POP MART has taken its consumer experience beyond the toy shelf for the first time internationally. On July 29, the company's bakery brand POP BAKERY opened its first Southeast Asian location at Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore. POP BAKERY was initially incubated within POP MART's urban theme park. Domestically, its expansion has relied on over 30 themed pop-up kiosks, with its only permanent store being the one opened in June at Aranya, Qinhuangdao. The second permanent location has now been placed overseas.
The store is situated at Villa A within Resorts World Sentosa, a key tourist resort area adjacent to Universal Studios Singapore and the coastal scenery. Unlike the Aranya store, the Sentosa outlet is a two-story space that blends blind box retail, themed dining, and IP interaction. The first floor is primarily a trendy retail area, showcasing a concentrated selection of POP MART's core IP toys and derivative merchandise. POP BAKERY's main operational area is on the second floor.
The outlet combines its IPs with Southeast Asian flavors, offering limited-edition items such as the Star Figure Sea Salt Coconut Bar, Star Figure Sour Green Coconut Mousse, and PUCKY Xiaolongbao Dessert. During the opening period, POP MART not only held the first overseas meet-and-greet for the Star Figure character but also invited IP artists like HACIPUPU and CHAKA for signing sessions.
POP BAKERY head Zhang Xiaoyang stated that the Singapore store aims to leverage the tourism and cultural resources of Sentosa to bring the experience from POP MART's urban theme park overseas. The goal is to create a consumer experience that blends trendy culture, dining, and leisure entertainment through themed desserts, creative beverages, and immersive interactions. The emergence of this combined format represents both a new step in POP MART's push towards groupification and an extension of its offline store operations strategy.
POP MART previously revealed during its 2025 earnings call that the number of new store openings and renovations will both increase in 2026. The core logic is to extend customer dwell time and enhance the sense of experience through a "store as a theme park" model. Bakery items themselves have a higher consumption frequency and are more closely tied to gatherings, celebrations, socializing, and travel scenarios. Even consumers without a specific plan to buy a blind box might enter the store for desserts, drinks, character meet-and-greets, or as a tourist attraction.
For POP MART, while the urban theme park model may not be suitable for large-scale replication in the short term, its mature modules for dining, interaction, and fan engagement can be extracted and embedded into overseas stores first. Groupification and globalization thus become mutually reinforcing fulcrums: a more diverse range of business formats helps POP MART expand its IP touchpoints overseas, while the continuously growing global network provides space for fan interaction and long-term operations.
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