POP MART's Beloved Character Steps Further Into Everyday Life
LONDON, BANGKOK and SHANGHAI, June 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- HIRONO has never been the loudest character in the room.
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HIRONO: Four Stores Across Shanghai, Bangkok, London, and Seoul
HIRONO: Four Stores Across Shanghai, Bangkok, London, and Seoul
HIRONO: Four Stores Across Shanghai, Bangkok, London, and Seoul
HIRONO: Four Stores Across Shanghai, Bangkok, London, and Seoul
Created by artist Lang and published by POP MART, HIRONO is introverted, quietly perceptive, and deeply felt — a character that resonates not through spectacle but through recognition. For years, that resonance lived in art toys, sculpture, and collectibles. Now it has an address. Four of them.
With stores across Shanghai, Bangkok, and London, and Korea's first flagship set to open at Gwangjang Market in Seoul on 5 June 2026, HIRONO is expanding its presence across Asia and Europe — each space designed not as a retail environment, but as a place that reflects the character's world.
Shanghai
HIRONO's first permanent store opened in Shanghai on 21 February 2025 — the brand's earliest and most considered expression in physical space.
The interior is built from concrete and reclaimed wood, with rows of traditional medicine cabinet drawers running along the walls. The reference is deliberate: the Chinese apothecary, a place associated with care, with quiet attention, with the idea that what ails you deserves a proper remedy. Here, that logic extends to the emotional. The space is unhurried by design.
Bangkok
The Bangkok store opened on 20 December 2025, occupying four floors in Siam Square and taking the floating market as its starting point — one of Thailand's most enduring cultural forms, and one that has always been about more than buying and selling.
Lang's interpretation doesn't recreate the floating market so much as draw from its spirit: a place where commerce and community exist in the same breath, where you might come for one thing and stay for another. Retail and leisure are woven through the building rather than separated. The top floor is given over entirely to rest.
London
HIRONO's European debut landed on Brick Lane on 15 February 2026, in a neighbourhood that has been accumulating character for decades — industrial heritage, immigrant culture, street art, an ever-shifting creative scene. It is a place where new things arrive without erasing what came before.
The store works within that logic. The original brick facade is intact. Furniture and objects were sourced from nearby antique markets. The wall typography echoes the visual language of the street outside. Nothing about the space signals arrival — it settles in.
Seoul
Of the four cities, Seoul presented the widest range of options. HIRONO landed at Gwangjang Market — established in 1905, one of Korea's oldest and most lived-in spaces, a place that has never needed rebranding because it has never stopped being used. Street food vendors, fabric merchants, the particular noise and warmth of a covered market that runs on daily habit rather than foot traffic. Lang has described finding, in the atmosphere of Gwangjang, something closer to HIRONO's sensibility than any purpose-built retail district could offer.
The store takes its name from that atmosphere: Passing Station. Not a destination you plan a trip around, but a stop that appears naturally on the route. The interior draws on the visual language of the Seoul subway, threading familiar, everyday references through the space so that it settles into Gwangjang's existing rhythm rather than standing apart from it.
The flagship opens on 5 June 2026, with artist Lang visiting Korea for the first time to mark the occasion. It will be HIRONO's first space in Korea to offer the brand's full apparel line alongside its art toys, homeware, jewellery, and accessories — the most complete expression of the HIRONO world to date.
As more cities join this story, HIRONO is slowly moving beyond the idea of "character."
It no longer exists only within a specific series, or as something displayed and observed. Shanghai, Bangkok, London, Seoul — each city carries the journey a little further forward. And Seoul, perhaps, is only the beginning of what comes next.
About POP MART
Founded in 2010, POP MART (09992.HK) is a leading company in the designer collectibles and pop culture entertainment industry. Leveraging our ecosystem built around characters and IPs, connecting with our fans through creative, immersive experiences, POP MART aims to light up passion and bring joy to fans everywhere.
With a core focus on designer collectibles, theme parks & experiential services, and digital entertainment, we manage and represent exceptional artists globally. Our IP portfolio includes dozens of iconic characters loved by fans worldwide, such as THE MONSTERS, SKULLPANDA, CRYBABY, MOLLY, DIMOO, Twinkle Twinkle, and HIRONO. Our products are available in more than 30 countries and regions via 630+ stores, 2,600+ roboshops, and on major e-commerce platforms. The company went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2020.
About Hirono
Hirono's personality is anchored in his hidden emotions. He is introverted, occasionally naughty, and often meanders without a clear direction. Hirono's world is a spiritual shelter protecting innocence and imagination that we fumble to maintain. It's that special something that connects us with our own unique emotional vibrations.
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HIRONO: Four Stores Across Shanghai, Bangkok, London, and Seoul
HIRONO: Four Stores Across Shanghai, Bangkok, London, and Seoul
HIRONO: Four Stores Across Shanghai, Bangkok, London, and Seoul
HIRONO: Four Stores Across Shanghai, Bangkok, London, and Seoul
LONDON, June 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- On June 22, CATL and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation announced two new initiatives together with BMW, Renault, Volvo, Google, Xiaomi and other industry leaders and stakeholders, at the Climate Innovation Forum, the flagship event of London Climate Action Week 2026, through CATL's Global Energy Circularity Commitment (GECC), developed in strategic partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The initiatives include circular battery design guidelines to embed circularity across the full battery lifecycle, and a business coalition to accelerate the policy, investment and commercial conditions needed to make circular business models the industry norm.
By 2040, the global battery recycling market alone is projected to exceed RMB 1.2 trillion, creating more than 10 million jobs, while the International Energy Agency projects demand for battery-critical minerals will increase fivefold over the same period. Meeting that demand sustainably will require not only greater recycling capacity, but common design standards and business models that keep materials in productive use for longer.
CATL became the first battery manufacturer to achieve carbon neutrality across its core operations in 2025, certified under ISO 14068-1, with full value-chain carbon neutrality targeted by 2035. Much of the remaining challenge lies in mining and raw material processing rather than manufacturing. Circularity will play a central role in meeting future demand without proportional increases in virgin material extraction. The initiatives announced aim to help build the common frameworks needed to accelerate that transition.
Earlier the same day, at Octopus Energy's Energy Tech Summit, CATL and Octopus Energy announced Europe's first battery-swapping joint venture, targeting 300,000 electric trucks and 30 hubs across Europe by 2035, with the first UK hubs scheduled to open in 2027. The partnership demonstrates the type of commercially viable circular business model the coalition aims to accelerate.
Miranda Schnitger, Climate Lead at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation: "Circular economy approaches were key to tackling the 45% of emissions that come from how we produce and consume."
Jiang Li, Vice President and Board Secretary, CATL: "Last year we set the direction: decouple battery growth from virgin material extraction. Today, the industry is beginning to build the common rules that will help deliver it. That is not only a climate opportunity, but an industrial one."
Greg Jackson, Founder and CEO, Octopus Energy Group: "By designing batteries to be swapped, optimised, shared and reused thousands of times, we can squeeze every drop of value out of the materials we already have, rather than digging up more. That's why our battery-swapping joint venture with CATL matters; we are taking the world's best hardware, combining it with smart energy tech to make it cheaper and more flexible, and building a completely self-sustaining transport network."
Initiative I: Circular Battery Design Guidelines
The circular battery design guidelines establish a common methodology for circular battery design across a range of mobility applications. As a founding partner, CATL brings practical experience from battery manufacturing, recycling and service operations to support their development. The methodology is intended to inform procurement standards, investor frameworks and future regulatory discussions, including the evolution of European battery policy.
Developed to address fragmentation across approaches to repair, second life and recycling, the guidelines provide a shared basis for comparing circular performance across the market. They aim to help buyers evaluate products, investors assess long-term value, and policymakers reference a consistent framework.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation provides a neutral platform through which companies across the battery value chain can develop shared principles that no single organisation could establish alone. The working group is now underway, with publication planned for 2027.
Initiative II: Business Coalition for Circular Business Models
The coalition for circular business models is a policy and industry platform established to accelerate the adoption of circular business models across mobility and energy. With battery swapping already operating across more than 1,650 stations in 127 Chinese cities, the focus is shifting from demonstrating technical feasibility to creating the commercial, regulatory and financing conditions required for international scale.
CATL contributes practical experience through its battery-as-a-service and battery-swapping businesses, including the expanding Choco-Swap and QIJI networks, providing operational insights that can support wider deployment globally.
The coalition also seeks to establish common approaches for evaluating circular battery assets, including service history, degradation data and second-life value, providing investors, fleet operators and policymakers with greater confidence and reducing market uncertainty.
CATL Advances Circular Battery Systems
CATL continues to scale circularity across its operations. In 2025, Brunp Recycling processed 210,000 tonnes of end-of-life batteries, recovering 99.6% of nickel, cobalt and manganese, with 80% of recovered materials returning directly into CATL's battery production.
Rather than treating recycling as the end of a product's life, CATL integrates circularity into battery design, manufacturing, use and recovery as a connected system.
Furthermore, CATL is accelerating the commercialization of sodium-ion batteries, with plans to deliver its first sodium-ion energy storage systems to customers starting this September. This initiative expands the energy storage technology roadmap beyond lithium, cobalt, and nickel, enhancing material supply resilience and cost stability.
** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **
From Vision to Action: GECC Launches the Global Energy Circular Economy Coalition and Circular Battery Design Guidelines
From Vision to Action: GECC Launches the Global Energy Circular Economy Coalition and Circular Battery Design Guidelines
From Vision to Action: GECC Launches the Global Energy Circular Economy Coalition and Circular Battery Design Guidelines
