A trendy Asian lifestyle chain opens in North Korea

WHEN Miniso said in January that its stores would “bring the happiness of stress-free shopping to the Koreans”, you would be forgiven for thinking they were referring to emporium-loving Seoulites. In fact, the home-goods store, co-founded by a Chinese entrepreneur and a Japanese designer, was announcing that it would be taking its capitalist trinkets into (ostensibly socialist) North Korea. In a joint-venture deal with one of the country’s state-owned enterprises, it agreed to establish the first foreign-branded chain store in Pyongyang, the destitute country’s showcase capital.

The first Miniso store opened there in April, eight months after its first shop in South Korea began operating, and just before it launched in America. Its arrival is remarkable in a place where displays of branding are rare (the exception is a handful of billboards advertising a local car firm, Pyeonghwa Motors).

Miniso’s coup in the secretive kingdom is part of a global advance. Since it opened its first store in Guangzhou in China in 2013, it has signed deals to expand into more than 50 countries, from Mexico to Mongolia; it has more than 1,800 outlets in total. Revenue amounted to 10bn yuan ($1.5bn) in 2016, almost double that of the previous year.

Ye Guofu, the Chinese entrepreneur who co-founded Miniso with Junya Miyake, who runs its design team in Tokyo, sends out some 200 buyers around the world in search of ideas. New household goods hit its shelves every week, from nail polishes to bath mats and frying pans. Its few pricey products cost no more than about $40. Its young fans see it as a cross between three popular Japanese retailers: Daiso, a ¥100 chain, where everything costs less than 90 cents; Uniqlo, a clothing company with minimalist design; and Muji, a lifestyle chain with a massive product range. Others gripe that it is misleadingly plugging its Japaneseness (it says it was founded in Tokyo, though it has only four shops there and over 1,000 in China) to appeal to Asian consumers keen on kawaii, or Japan’s brand of cuteness.

Anecdotal evidence from Pyongyang suggests that the city’s coterie of privileged North Koreans is already enthusiastic. On a recent visit a foreign resident saw mainly toys, cosmetics and home-decor baubles being bought for between $2 and $10. Price tags at Miniso are in North Korean won but customers must pay in dollars, euros or Chinese yuan—an embarrassment to the regime, which knows its won are worthless. The store is in a lotus-flower-shaped building on Ryomyong Street, a cluster of high-rise apartments and shops (pictured) opened in April to fanfare by Kim Jong Un, the North’s leader, who took power on the death of his father in 2011.

The young Mr Kim has promised his oppressed people more leisure and consumption: shopping centres, renovated funfairs and a water park have in recent years been unveiled in the capital. That helps to explain the entry of Miniso, which says it wants not only to “enrich people’s choices in North Korea, but also improve people’s living standard”. Lim Eul-chul of Kyungnam University in South Korea expects Miniso will soon be stocked with locally produced goods too. Yet this is not a market for the faint-hearted. Egypt’s Orascom Telecom entered into a joint venture with the state in 2008 to set up North Korea’s first 3G cellular network. It has yet to repatriate any profits, and in 2015 it said that the North Korean state had established a second carrier to compete with its own network.