Narumiya's petit main opens its first mainland China store, in Hangzhou, after building out Taiwan and Hong Kong

Narumiya International, the WORLD Co. group company behind kids' brand petit main, opened its first store in mainland China on October 10, in Hangzhou — a market the company's own release defines as excluding Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, where petit main already trades.

The roughly 66-square-metre store sits on the fifth floor of Hangzhou Tower in Zhejiang Province, after a soft opening on October 3, Narumiya said. It will be run through a local distributor, which the company described as the first step in its mainland sales. petit main, launched in Japan in 2011 for children aged 0 to 9 (sizes 50–130cm), now runs about 170 stores domestically.

The entry follows markedly different paces in the brand's two earlier moves into Greater China. In Taiwan, where petit main trades through a local affiliate, the brand opened its first store in March 2025 and had grown to four by this autumn after three further additions — roughly a year and a half. In Hong Kong, where an agent runs the brand inside commercial facilities and department stores, the first store opened only in autumn 2025, yet the chain already reached four stores within about six months, a noticeably quicker ramp.

Narumiya said it will draw on what it learned building out Taiwan and Hong Kong but will not simply copy that approach for mainland China, citing different regulations, distribution structures and consumer behaviour. Plans for Hangzhou include marketing through Xiaohongshu and WeChat, linking store sales with mainland e-commerce, and developing localised product lines and IP collaborations, the company said, positioning petit main as "upscale casual" wear for urban parents. China's children's apparel market was worth an estimated 473.76 billion yuan in 2025, according to QYResearch, against roughly 7.92 million births that year by the National Bureau of Statistics' count; Narumiya said it will use the Hangzhou store's results and customer feedback before deciding how to expand to other cities.

The deliberate hedge here — one city, one distributor, before any commitment to a wider China rollout — is itself the story: Narumiya is treating its two Greater China precedents as a caution rather than a template, given how far Hong Kong outpaced Taiwan despite using a similarly agent-led structure, and a declining Chinese birth rate puts a real ceiling on how large a single-city test can prove to be.