“Why isn’t there one of these at home?” The question, more consumer truth than childlike curiosity, revealed a gap in the UK retail psyche. And unlike the lofty brand strategies of the past decade, it pointed to something surprisingly grounded: shoppers of the next generation wanted joy on a budget and wanted it quickly. I spoke to Amir Mashkoor exclusively for Forbes.
MINISO
On a family holiday several years ago, a brief exchange between a father and his daughters captured what many retailers had been struggling to grasp: the high street was no longer short on stores, it was starved of delight. When Amir Mashkoor, now CEO of MINISO UK, found himself ushered by his children into a branch of the Asian-born retailer abroad, the comment was disarmingly simple: “Why isn’t there one of these at home?”
The question, more consumer truth than childlike curiosity, revealed a gap in the UK retail psyche. And unlike the lofty brand strategies of the past decade, it pointed to something surprisingly grounded: shoppers of the next generation wanted joy on a budget and wanted it quickly. I spoke to Amir Mashkoor exclusively for Forbes.
Today, MINISO is adding stores at a pace that appears almost countercultural. While much of the UK high street contracts or consolidates, red-and-white MINISO façades continue to appear in prime and secondary locations. The brand’s 50th UK store opening in Milton Keynes drew queues from 6am, the kind of cultural anticipation once reserved for Apple drops or limited-edition sneakers. But to understand the phenomenon, it helps to understand what many legacy retailers misread.
The New Consumer Equation: Joy, Speed, and Shareability
In an era in which inflation has taught consumers to calculate trade-offs with forensic precision, MINISO’s proposition seems almost engineered for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. These shoppers, now dictating the mood music of global retail, value the quick hit of joy, a “feel-good moment,” as Mashkoor describes it, over the traditional promise of durability or lifetime value
MINISO
In an era in which inflation has taught consumers to calculate trade-offs with forensic precision, MINISO’s proposition seems almost engineered for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. These shoppers, now dictating the mood music of global retail, value the quick hit of joy, a “feel-good moment,” as Mashkoor describes it, over the traditional promise of durability or lifetime value. They want fast-paced environments, photogenic merchandise, and cultural shorthand they instantly recognise. They want to shop, but they also want to broadcast. And MINISO, intentionally or not, has become one of the UK’s most shareable retail stages.
Mashkoor frames the shift as part of an “interest-driven consumption” wave, the collision of pop culture, micro-indulgence, and collective discovery. The brand’s stores, stacked with Hello Kitty tumblers, Harry Potter water bottles, and Disney-branded everyday objects, tap into a truth that many retailers overlooked: even functional items can feel like entertainment when wrapped in the right IP.
In that sense, MINISO has become a masterclass in the psychology of small joy. In a cost-of-living era, the consumer still wants to feel something, just not at a premium.
The Blind Box Economy and the Rise of the Kidult
Nothing captures this better than MINISO’s blind boxes, now integral to the brand’s identity. One sells every three minutes in the UK alone. Globally, the number surpassed 40 million last year. The boxes, each containing a mystery collectible, sit at the intersection of suspense, nostalgia, and social bonding. Mashkoor sees the appeal as rooted in the thrill of the unknown “the excitement… you don’t know exactly what you will get” but consumers know it as something more: a form of adult play that doesn’t require justification.
MINISO
Nothing captures this better than MINISO’s blind boxes, now integral to the brand’s identity. One sells every three minutes in the UK alone. Globally, the number surpassed 40 million last year.
The boxes, each containing a mystery collectible, sit at the intersection of suspense, nostalgia, and social bonding. Mashkoor sees the appeal as rooted in the thrill of the unknown “the excitement… you don’t know exactly what you will get” but consumers know it as something more: a form of adult play that doesn’t require justification.
For Gen Z, blind boxes have evolved into a gateway to community. Fans meet online to unbox together, swap characters, and display completed sets. Retailers have long talked about “experience”; MINISO has stumbled onto something subtler and more powerful -participation.
The brand’s strategy hinges on rapid cycles of newness, anchored by a constant refresh of global IP, from emerging Asian characters to Hollywood staples. As long as the cultural pipeline flows, the blind box phenomenon continues to feed itself.
A Global Engine With Local Reflexes
Behind MINISO’s agility lies its global infrastructure: almost 8,000 stores worldwide, a supply chain connected to China’s manufacturing heartland, and a design ecosystem months ahead in reading Asian-led pop culture trends. This is not a retailer simply stocking merchandise; it is one plugged directly into the source code of global culture.
The speed advantage is stark. Where traditional UK retailers often require months to bring a new range to shelf, MINISO can respond to a cultural moment within weeks. Part of that is scale. Part of it is appetite. And part of it is the UK team, a local buying hub that acts as a cultural filter, adjusting products, formats, and merchandising to match British tastes.
Speed, in this segment, is not a nice-to-have. It is everything. Pop culture is perishable. The appetite of Gen Z even more so.
Human Retail, Not Automated Retail
At a time when much of the industry chases efficiency through automation, Mashkoor speaks repeatedly of colleagues, their enthusiasm, their product knowledge, their confidence to advise. He avoids romantic comparisons with the old John Lewis service model, but the sentiment echoes that era of staff empowerment. MINISO’s frontline teams are encouraged, even expected, to know the characters, the ranges, and the quirks of the brand’s fandoms. They are taught to guide not sell. In a modern context, that is its own form of innovation.
For a generation raised on digital platforms, a knowledgeable human in-store is a differentiator. For a retailer built on discovery, it is a necessity.
Why Bigger Stores, and More of Them, Still Make Sense
The retailer’s physical expansion looks counterintuitive in a world of shrinking footprints and shuttered flagships. Yet MINISO’s store formats range from large experience-led spaces to MINI MINISOs and transit-hub units under the MINISO-Go concept. Across formats, Mashkoor points to a consistent consumer request: more space, more experience, more emotional connection. The stores function less as transactional sites and more as cultural zones, backdrops for photos, videos, and shared digital moments.
Where traditional retailers often treat store expansion as a gamble, MINISO treats it as an iterative process. Formats are tested, adjusted, downsized or upsized based on performance. A store opened in Ealing was later reconfigured after the team concluded it was “too big.” Agility, again, is not philosophical, it is operational.
What Comes Next: From Retailer to Cultural Company
When Amir Mashkoor, now CEO of MINISO UK, found himself ushered by his children into a branch of the Asian-born retailer abroad, the comment was disarmingly simple: “Why isn’t there one of these at home?” The question, more consumer truth than childlike curiosity, revealed a gap in the UK retail psyche. And unlike the lofty brand strategies of the past decade, it pointed to something surprisingly grounded: shoppers of the next generation wanted joy on a budget and wanted it quickly. I spoke to Amir Mashkoor exclusively for Forbes.
MINISO
The brand’s next phase is less about scale and more about evolution. Mashkoor is blunt about growth inevitably slowing, no retail rocket ascends forever, but clear about the ambition: upgraded stores, experimental formats like MINISO Space and MINISO Land, and deeper investment in proprietary IP. The company is positioning itself not just as a retailer but a “cultural and creative company,” a shift that aligns with a broader industry truth: in pop culture retail, the most defensible asset is your own story.
Licensed partnerships will continue, but the brand expects original IP to become a dual engine of growth alongside its merchandising cycles. If MINISO succeeds in that pivot, it won’t just be selling the icons of others, it will be creating the icons of its own.
The Consumer Insight No One Should Ignore
MINISO’s success is not an accident and not, despite the colour palette, a cartoon. It is a response to a generation that shops differently because it feelsdifferently. For decades, retailers assumed value meant lowering the price. MINISO has reframed value as something else: lower cost, higher feeling.
And in a retail environment often dominated by operational language, efficiencies, restructures, cost bases, it is worth remembering the simplest insight of all: consumers still crave joy. They just want it at a price that fits the world they are living in.
In that sense, the daughters on that family trip were early to the trend. They recognised something many executives missed: the future of retail would be fun again, not frivolous, but emotionally functional. And right now, MINISO is one of the few retailers proving the point in real time.