ier, if not the premier, shopping and dining hub in Southeast Asia (and East Asia if you want to include Hong Kong and other traditionally strong shopping destinations). Here are some of the newer retail launches in the Thai capital. Sunnies World at Dusit Central Park Sunnies, a Philippine lifestyle brand, opened on the second floor of Dusit Central Park in November. Founded in 2013, Sunnies initially sold only sunglasses but then expanded into a full-service optical business. However, it didn’t stop there, and about five years after its launch, it introduced other, related products in the skincare and cosmetics category. Finally, it also introduced customisable flasks, since proper hydration is essential for skin and general health maintenance. In the Bangkok flagship, Sunnies brings all of these facets together in an attractive store setting that also includes a coffee bar and a partitioned department called Sunnies Face Bath that features, yes, a ceramic tub, and space to interact with Sunnies beauty products and dabble in other exclusive merchandise as well, including bags and small accessories. This is a beautiful flagship store and puts together a complementary set of products that sit logically together in a merchandising sense. Sunnies currently has approximately 130 physical stores operating in the Philippines, Vietnam and now Thailand, along with e-commerce in adjacent Southeast Asian countries. Sunnies World has some elite company at Central Park: department store Comma And, Brazilian athleisure brand Live!, Thai athleisure brand ORI, Victoria’s Secret and Uniqlo are among Sunnies’ near neighbours on the second floor. The North Face (Dusit Central Park) While Sunnies World is the newest major attraction on the second floor of Dusit Central Park, the escalator up to the third level brings visitors to the new The North Face store, which opened in late November, cheek-by-jowl with New Zealand outdoor apparel retailer Icebreaker. The local operator markets the store as a ‘new concept store, the first in Southeast Asia’, although it has to be said that the marketing spiel explaining the slogan is largely unintelligible. The tagline for The North Face’s marketing campaign, “Never fear the forecast”, seems faintly odd in sweltering Bangkok, where a cold-weather retailer might itself fear the forecast just about every day of the year. Still, this gear is not intended to be worn in Bangkok; its market is the growing number of affluent Thai travellers who can travel abroad or to the northern mountains in Thailand itself, and tourists returning to their more temperate countries. The local operator of the store in Bangkok is Thai Outdoor Group, which also operates the new Icebreaker store adjacent to it. It has a simple, clean layout merchandised with a strong emphasis on puffer jackets, with footwear on the rear wall. The North Face, which now has more than 40 retail outlets in Thailand, is part of VF Corporation in Denver, which also owns Timberland and Vans, and, until recently, Dickies. Boss in One Bangkok A little over a kilometre east of town is another mixed-use project of recent vintage, One Bangkok, where retail leasing of unoccupied space is ongoing. The latest high-profile addition is Boss, which opened in the first week of December. As reported in Inside Retail earlier in the month, this is the brand’s largest store in Southeast Asia, with 750 square metres of floorspace across two levels, most of it on the upstairs mezzanine. At the front of the entrance level is a small cafe, continuing the trend of high-end brands incorporating cafes in their stores. Around town: Siam Paragon and Central World Two experiential concepts – Meland and Nextopia – have now opened at Siam Paragon. Nextopia is a 15,000sqm blended educational, experiential and retail space that constitutes Paragon’s foray into community- and city-building. It begins with the somewhat gloomy (and you might say arguable) proposition that there is a “global crisis”, and incorporates expertise by dozens of partners (‘co-creators’) in architecture, engineering and other disciplines to demonstrate aspects of how a new, better world might look and function. Meland is a 5,000sqm educational theme park, also on the fifth floor, with six distinct zones (underwater, forest, etc.), each with its own rides and amusements. Tickets can be purchased for three hours or all day. With the addition of Nextopia and Meland to the existing Sea Life Bangkok Ocean World, possibly the largest aquarium in Southeast Asia, on the mall’s lower level, Siam Paragon has established itself as a major regional edutainment destination and a premier high-end shopping centre. Meanwhile, just around the corner at Central World, on the fourth floor, Muji has just opened a 3,270 square-metre flagship of its own. It is the retailer’s 40th and most ambitious store in Thailand, and its biggest in Southeast Asia. Too much of a good thing? The only problem with so many high-profile openings in recent times, particularly when it involves filling out space in new malls, is that there is so much marketing noise that excellent individual brand stores can find it more difficult to get their story out. This, in turn, means marketing can sometimes become cringy as brands vie for attention. Take, for example, the growing use of the term ‘concept store’ that attempts to differentiate a new store, perhaps with some design and/or merchandising tweaks, from its predecessors. At the end of the day, all stores are created on the basis of a concept. Do customers even listen to this kind of stuff anymore? There may be a need for retail marketers to get back to basics: the stores are great, but linking them to ideas that are obscure and borderline nonsensical doesn’t help sell merchandise. Further reading: Inside Muji’s triumphant Bangkok flagship