What is an ideal location to open a shop in Hong Kong? asked a friend of ours.
A textbook answer would be “Location, Location and Location”, but in our opinion it is “Affordability, Time, and Online”
Rental is painfully expensive in Hong Kong, and it is not as simple as whether you can afford the rent today, or not. Unlike other places, our standard rental duration is around 2 to 3 years, and rate is fixed for the first or second year, and the landlord has the liberty to raise the rent on the final year while the tenant could opt to vacate the premise without getting penalised. The percentage of a new rent normally goes up at least in double digits.
So why would you need a shop when you could online? And this is exactly the question we have been asking ourself lately.
We want to pull completely out of the shop retailing and to gather all our resources doing online only. We are creating different scenarios and their possible outcomes, weighing out the pros and the cons of each, and trying to figure out what the new logistic would be if we were to stop the physical retail shop. The idea is to turn the shop into a full time studio for videos and photos, that would be really fun for us.