Miniso is going big.
A new Miniso, purveyor of everything from household wares to toys to branded merchandise, is opening Saturday in the Santee Trolley Square shopping center. The Santee location will be one of the company’s larger store formats.
To celebrate, this Miniso is giving its first 50 customers who come to the grand opening on Saturday 20% off of their purchase. For the rest of the weekend, items will be discounted 10%. The store will open at 10 a.m.
Miniso, founded in China in 2013, has almost a dozen stores in San Diego County. These are the tail of a years-long boom in openings. From mid-2020 to mid-2021, it “opened 364 brick-and-mortar stores globally, an average pace of one per day — bucking pandemic retail trends,” a company blog post said. Its 200th U.S. store, in Santa Monica, opened in 2024.
This month, Miniso opened stores in Portland, Oregon; Cupertino, Fontana and Visalia in California, and Brooklyn, New York.
The Santee store replaces a Party City that closed when that company — founded in 1986 and filed for bankruptcy in 2023, about a decade after private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners acquired a majority stake — announced it was shuttering all stores.
A LinkedIn job ad shows what Miniso is looking for in a store manager. “(I)t is their responsibility to not just manage a store, but to embrace the idea that life is for fun and create an exciting, vibrant experience for both their team and customers,” the job description begins.
At 9,400 square feet, the store is far larger than other Minisos. The one in Hillcrest is 2,700 square feet. The Balboa Avenue store is around 3,000 square feet. A larger one in San Marcos is around 7,650 square feet. The Santa Monica store is around 3,700 square feet. The largest U.S. store, at 12,000 square feet, just opened in the Bay Area.
“The brand’s name comes from a combination of two syllables from Japanese writing that form the phrase ‘Meisou,’ which translates to ‘beautiful and simple thing,’” Merca 2.0, an advertising and marketing website, wrote.