Parco's biggest Nagoya renovation in years lands a UK lifestyle brand's first Tokai store
Parco is rebuilding roughly 1,100 square metres of Nagoya Parco's basement into a lifestyle floor anchored by PLAZA and the Tokai region's first Cath Kidston store, reopening 4 September as part of a wider renewal push across the building.
Parco said in a release dated 27 July that it will rebuild roughly 1,100 square metres of the basement floor in Nagoya Parco's west building into a new lifestyle-goods floor, reopening 4 September with a first Tokai-region store for British lifestyle brand Cath Kidston as the headline addition.
According to the release, the reworked west-building B1F will be anchored by PLAZA, the multi-category retailer selling cosmetics, confectionery, fashion accessories and character goods; Cath Kidston, known for its vintage-inflected prints; and Barcelona-founded candy-maker PAPABUBBLE, which makes its sweets in view of customers. Parco's release marks Cath Kidston explicitly as the brand's first store in the Tokai region — a claim it does not extend to PAPABUBBLE, which opens the same day without that distinction. A renewed Bagel & Bagel reopens on the floor on 1 October.
The basement overhaul is one piece of a wider renewal running across the west building through the year, the release said: Beck and Call, which Parco calls a nationwide-first opening, opened on B6 on 18 July; Samantha Vega/Varzar, marked a Tokai-first, opens on B4 on 4 September alongside N゜3 Nice Claup; and TOP TOY opens on B3 on 10 September.
Parco attributed the pace of renewal to results it says it is already seeing: fiscal 2025 sales rose 13.7% and footfall 15.1% year on year across a run of changes dating back to the Pokémon Center and Kiddyland openings in autumn 2024 through Diesel and Matin Kim last autumn, which the company credited with widening its visitor base. It said further renewal is aimed chiefly at MZ-generation (millennial and Gen Z) shoppers.
The swap is a Product and Presentation bet rather than a Price one: trading general merchandise and standard apparel counters for brand-anchored, experience-led concepts — candy made to order, a British heritage print, character merchandise — aimed at pulling in a younger, trend-led domestic shopper rather than department-store regulars. It also lands the same week as two other Parco renewals floortok has covered, at Shinsaibashi and in Nagoya Parco's own entertainment floor, suggesting a group-wide push by J. Front-owned Parco to refresh several flagships in parallel rather than one at a time.
Whether swapping general merchandise for brand-anchored concepts sustains the traffic gains Parco is citing, or simply reshuffles spending within the same building, is the open question. But with a comparable run of renewals already showing double-digit growth in both sales and footfall, Parco has a working formula for pulling in a younger domestic shopper who isn't leaning on the inbound tourist wave propping up Tokyo's flagship stores.