Shared Office Enters Large Mart... 'Cafe24 Startup Center' Opens in Homeplus Store

Models are showcasing various convenience facilities at the 'Cafe24 Startup Center,' an e-commerce specialized business center that opened on the 10th on the 4th floor of Homeplus Gyesan Branch in Gyeyang-gu, Incheon.

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeon Jinyoung] Homeplus announced on the 10th that it is partnering with the global e-commerce platform ‘Cafe24’ to become a startup assistant for small business owners.

They aim to create an incubating space for small business owners preparing for small-scale startups of one to two people in shopping malls, aspiring to become the center of ‘shopping mall innovation.’ Homeplus has already innovated by introducing various experiential tenants into mall tenant spaces within stores, such as new car showrooms including Hyundai Casper, children’s swimming pools, and futsal parks, rather than just spaces for face-to-face sales with customers.

Homeplus has opened the ‘Cafe24 Startup Center,’ an e-commerce specialized business center supporting small business owners’ startups, at the Homeplus Gyesan branch in Gyeyang-gu, Incheon.

This is the first time Cafe24 has collaborated with a large supermarket to support and revitalize small business startups. The two companies have formed a strategic partnership and agreed to support online startup assistance and activation based on their respective online and offline infrastructures.

The Cafe24 Startup Center, operated for e-commerce specialized incubating, provides not only independent office spaces but also professional services necessary for online business startup and operation, including ▲online and offline education ▲one-on-one consulting ▲studio ▲parcel delivery services. It operates over 80 branches in major commercial districts nationwide, with more than 20,000 cumulative startup tenants.

Cases combining shared offices with large shopping malls are rare domestically, although last October, Japan’s representative shopping mall Aeon Mall introduced the shared office ‘Basis Point’ in ‘Aeon Mall Nagoya Noritake Garden.’

Accordingly, the Cafe24 Startup Center Gyesan branch, the first shared office located in a large supermarket in Korea, is situated on the 4th floor of Homeplus Gyesan branch, covering approximately 400㎡ (120 pyeong). It consists of 58 independent private offices sufficient for one to two users, a lounge (lobby), meeting rooms, a studio, parcel delivery services, and other shared spaces.

Gyeyang-gu Office, post office, police station, fire station, labor office (Incheon Northern Branch of the Ministry of Employment and Labor), and banks are densely located near the store, continuously developing the office commercial district. This location advantage makes administrative and financial processing easy for prospective entrepreneurs.

Additionally, Cafe24 can actively support the convenience of small business tenants in the startup center by utilizing various infrastructures of the large supermarket, such as parking lots and food courts.

Tenants of the startup center can also use other major tenants within the large supermarket, such as restaurants and pharmacies, and purchase various office supplies in the store, providing excellent convenience.

Homeplus plans to provide linked services with its existing self-storage service ‘The Storage’ to meet the needs of Cafe24 Startup Center tenants who require logistics space for storing product samples and more. They are also planning differentiated content such as startup education linked with the cultural center inside the large supermarket, considering support measures that can create various synergies.

Furthermore, they are reviewing plans to offer benefits such as offline pop-up store opportunities and entry into the Homeplus online mall for outstanding tenants in the future.

Homeplus plans to open Cafe24 Startup Centers in more than 10 stores this year, focusing on the Seoul metropolitan area and major metropolitan commercial districts, and in the long term, continuously attract startup centers in key locations nationwide to actively support small business startups and actively practice ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) management.

Han Hyoseop, head of the Homeplus Mall Brand Partnership Team, said, “With a new service combining Homeplus’s spatial convenience and Cafe24’s e-commerce specialized office operation know-how, we will support small business startups and nurture Homeplus stores with Cafe24 Startup Centers as ‘local community hubs’ through differentiated services.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.