Source | Lingshou ID | lingshouke Author | Shili

"This adjustment is different from before; it's not just changing the storefront or renovating," said a former Miniso franchisee. "If all stores have to meet the 'MINISO LAND' standard, it means we need to relocate, redesign the store, and retrain and manage staff all over again."

Not long ago, Miniso founder Ye Guofu publicly announced a new "reform" plan.

Ye Guofu proposed that over the next two years, the company would undergo a "change of tenants" (a metaphor for transformation), planning to close and reopen 80% of its stores. The goal is to change the store format and product offerings, shifting the company from retail to cultural and creative business.

This number is significant: Miniso currently has over 7,000 stores globally, and 80% means nearly 6,000 stores will undergo major changes.

For franchisees, this may mean not only paying for renovations and changing inventory but also bearing losses during the closure period. This is a major test for stores undergoing "adjustment and renovation."

In Ye Guofu's blueprint, the adjustment follows two lines: first change the stores, then change the products.

Regarding stores, the previous small stores under 200 square meters will be upgraded to themed spaces of 400 to 600 square meters. The flagship store model is the 1,500-square-meter "MINISO LAND Global No.1 Store" on Nanjing Road in Shanghai, which not only sells products but also offers entertainment and social functions.

Regarding products, over the next three to five years, he hopes to increase the proportion of IP products from the current 50% to over 80%, cutting low-priced standard products and adding high-premium co-branded series like Marvel, Disney, and Kikava, pushing Miniso from a general merchandise retailer to a cultural creative brand.

Following this logic, Miniso will gradually upgrade from small stores to thousand-square-meter cultural experience spaces. This is actually a major move by Ye Guofu betting on China's IP consumption market, with significant opportunities and risks.

The core transformation direction is shifting from relying on store count growth to relying on IP value growth. Previously, the company used hundreds of small stores and low-priced products to expand the market, relying on fast-moving consumer goods for profit. Next, it will rely on larger stores and a higher proportion of IP products to capture the growth dividend of the IP licensing industry.

After all, in 2024, the total retail sales of IP licensed products in China reached 155.09 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.7%. This pie is indeed worth a share.

Since this year, Miniso's trend of "following Pop Mart" has become increasingly evident: plans to spin off the trendy toy brand TOP TOY for a Hong Kong listing, and in its financial reports, it has repositioned itself as a "global value retailer of trendy lifestyle products characterized by IP design."

Additionally, the newly opened "MINISO LAND" large stores, often covering thousands of square meters, sell almost exclusively IP products. Some stores have seen monthly sales multiply 8 to 10 times after renovation.

It sounds exciting and looks good, but not everyone is optimistic. An industry observer warned: "Turning 80% of stores into themed stores all at once carries risks. If only a few themed stores are opened, you can indeed make money from novelty; but if all stores adopt this style and prices are raised, it may dilute Miniso's past 'cheap' image."

Some speculate that Miniso is likely to adopt a conservative "two-track parallel" approach. For example, only upgrading 10% to 20% of stores in core business districts of first- and second-tier cities, creating a clear distinction from regular stores, forming a "high-end version" dual-brand structure. This would preserve the original cost-performance perception while testing new consumption scenarios in core areas, making risks more controllable.

In the past, for many consumers, the first impression of walking into a Miniso store was: "Nice design, and not expensive." This feeling of "good-looking and cheap" is its most powerful selling point.

Essentially, this relies on a stable supply chain to keep costs extremely low. With this approach, Miniso replicated stores at high speed, quickly covering the globe, like a bulldozer occupying markets on a large scale.

But over time, challenges have emerged: there will always be someone cheaper than you, and someone faster at opening stores. When the dividend of channel expansion is exhausted and competitors can also offer "high appearance + low price" combinations, the original unique advantage becomes an easily imitated model. If the old approach can no longer bring incremental growth, Miniso will certainly seek new ways to grow.

Customers attracted by cost-performance may also switch to competitors with lower prices.

From the financial reports, Miniso's performance remains impressive. In the first half of 2025, the company's revenue reached 9.39 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 21.1%; second-quarter revenue was 4.97 billion yuan, up 23.1% year-on-year.

By brand, Miniso's second-quarter revenue was 4.56 billion yuan, up 19.5% year-on-year; the trendy toy brand TOP TOY achieved 400 million yuan in revenue, soaring 87.0% year-on-year.

Profit performance is good but not fully in sync with revenue.

According to the financial report, affected by the acquisition of Yonghui Superstores and its continued losses, profit for the period fell 23.1% year-on-year to 906 million yuan. More notably, the number of domestic stores saw negative growth, with a net decrease of 81 stores in the first half of the year. For a retail enterprise deeply reliant on physical channels, this signals an adjustment in the growth model.

Domestic same-store sales growth remains in the low single digits, but there was some improvement in the second quarter. Ye Guofu expects the full year to turn positive, but the final result depends on the second half's performance.

Meanwhile, overseas expansion is astonishingly fast. As of the end of March 2025, the total number of overseas stores reached 3,213. However, these new businesses, especially directly operated stores, require significant upfront capital, which will affect overall profit in the short term. Additionally, the capital consumption from the Yonghui investment is being gradually digested during the adjustment.

In other words, Miniso is undergoing a transitional phase of revenue growth and profit pressure.

Under the dual pressure of slowing domestic growth and overseas profits not yet released, Ye Guofu chose a strategic upgrade, which indeed requires great courage. By upgrading stores and optimizing product structure, the company hopes to attract customer groups with higher spending power.

This is both a "transformation" upgrade and a rebalancing and "adventure." While pursuing new growth drivers, whether it can stabilize its original price-sensitive users may be key.

After all, the core demographic for IP consumption is concentrated in first- and second-tier cities. The Shanghai Nanjing Road store attracted many young consumers with its anime-themed store model, but it may not be fully replicable in third- and fourth-tier cities or lower-tier markets. If the new customer base does not fully open up and existing customers are lost due to the repositioning, the company may face pressure on both ends.

Additionally, there are bottlenecks in Miniso's shift from a budget department store to an IP lifestyle brand.

From an industry horizontal comparison, its advantages are prominent: a mature supply chain keeps product costs low, co-branding cases like Disney have validated its hit-making ability, and the large-store model MINISO LAND has achieved good results.

In the past, Miniso's IP strategy was mainly licensing: Sanrio, Marvel, Disney... using co-branded series and pop-up events to attract attention and enhance the emotional value of products. This approach has worked, but there is a context: you are "working for" someone else's brand; licensing fees are high, and pricing power lies with others.

What truly builds a moat is creating your own IP, shifting from "borrowing traffic" to "creating traffic." But this is not easy; it requires developing stories and personalities for IP characters like Disney, allowing them to maintain long-term emotional connections with users.

Currently, Miniso's original IPs, such as "Youyoujiang," are still in their infancy and have not reached a level of market irreplaceability. If this step is slow, competitors may seize the gap.

A deeper challenge is that Miniso's strength has always been the supply chain, excelling at minimizing product costs. But content-driven IP business requires storytelling, fan operations, and ecosystem building, which are different capabilities from the supply chain. In this regard, Miniso still has a long way to go.

The second bottleneck is stores. The large-store model has indeed brought Miniso attention and impressive results: the MINISO LAND Global No.1 Store on East Nanjing Road in Shanghai broke 100 million yuan in sales within nine months of opening; the City Playground store on Beijing Road in Guangzhou saw over 10,000 visitors on its first day. In the first half of this year, 11 similar large stores have opened nationwide.

Although stores have become larger, whether the improved efficiency can be widely promoted depends on whether operations can keep up.

The ideal approach is to use data and systems to predict consumption habits in different cities and dynamically allocate inventory: increase the proportion of IP trendy products in first-tier cities, control IP proportion in third- and fourth-tier markets, and retain more affordable essential items, ensuring each store precisely matches local demand, i.e., "a thousand stores with a thousand faces." If the old approach of uniform distribution is still used, large stores may become high-cost burdens.

Ye Guofu's strategy is to combine large stores, flagship stores, regular stores, and pop-up stores into a multi-tiered channel matrix, covering different markets and consumption scenarios. If this system runs smoothly, large stores will truly become growth engines.

Finally, the overseas market is also a tough battle.

The overseas market looks huge, but challenges remain significant. So-called glocalization is not just opening a store; it involves building local R&D and marketing teams. In North America, products need to be adapted to local aesthetics; in Southeast Asia, local KOLs and marketing tactics are needed to engage users. If the domestic model is simply copied, no matter how big the market, it may only result in impressive data with limited conversion.

Overall, shifting from "channel is king" to "content and user is king," Miniso's direction aligns with the major trend of consumption upgrading in China. IP licensing is accelerating its integration with offline immersive scenarios, and AI technology is improving the efficiency of IP design; these are all being tried.

Retail transformation is never easy; it is a self-upgrade and overthrow of old success methods. Whether the short-term pain in profits, original IP capabilities, and refined local operations in overseas markets can be handled simultaneously is the key to whether Miniso can truly break through.

Retail enterprises doing IP is essentially fighting across capability boundaries. The direction is good, but it is also a hard battle of endurance and depth.