He Started in a Garage in Guangzhou — And Built the World's Most Visited Lifestyle Store. The Story of MINISO.

In 2013, Ye Guofu — a Chinese entrepreneur from Hubei province who had already built and run several retail ventures in Guangzhou, including a chain of fashion accessory stores — went on a family trip. What he saw abroad stopped him in his tracks.

The stores he walked into were selling well-designed, quality everyday products — home goods, accessories, personal care items, small electronics, stationery — at prices that were accessible, even affordable. And when he looked at the labels, he realised something that he found simultaneously amusing and instructive: many of these products were manufactured in China. The same country that was producing them was not yet the country buying them in their best-designed, best-packaged form.

He returned to Guangzhou with a clear idea. He would build a chain of stores that offered what he had seen abroad — curated, design-led, affordable lifestyle products — but built for the scale of the Chinese market and, eventually, the world.

In 2013, Ye Guofu founded MINISO. Like many companies that would go on to reshape global retail — Amazon, Apple, Google — MINISO began in a garage in Guangzhou. The name combined "mini" (small, accessible, approachable) with a Japanese-inspired suffix that would, for years, become both the brand's greatest marketing asset and its most significant reputational liability.

The Japanese Aesthetic That Was Never Quite Japanese

MINISO launched with a deliberate aesthetic strategy: clean white interiors, minimalist design sensibility, Japanese-inflected branding, and a name that sounded like it could belong to Tokyo as easily as it belonged to Guangzhou. The brand was co-founded with Miyake Junya, a Japanese designer whose participation gave international credibility to the brand's Japanese design narrative.

For the first several years, this positioning worked. Chinese consumers — and then international ones — responded enthusiastically to what appeared to be a Japanese lifestyle brand offering quality products at accessible prices. The stores multiplied with remarkable speed: over 300 locations by 2014, more than 1,000 by 2015, and an international launch in Singapore in 2015 that began the global expansion.

But the Japanese identity was, in important ways, constructed rather than authentic. Chinese media and investigative journalists questioned the extent of Miyake Junya's role and involvement. Japanese media noted that MINISO was not widely known as a Japanese brand in Japan itself. The company's operations, capital, supply chain, and senior management were overwhelmingly Chinese.

The reckoning came in 2022. A marketing campaign that used Japanese cultural imagery triggered a significant public backlash in China, where nationalist sentiment around Japanese brand associations ran high. MINISO responded by acknowledging the criticism publicly, issuing an apology, and declaring itself a proud Chinese brand. By 2023, the Japanese styling had been substantially removed from the brand's visual identity and positioning — replaced by a cleaner, more globally neutral aesthetic built around MINISO's own evolving brand character.

The pivot was handled with enough speed and sincerity that the brand's commercial trajectory was not materially disrupted. In fact, the company's most significant growth years came after the rebrand — suggesting that MINISO's genuine strengths had always been commercial and experiential rather than dependent on the borrowed heritage.

300 Stores in One Year: The Franchise Machine

The mechanism that allowed MINISO to grow from a single Guangzhou store to over 1,000 locations in two years was the franchise model — executed with a precision and speed that most retailers take decades to achieve.

Under Ye Guofu's asset-light partnership model, franchise partners fund and operate the physical stores. MINISO controls the brand, the product catalogue, the supply chain, and the design. The franchise partner takes on the capital expenditure risk of the store; MINISO takes on the brand and product quality risk. This division of risk allowed MINISO to scale internationally without the balance sheet requirements of a company-owned store rollout — entering new markets rapidly by partnering with local entrepreneurs who understood their own retail environments.

The products themselves were produced through MINISO's customer-to-manufacturer supply chain, which sources from factories across China and provides those factories with MINISO's design requirements rather than accepting whatever the factory was already producing. This model kept prices low, quality consistent, and design under MINISO's control rather than the manufacturer's.

By 2015, international expansion had begun in earnest — entering Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and eventually Europe, the Americas, and South Asia. MINISO entered India in 2017, partnering with Elara Capital-backed retail companies to bring the store format to Indian malls. By 2019, it had 62 stores across India. Today, India is one of MINISO's significant international markets, with stores in over 50 cities.

MINISO listed on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2020 under the ticker MNSO, and subsequently added a Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing in 2022 under the stock code 9896.HK — giving the company dual-market capital access and the institutional investor profile of a genuinely global company.

In FY2025, MINISO reported revenues of RMB 21.4 billion — up 26 percent year on year — with overseas markets now contributing approximately 39 percent of MINISO-brand revenue, making international expansion the fastest-growing engine of the business. The company operates approximately 7,905 stores worldwide as of mid-2025, with a stated target of exceeding 10,000 stores by 2027.

The IP Revolution: From Lifestyle Store to IP Empire

The most significant strategic evolution in MINISO's history has been its transformation from a general lifestyle store into what it now calls a "Global IP Collection Store."

Beginning with partnerships with globally recognised intellectual property licences, MINISO developed co-branded product lines featuring characters and worlds that young consumers around the world were already emotionally invested in. Disney. Sanrio. Harry Potter. Barbie. Snoopy. Marvel. Warner Bros. Chiikawa. Each IP collaboration produced a range of products — plushies, blind boxes, stationery, cosmetics, accessories, home goods — that the specific fanbase of that IP would feel a personal connection to purchasing.

The results transformed the business. Global IP product sales exceeded RMB 10 billion. More than 10,000 new IP products are launched each year. Over 800 million IP products have been sold cumulatively across MINISO's global store network. The company has partnered with over 150 globally recognised IPs.

The blind box — a sealed package containing one of a series of possible collectible figures, with the specific figure unknown until the box is opened — became one of MINISO's defining product categories. The combination of collectibility, surprise, and affordability created a repeat purchase dynamic that is qualitatively different from the ordinary consumer goods purchasing cycle. Blind box sales exceeded 20 million pieces globally in a single year. The format drove return visits, social sharing, and community formation among collectors who compared their acquisitions and hunted for rare variants.

The Marketing Strategy Built on Joy, IP, and Experience

MINISO's marketing philosophy has evolved significantly across its history — but the core principle has remained consistent: the store experience is the primary marketing vehicle.

The Joy Philosophy as a brand operating system. MINISO's stated business philosophy — the Joy Philosophy — is not a tagline. It is a design brief for everything the company does. Products must be aesthetically pleasing, fun, and practical. Stores must feel like a treasure hunt rather than a routine shopping errand. The discovery experience — finding something unexpected that delights you at a price that doesn't require deliberation — is what MINISO is designed to deliver, and everything from store layout to product curation to IP partnership selection is evaluated against that standard.

IP as emotional shorthand. The decision to build product ranges around globally beloved intellectual properties was MINISO's most commercially consequential marketing insight. A consumer who sees a Hello Kitty blind box or a Harry Potter wand pen in a MINISO store is not evaluating a product they have never encountered before. They are encountering a beloved character in an unexpected, accessible form. The IP's emotional equity dramatically reduces the cognitive barrier to purchase — the product is new, but the love for what it represents is already established.

The store as content. MINISO has invested in creating retail environments — particularly in its flagship MINISO LAND format — that are designed to be experienced, photographed, and shared. The Madrid MINISO LAND, which opened in December 2024 on Gran Via with a 20-metre Sanrio-inspired glass exterior facade, features a blind box zone, a claw machine experience area, IP-themed spaces, and deliberately curated photo spots. The store is architecture designed for social media — every corner is a potential post. The consumer becomes a content creator for MINISO simply by visiting.

Blind boxes as a community and repeat purchase engine. The blind box format generates a fundamentally different relationship between the consumer and the brand than standard retail. Collectors return repeatedly in pursuit of complete sets. They compare their collections online. They trade variants with each other. MINISO does not just sell them a product — it gives them a community. That community is the most durable marketing asset the brand has built.

The asset-light franchise model as market entry. By partnering with local franchise operators rather than building company-owned stores in every market, MINISO's international expansion generated brand presence in new markets faster than any competitor with a company-owned model could match. The brand entered India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas within a few years — creating global consumer recognition that functions as both distribution coverage and brand marketing.

From a Guangzhou Garage to 7,900 Stores on Five Continents

The controversy over MINISO's Japanese branding is a real part of the company's history — acknowledged, apologised for, and ultimately resolved. What replaced it was a cleaner, more honest story: a Chinese entrepreneur who travelled, observed, and built a retail format that genuinely serves the consumer's desire for joy, discovery, and affordable delight.

From a garage in Guangzhou in 2013 to 7,905 stores across more than 100 countries in 2025 — MINISO has done something that even the most credulous business school case writer would have struggled to project in 2013: it became one of the world's most recognisable retail brands, present on five continents, publicly listed on two major stock exchanges, and generating over RMB 21 billion in annual revenue.

The Joy Philosophy works. Not because it is a clever slogan. But because the stores actually feel joyful to be in — and because the products inside them, whether they carry a beloved IP character or simply a clean and considered design, genuinely delight the people who buy them.

In the language of retail, that is called execution. In MINISO's language, it is simply called joy.