← Back to LettersAugust 26, 20269 min · essayThe Retail Brief · Nº 007 · RETAIL & AI

K-pop, anime, and a mall where we'd already failed.

The first Bold we opened in Los Dominicos failed. On Saturday we open there again — this time having read what the mall had turned into.

Campaña de apertura de Bold en Mallplaza Los Dominicos, con Bold transliterado al hangul

The first Bold we opened in Los Dominicos failed.

And K-One, let's not even start.

On Saturday, 29 August, we open there again.

For anyone who doesn't know the brand: Bold is our multi-brand sneaker and streetwear format. And for anyone who doesn't know Santiago: Mallplaza Los Dominicos is in Las Condes, on the city's east side.

The mall itself hasn't fully delivered on what was expected of it either — being Mallplaza's big move into Chile's ABC1, the country's highest-income segment. That promise, in my view, is still under construction.

Going back, then, wasn't an obvious decision. But we have a fairly bold streak — sometimes more than we should — and we decided to do it.

Going back with the same formula, though, would have been a strange way to expect a different result.

The launch artwork shows Bold transliterated into hangul, the Korean writing system. The date is written in Korean too. There are blocks that look like signage on a street in Seoul, colours that aren't remotely shy, and a finger heart.

On 1 July, Paula Salgado — Pau to all of us — shared a first proposal for the opening. Among the ideas for content, perks and influencers, she wrote that she saw an opportunity in connecting Bold's arrival with the K-pop universe and the hallyu — the so-called Korean wave — that already had a community in Los Dominicos.

The core idea was hers.

Through 2025, Mallplaza transformed 3,000 m² of the shopping centre. One of the results was the Callejón Asiático, on the third floor.

There's Korean and other Asian food; K-pop; manga, anime and Japanese kawaii aesthetics; imported goods, karaoke and virtual reality. Mallplaza has also run K-pop dance meetups and tributes tied to Korean pop culture.

Bold will be on the first floor, not inside that alley. We aren't assuming people walk out of karaoke and fall into our store by gravity. The relationship isn't physical. The relationship is the community visiting the mall and the identity Los Dominicos is trying to build.

There was also a signal that was fairly hard to ignore. According to Mallplaza, Koychi — a Korean food concept in the alley — made that unit the highest-selling in its entire chain barely ten days after opening.

Ten days.

We don't know the sales figure and the company reported it itself, so it isn't right to treat it as an audited case. But for a retail operator it's a signal. Something was happening there, and it was happening fast.

I came to K-pop through a pretty bad door: the estallido social.

In December 2019, Chile's Interior Ministry handed prosecutors a 112-page report. It had analysed almost five million authors and 60 million comments using technology the minister, Gonzalo Blumel, called "extraordinarily sophisticated".

The largest group was young people, responsible for more than four million retweets during the first week of the unrest. Then came the phrase that ended up eating the other 111 pages: "they're K-pop fans".

I remembered an even better version: groups coordinating through K-pop to organise the riots. It would have been an excellent plot twist, but the report didn't show that.

Prosecutors described it as open-source information, not intelligence. La Tercera added that none of the material was criminal in nature. The extraordinarily sophisticated technology had discovered, in practice, that young people knew how to retweet.

The simpler explanation was that fandoms already dominated hashtags and crossposting: adding massive K-pop hashtags to messages about the protests to give them reach. There was a network. There was no evidence of a conspiracy.

Back then I barely understood what K-pop was. It struck me as one more of the many absurd things about 2019.

What happened next aged that episode fairly quickly.

In 2020, Parasite became the first film in a language other than English to win Best Picture. That same night it took three more awards. Also in 2020, BTS became the first Korean artist — and the first working mainly in a language other than English — to top IFPI's annual global ranking. In 2021, Squid Game became the most popular series in Netflix's history. In 2023, BLACKPINK were the first Korean artist to headline Coachella.

In 2024, at Stanford, I was lucky enough to sit in on a class on entertainment business that had Miky Lee as a guest. Vice-chair of CJ Group, driving force behind KCON and executive producer of Parasite, Lee had spent decades working to expand Korean culture beyond South Korea. Listening to her made it clear that behind the "wave" there was rather more than luck: investment, distribution, and a very concrete intention to take that culture to the world.

And in 2025 came KPop Demon Hunters. The film brought together Korean, diaspora and American talent to build a global production out of the music, the aesthetics and the fandom logic of K-pop. As of August 2026 it has passed 600 million views and is the most-watched original title in Netflix history. Its soundtrack has racked up more than 15 billion streams.

Spotify helps measure the scale: during 2025 alone, K-pop accumulated more than 61 billion streams outside South Korea.

With Japan the path was different. The anime market reached ¥3.84 trillion in 2024, and 56.5% of it was already outside the country. Anime's international business overtook its domestic business for the first time in 2023.

In my case, that influence also started well before K-pop. My childhood was shaped far more by Japan than by South Korea: Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z and Samurai X — Rurouni Kenshin in the original. Attack on Titan came later.

At the time I didn't call it Japanese influence, obviously. They were just the cartoons I watched. Only much later did I understand I'd already grown up consuming Japanese culture.

These are different countries, industries and histories. There is no single "Asian culture", and it would be fairly lazy to put South Korea and Japan in the same bag.

But there is a generation receiving K-pop, anime, skincare, streetwear, manga and food simultaneously through the same screens. Then it starts looking for them in the same neighbourhoods, stores and malls.

That's what, from retail, we're grouping under the pan-Asian label: cultural signals from different origins that end up meeting in the habits of one consumer.

In Chile that conversion can already be measured.

During 2025, Chile imported US$25.6 million in Korean cosmetics. Since 2019, the figure has grown 753%. Sokobox already has 13 stores and more than 45 brands; DBS says Korean beauty tripled its weight inside the chain in under three years.

In food, a sample of categories analysed by KOTRA Chile went from US$785,000 in 2022 to US$2.44 million in 2025: 211% cumulative growth.

Santiago already has more than 50 Korean restaurants concentrated in Patronato. The King Sejong Institute has close to 200 Korean-language students, four times as many as when it began classes in 2019.

The sequence starts to show: someone hears a song, learns a choreography, watches a series, tries a product, studies the language, and looks for a place to meet others who share it.

Not everyone walks the whole path, obviously. But enough do to move imports, fill stores, and turn a Korean food unit into the highest-selling in its chain in ten days.

Pau's idea was to read that signal and ask what it meant for Bold.

We didn't answer by substantially changing the brand mix versus other Bolds. We didn't build a Korean-product store or replace the commercial proposition to chase a trend. The core is the same.

What changed was how we present it in that location. The reference reached the campaign and the store design.

I don't want to spoil it before we open, but two details give you a hint. We designed Bold packaging for chocolate-covered biscuit sticks and for mochi, a Japanese preparation traditionally made with glutinous rice. The store will have several touches of that kind.

Neither changes the brand mix. It does change how it feels to be in this Bold rather than any other.

Pau led creative direction and Brand Communications. Matías Alderete worked on Visual Merchandising; Magdalena Vera, the spatial experience; Francesca Pollarolo, Trade production; and Juan Pablo Rojas, the business side. On JOIA's side, Valentina Ibaceta, Cristina A. Donoso, Jorge Navajas and Diego Navarro developed the KV and the final design of the proposals.

Naming them matters to me because a finished campaign always looks like it was born from "the company". In reality, someone sees something first, puts it forward, and then several people have to turn that intuition into a store that opens on time, works, and still looks like Bold.

This is, in the end, how I understand retail. If we do what everyone else does, we end up competing on price, location, and who has the bigger budget. I'd rather compete on differentiation: read each location better, and dare to step outside the norm when the opportunity justifies it.

That doesn't mean being different for sport. The risk, obviously, is dressing a store up in the trend of the moment. Putting Korean letters on a wall doesn't create community by itself. The bet makes sense if it manages to speak to something that already exists in Los Dominicos; not if it tries to appropriate it.

That's why this opening is still a hypothesis, not a success story. On Saturday we open the door and the store starts giving us information back: who comes in, what they look at, what they understand and what they ignore.

For years, when we wanted to look from Chile at what was happening in retail, the trend trips had a fairly well-known circuit: Los Angeles, New York, Madrid, Paris and London.

They're all still essential cities. We want to keep going.

But we also want to go to Tokyo and Seoul.

K-pop, anime, and a mall where we'd already failed.

Sources

How we deploy AI across a large retail store network.

Build vs Buy in the age of AI.