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Zara Opens First Zacaffe Outlet in Seoul, Blending Fashion and Cafe

Style and Beauty

Business Honor
20 March, 2025

Zara opens a Zacaffe in Seoul, joining the trend of fashion brands incorporating cafes into retail.

This May, the Spanish fashion giant Zara plans to open its first ZARA outlet in South Korea, inside its recently refurbished flagship store in Seoul's Myeong-dong. In order to give clients a more attractive brand experience, most of the international fashion labels are increasingly mixing cafes into their retail locations.

In November 2024, Zara opened Zacaffe in Madrid while combining a cafe area into a few of their stores to serve coffee, pastries, and branded goods such as t-shirts, eco-bags, hats, and tumblers. The Seoul facility will be the company's third international outpost after its Nanjing, China, debut last month. An Osaka store is also planned.

In an effort to draw in both domestic and foreign clients, Zara also intends to launch Korean-inspired sweets and a cafe design that incorporates regional aesthetics. The business is thinking about growing even more in South Korea. Zara is hardly the first company that has combined café culture with retail. Luxury fashion companies are increasingly using coffeehouse operations to increase consumer involvement and awareness of the brand.

Ten years after establishing Ralph's Coffee in New York in 2014, Ralph Lauren opened a coffee shop in Seoul's Garosu-gil area in September 2024 to bring the brand to South Korea. The Parisian-Japanese firm Maison Kitsune, a part of Samsung's C&T fashion division, opened the Kitsune cafe in Garosu-gil, Seoul, in 2018. Since then, the brand has spread to Shinsegae's Centum City site, where the café serves more than 400 customer groups every day on weekends in the Hyundai Department Store's Mokdong and Pangyo locations. This trend indicates an important change in the fashion industry.

As e-commerce expands and in-store foot traffic decreases, brands are reconsidering retail spaces as lifestyle destinations. As more businesses use cafe-driven retail strategies, which blend the lines between fashion, lifestyle, and hospitality, it is expected that the industry's tendency toward experience shopping will increase.