Miniso is redesigning its network around fewer, larger stores and faster assortment refresh cycles. The strategy concentrates demand, increases planning complexity, and shifts more inventory risk upstream, trading working capital for margin protection and execution reliability.
In Brief
- Miniso is pursuing an “open big, close small” strategy, concentrating volume into large-format stores while exiting weaker and undersized locations.
- Weekly assortment refreshes, IP-driven product launches, and thousands of new SKUs are increasing planning complexity and raising the importance of demand forecasting.
- Membership programs and customer data are making demand more predictable, helping improve allocation, replenishment, and launch planning.
- The company is carrying more inventory upstream through extended raw-material coverage and higher overseas safety stocks to protect service levels and margins.
Network Design Is Moving From Store Count To Throughput
The most important change inside Miniso is not the number of stores it operates but the type of network it is building.
By the end of Q1 2026, the company operated more than 8,500 stores globally. Yet management highlighted that only around 12 percent of stores, primarily large-format concepts and themed flagship locations, generated roughly 30 percent of total sales. The company plans to accelerate that shift by opening nearly 500 large-format stores in 2026 while renovating more than 300 existing locations and systematically closing weaker, smaller outlets.
The strategy reflects a move away from growth measured primarily through store count. Instead, Miniso is concentrating demand into larger, more productive nodes capable of carrying broader assortments, supporting larger product launches, and generating higher sales per location.
For the supply chain, the benefits are clear. Fewer stores can simplify distribution, reduce handling complexity, and improve inventory productivity. However, larger stores also create greater operational concentration.
When a store carries more inventory, more traffic, and a larger assortment, the consequences of stockouts, delayed launches, or poor assortment decisions become significantly larger. Success depends less on network size and more on the ability to consistently place the right inventory in the right locations at the right time.
Faster Assortment Refreshes Create New Planning Demands
The network strategy only works because it is supported by a product engine built around continuous assortment renewal.
Miniso manages licensing rights across more than 150 IPs and works with approximately 2,000 suppliers globally. The company launches thousands of products annually and refreshes assortments on a weekly basis across many locations.
That operating model resembles the planning challenges traditionally associated with fashion retailers rather than conventional discount retail. Demand increasingly revolves around events, collaborations, seasonal collections, and limited-time launches rather than steady replenishment cycles.
As product lifecycles shorten, forecasting becomes more difficult. Inventory must arrive before demand peaks, while excess stock becomes harder to absorb once interest fades.
To manage that complexity, the company has increasingly focused on hero products while reducing tail SKUs. This is not simply a merchandising decision. It is also a supply chain simplification strategy.
Reducing assortment complexity allows planners to concentrate inventory investment on products with the greatest sales potential while improving forecasting accuracy and reducing operational noise across sourcing, replenishment, and allocation activities.
Membership Data Is Becoming A Planning Asset
The company’s growing membership ecosystem is also changing how demand is forecast and managed.
Membership sales represented approximately 73 percent of revenue during Q1 2026, while repeat purchases accounted for a majority of member transactions. This gives the company a much clearer view of future demand than retailers that depend primarily on anonymous store traffic.
The value extends beyond marketing. Membership behavior creates predictable purchasing patterns that can be incorporated into inventory planning, labor scheduling, replenishment timing, and product launch allocation. Demand peaks tied to payday cycles, promotional events, or major IP launches become easier to anticipate when customers can be directly engaged and tracked.
The company has also indicated plans to combine membership data with AI-driven planning tools to improve demand forecasting and inventory decisions across channels and markets.
For supply chain leaders, the broader lesson is that customer data is increasingly becoming a planning asset rather than simply a marketing resource. The more accurately demand signals can be translated into replenishment and allocation decisions, the lower the inventory required to support growth.
Why Inventory Risk Is Moving Upstream
The most significant supply chain decision may be where Miniso is choosing to carry risk.
While inventory days remained relatively stable overall, the composition changed considerably. Inventory turnover improved in China, but overseas inventory levels increased as the company expanded internationally and added additional buffers to protect against logistics disruptions.
The company also extended raw-material coverage for key products from roughly two months to three or four months. Taken together, these decisions represent a deliberate shift in inventory strategy.
Rather than absorbing disruption risk at the store level, Miniso is moving more of that exposure upstream into raw materials, supplier commitments, and regional inventory buffers. The approach provides greater protection against transportation delays, supplier instability, and cost volatility, particularly in overseas markets where lead times are longer and logistics conditions can change rapidly.
The trade-off is higher working capital exposure. More inventory tied up earlier in the supply chain improves service reliability but reduces flexibility if demand changes unexpectedly. It also raises the importance of forecasting accuracy because inventory decisions are being made further in advance of actual sales.
In effect, Miniso is exchanging inventory efficiency for execution certainty.
Protecting Margins Through Supply Chain Design
The inventory strategy also supports a broader effort to protect margins in a volatile operating environment.
The company continues to face higher logistics costs, commodity price volatility, and uncertainty in consumer spending patterns. Rather than relying primarily on broad price increases, management is combining several operational levers.
Product mix is shifting toward higher-margin proprietary IP products. Raw-material inventories are being expanded to lock in costs. Selective pricing adjustments are being introduced in certain markets, particularly for high-volume items where elasticity appears manageable.
These actions mirror strategies increasingly seen across retail and consumer products sectors, where companies are using procurement discipline, inventory positioning, and assortment management to offset cost pressure without undermining customer value perceptions.
The difference is that Miniso’s model depends heavily on the continued success of its content engine. The value consumers place on licensed and proprietary products provides greater pricing flexibility than many traditional value retailers enjoy.
The Larger Supply Chain Lesson
Miniso’s “open big, close small” strategy is ultimately a network design decision rather than a store-format decision.
The company is concentrating demand into larger, more productive locations while relying on faster assortment refreshes, membership-driven forecasting, and higher upstream inventory buffers to keep those stores operating efficiently.
The model offers clear advantages. Larger stores improve productivity. Membership data improves visibility into demand. Upstream inventory reduces exposure to disruption. SKU rationalization simplifies planning.
But each advantage comes with a corresponding requirement for greater forecasting precision and stronger execution discipline.
As Miniso continues expanding across global markets, the central challenge will not be opening additional stores. It will be maintaining the supply chain accuracy, inventory positioning, and planning discipline required to support a network where a smaller number of high-volume locations carry a growing share of the company’s growth ambitions.
