Hello everyone, do anyone know how to get a food shop/kiosk in SOGO mall(s) or any major shopping centers in Taipei area? How do we get in touch with the management? I written to them in english but gotten no response. It’s quite hard to source information online as most resources goes one big loop. Thanks so much
Are you a representative of a large multi-national company ? I am not trying to be rude,but if you don’t have deep pockets or connections, it is basically impossible to enter SOGO or Mitsukoshi.
First of all you need to have a representative in Taiwan, someone who understands the business and can do “negotiations”, it is not required, you can always send SOGO an email or give them a call but that’s basically never going to work, unless you are representing a top company.
There are multiple categories for these places, but for the sake of simplicity lets just say there are the short and long term ones. The short term ones are those who are normally located by the escalators, they don’t have a “shop”, just a stand or a large trolley. This is the easiest and most realistic way to enter SOGO. The fee is still pretty expensive and you have pressure to maximize revenue in a few weeks, so usually they are for discounted products.
For the long term shops, just imagine hundreds of people lining up wanting to throw money at the SOGO manager everyday for a place. On paper, SOGO charges you either a fixed rent or the commision they take from your sales whichever is higher, if you have bad sales and can only pay the rent, then you’d be kicked out pretty soon (shortest contract is 6 months, and it would be a disaster because you’d be missing major festive days which can account for 20~30% of annual revenue). So basically you have to convince the SOGO manager that you can make more sales than all the other applicants, and that is a tough job.
I’ll give you some more insight on how tough this is.
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Competitiveness Food > Cosmetics > Jewelry > Shoes > Clothes > others
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Let’s say you used to make 2M$ per month with a commission rate of 20%, so you pay 400K$ to SOGO each month. The rent is 200K$ if your commission generated is lower than 200K$. There are lots of “shops” in SOGO that would rather use money from their company to buy their own products to maintain their sales figure rather than pay the rent in fear of being kicked out.
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There is a lot of undertable business going on in this .
tl;dr : You need to know what you are doing to enter dept. stores , and you need a local to help you unless you are big.
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And that’s not all, once you’re in you (or your staff) need to be there 7 days a week from opening to closing. Or you get fined.
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@scinider @Belgian_Pie - ahh i see, okay thanks for the insight, I think i’ll probably pass SOGO for now. Cheers and appreciated
It’s not just SOGO, all the department stores have their stipulations and rules you need to follow. All they want is money, no matter how they get it. The last year many long time department store counters have stopped due to increased rents, percentages, lower customer rates and higher demands of the department stores. More stores and malls open without an increasing customer base.