In France, Japanese pop culture such as anime and manga is very popular, more so than in other Western countries. If I told someone I was Japanese, they would get excited and tell me all the Japanese brands and characters they knew, and they knew a lot! I got the impression that most people thought fondly of Japan. (Unfortunately, I leaned too heavily on their kindness and came back barely speaking any French. (laughs) That’s one of my regrets!) 

France is also a country that is leading the charge for startups in Europe, with the number of startups rapidly increasing in recent years. The French government is promoting startups as a pillar of its growth strategy, and as a result, France has produced more than 30 unicorns over the past 10 years. It is now a popular choice for talented people from all over the world seeking experience at a startup.  In fact, the Japanese government has introduced a number of policies based on the French model. The 2024 edition of Viva Technology (commonly known as “VivaTech”), the largest tech conference in Europe, was held right before I returned to Japan and featured a Japan booth and presentations by many Japanese companies and startups.

Since I happened to be in Paris at the time, I was able to attend and saw tech companies from all over the world. This ignited a passion in me to make Japan’s global presence even stronger.

The fact that Japanese brands and Japan itself are so popular right now is thanks to all the hard work of the people who came before me. There’s no doubt that Japan will continue to be competitive on the global stage in terms of manufacturing technology and pop culture content. However, as other countries become more well-known by creating new industries, I think Japan will have to ensure it has its own companies and services that are held in high regard around the world and carry that positive image of Japan forward, like Google for America, Alibaba for China, and Spotify for Sweden.

As I started becoming more interested in Japan’s leading tech companies as a potential career path, I also started to worry about my limited PR experience only having worked at a private startup as the sole PR representative.

I love startups, but I decided that challenging myself to work at a bigger company that’s in a different business phase would help me gain more experience and increase the overall value I could give back to the company in the future.

Joining Mercari to take on bold initiatives

For that reason, I had been interested in Mercari’s PR efforts and in working at the company for a while.

Having become the first Japanese unicorn, Mercari is a leader of the Japanese startup market. At the same time, Mercari continues to take on bold challenges that are a large departure from its original business model, such as establishing the on-demand work service Mercari Hallo. As someone looking in from the outside, I got the impression that Mercari values thinking outside the box and trying new things as if it were still a startup.

Mercari also has a culture of fostering forward-thinking initiatives that complement its main businesses, such as promoting a circular economy and inclusion and diversity. I had actually referred to Mercari use cases when coming up with policies and systems in the past, so I already strongly resonated with the company’s values. Additionally, I had been a Mercari user since the early days, so I was very familiar with the product. That was also a big factor.

I found out that Mercari was hiring after seeing a post on X (formerly known as Twitter). Han from the PR team, who is now my colleague, shared the listing for my current job. I had actually worked with Han in the past, so I sent him a DM asking for more information. That’s how everything started.

One thing that stood out to me during the selection process was a discussion I had with the PR team members who listened to a presentation I gave about ideas for PR to help solve a business challenge. They asked me questions and made suggestions, and that helped me gain a clearer picture of what is required in the role. This helped me polish my ideas and made me realize that PR at Mercari is a team effort, which was a novel concept to me back then. Also at that time, Mercari had just published an interview with Shintaro (Mercari Representative Director and CEO Shintaro Yamada) about the company’s new theme, “Back to Startup,” which struck me personally as a positive move.  It seemed that the company was on the lookout for people willing to embrace a startup-like mindset in terms of speed and culture.

I was considering some other companies that also had attractive businesses and organizations, but I ultimately chose Mercari for three reasons: the potential to produce more value due to the size and business phase of the company; Mercari’s desire to operate like a startup even after growing to its current size; and a team where I could share knowledge with others and grow.

Continuously asking “Why now, why Mercari?”—Breaking down the true nature of driving business 

Looking back on my time at the company so far, two projects stand out in my mind. One was an event we held at the end of 2024 called “Chinese Restaurant You Can’t Pay At.” The other was a project called “Area Growth Strategy,” which I was primarily in charge of.

Ironing out the details for a large in-person event

For the “Your-Money’s-No-Good-Here Chinese Restaurant” project we worked on at the end of last year, we opened a Chinese restaurant in Shinjuku for a limited time. This was an in-person PR event where people could experience working a part-time job with Mercari Hallo.

When I was working at the HR tech startup, carrying out a project like this would have been difficult due to budget and resource constraints. I was amazed at the scale of the event and that there was such conviction to invest so heavily in PR for a service in its first year of operation.

Up until that point, I had only seen completed Mercari projects from the outside. Upon joining the company, I was taken aback by just how much work goes into every project and everyone’s dedication to creating media value. What surprised me was how long we spent discussing how to attract media and user interest in the social issues and topics related to the service; the goal was not simply promotion for the sake of profit.

For example, we discussed how to get across the message, “spare time can be valuable.” We wanted to convey that even a short amount of time can be allocated to working a part-time job, which turns that time into something valuable. We discussed how best to convey this almost right up until the event, eventually creating “spare time cards” and “spare time exchange tickets.” We worked hard on designing the user experience, such as how people would move through each space. We wanted to create an event that was not just interesting, but also empowered the media to convey the core value of the service and experience in a way that was easy-to-understand, novel, and socially meaningful. Seeing how dedicated the project members were to all these details really impressed me, as I had never seen anything like it before.

It was also my first time working with external partners and promoting a project as a team. In essence, we are always asking how we can combine our core expertise with external expertise to make 1+1 add up to more than 2. This project was a valuable learning experience, continuously teaching me things that I could have only learned working on a project of this size.

Going beyond “interesting”—pursuing the “why” that forms the foundation of PR 

To me, the most important part of the Chinese restaurant project was covering all bases of the upstream strategy before taking any action.

We held a press briefing on the first day of the project, explaining why Mercari decided to conduct the project and why we were doing it then. Even the biggest event in the world would be no more than a brief topic of conversation without a clear explanation as to why the event was held—the “why” is necessary for us to truly convey our intended message. While we may be tempted to rush into planning the “how” part, we always hold back and keep pursuing the true nature of the project. The Chinese restaurant project made me realize that prioritizing this step is the true strength of PR at Mercari.

Challenges faced as a first-time project owner and tangible results

The next project I worked on was the Area Growth Strategy. This was the first project I led in a capacity similar to a project owner. The goal of this project was to focus on expanding awareness of Mercari Hallo in certain regions to promote the service outside of the Greater Tokyo Area.

At first, I often found myself getting bogged down in action-oriented thinking and struggling to grasp the role of PR in the business strategy, which led to the team sending back my plans multiple times for revision. As someone who likes to take immediate action, it was a very frustrating time for me.

The turning point lay in once again returning to the “why.” Through discussions with the team, I went back to the basic questions of why Mercari is doing this project and why we are doing it now.

As a result, we decided to shift our approach to directly making proposals to local media outlets rather than holding a large-scale event. We had a very good response from the media upon showing them materials that clearly stated the background and reasoning behind the project, which gave me a tangible sense of progress.

Working on this project taught me firsthand the importance of establishing a solid foundational strategy before taking any action, and I will take this experience forward as one of my successes.

Future challenges at Mercari, future colleagues

My experience at Mercari has shown me that our work improves in direct proportion to how often we engage with users’ honest feedback. Good PR is not possible without listening to direct user feedback, both negative and positive. We as a team want to use that feedback as a springboard to keep developing creative projects that will contribute to the business.

I think Mercari is now past the stage of making news unless something big happens. Now more than ever, our work demands a strategic outlook that requires us to think “why now, and why Mercari?”

Also, Mercari is a company of constant and rapid change. Employees need to have the flexibility to deal with such change and the conviction to move ahead with what they want to do, without being influenced by their surroundings. In other words, self confidence is a big part of the job. You won’t be able to provide much value if you’re a yes-man or are too stuck in your ways. In a company like Mercari, that embodies aspects of both a large corporation and a startup, I believe my task is to take our business needs head on, while also holding onto my core beliefs and embracing change.

I truly look forward to all future work with my like-minded, passionate coworkers and any future team members we may have.