Disney Store to open in The Phillipines

Three years after closing the majority of their stores in the United States and Europe, and all of their stores in Canada, Disney is opening in a new country, The Phillipines.

The first ever location in the country will open at SM Mall of Asia this September, according to Manila Bulletin. That shopping centre is not only the largest in that country, but the sixth largest in the world. SM Mall of Asia is nearly a million square feet larger than Mall of America, for comparison.

The reboot is courtesy of conglomerate SM Group, which owns everything from groceries stores to shopping malls, hotels to cinemas, banking to mining. Its International Toyworld division operates the Toy Kingdom chain of 23 stores.

Toy Kingdom’s previous Disney connections.

This is the logical next step for the company. One of SM Group’s shopping centres, SM Seaside City Cebu, played host to a weekend-long Disney-themed pop-up store in 2023. For two of those days, Princess Aurora appeared to meet and greet visitors.

That same year, many of Toy Kingdom’s social media posts began using a Disney Shop logo.

This is a win for Toy Kingdom in their competition with the larger Toys’R’Us chain, which has 89 locations in the Phillipines. About half are full size, with the remainder being a smaller ToyBox format.

Branded online as Disney Store by SM, you can follow them on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on TikTok. The Facebook page was quietly created in September.

Disney has store-in-store partnerships in Mexico’s Liverpool department stores, launched in 2021, and in South Korea’s Hyundai department stores, launched in 2023. Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates share 25 store-in-stores. In the United States, Target’s store-in-stores take a far more limited form, without separate staff or involved displays. Kuwait is seemingly the only other country where Disney has launched a standalone store with a partner, aside from its decades-long Disney Store Japan partnership.