"Open runs every day" Must-visit 'Otaku Holy Land' in Seoul

The Pokémon pop-up store that opened at Yongsan iPark Mall in Seoul on the 5th. / Reporter Lee Sol

On a Wednesday afternoon at IPARK Mall Yongsan in Seoul, the line outside a Pokémon pop-up store stretched roughly 100 meters past the entrance and out into the rest of the mall. Inside, shoppers in their 20s and 30s waited their turn to pick up plush toys and figures. Many who gave up on getting in stayed anyway, pulling out their phones to take photos of the setup.

The crowd is the payoff for a strategy IPARK Mall Yongsan has spent the past few years building: design the mall around fans and collectors, not casual browsers. The approach is working. The mall has now posted year-on-year sales growth for 50 straight months, a streak that runs against the broader decline of offline retail in the face of e-commerce.

According to IPARK Mall, the retail arm of HDC Group, sales at the Yongsan location have risen every month compared with the year before since April 2022. Last year's revenue hit 649.5 billion won, up 20% from the previous year.

The heart of the shift is "Dopamine Station" on the third floor of the mall's Living Park section. Starting in 2023, IPARK Mall began converting a corridor once filled with phone and camera shops into a complex built around Japanese subculture, gaming, and anime. The floor now packs Pokémon cards, claw machines, gacha machines, and custom keyboard shops into a single zone.

The pull is real. When the Pokémon card set "Ninja Spinner" launched on April 5, between 700 and 800 people lined up that morning. Since then, 100 to 150 fans still show up at opening time most days. The claw machine area takes in an average of 30 to 40 million won a day, and the gacha park clears more than 200 million won a month.

Pop-up stores are the mall's other major draw. IPARK Mall ran more than 810 pop-ups last year. A TWICE pop-up pulled in over 1 billion won in 10 days. A BOYNEXTDOOR pop-up brought in 1.6 billion won across 13 days. When a popular pop-up opens, sales at nearby restaurants and cafes climb about 40% on average. The Five Guys location inside the mall ranked among the top five stores worldwide for sales during its opening stretch, out of roughly 1,900 locations. Fans coming for the content stay for the food, the coffee, and the desserts.

The rebuild started after the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 and 2021, IPARK Mall filled growing vacancies with food and beverage tenants. From 2022, it reshuffled fashion and lifestyle stores and brought in a wave of taste-driven brands. Experience-led events followed, including a beer festival, a terrace cinema, and a camping fair. The goal was to turn the mall from a place people visit to buy something into a place people visit to spend time.

A change in how the mall makes money is part of the story too. On parts of the third and seventh floors of Living Park, IPARK Mall shifted leases from fixed rent to revenue-sharing deals. When tenants sell more, the mall earns more.

Retail experts read the streak as a sign of how offline shopping has changed. Survival now depends on giving people a reason to make the trip, not on waiting for foot traffic to wander in.

"Going forward, only offline stores that offer something you cannot buy on e-commerce, real experiences and real fun, will survive," said Lee Eun-hee, a professor of consumer studies at Inha University.

For IPARK Mall Yongsan, that something is fandom itself. Five years after the pandemic shook offline retail, the mall has bet that K-pop pop-ups, anime corners, and Pokémon launches can do what discounts and department-store layouts no longer can.