Uniqlo Co., a Japanese fast fashion brand, is vigorously expanding brick-and-mortar stores in South Korea, ttracting budget-conscious consumers amid the protracted inflation as FRL Korea Co., which operates Uniqlo stores in South Korea, said on Friday it reopened an outlet within Dundun, a shopping complex in Dongdaemun, Seoul, after four years.
The 1,558-square-meter store was shuttered in 2020 at the height of COVID-19. It marked its second outlet opening this month after launching its largest offline store in South Korea within Lotte World Mall in eastern Seoul early this month. Next month, it will add four more stores: three in Gyeonggi Province surrounding Seoul and one in the capital city of South Korea.
Fashion industry officials forecast Uniqlo to rake in more than 1 trillion won ($760 million) in sales in South Korea in 2024 for the first time in five years. Founded in 2004, FRL Korea is a 51:49 joint venture between Japan’s Fast Retailing Co., the parent of Uniqlo and South Korea’s Lotte Shopping Co.
It had led the boom of specialty store retailers of private label apparel (SPA) in South Korea and operated up to 186 outlets at its peak in 2019 before COVID-19 struck. Uniqlo has since scaled back domestic operations, reducing the number of stores to 127 in the country as of 2022. It was among the hardest hit by South Koreans' No-Japan boycott campaign launched in 2019 in retaliation of Japanese government’s control of imports of South Korean goods.
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