AEON Vietnam's Other Front: A $6 T-Shirt and a 30cm Frying Pan

[AEON Vietnam's Other Front: A $6 T-Shirt and a 30cm Frying Pan]

▍ The $6 T-Shirt

Walk into an AEON Mall in Ho Chi Minh City and you'll find a fashion section called MY CLOSET.

A T-shirt costs about VND 150,000 — roughly $6.

In the same mall, Uniqlo and H&M T-shirts run VND 200,000 to 300,000, or $8 to $12.

MY CLOSET runs about half their price.

It is AEON's own fast-fashion label — a category where new inventory drops every two months — launched in September 2022 and aimed at Vietnamese women aged 16 to 24.

This is the other front AEON is fighting on in Vietnam.

▍ Private Brand: The Strategy Beyond Malls

AEON Vietnam's story has mostly been read as "Japanese mall operator expands in Vietnam."

But Yasuyuki Furusawa — the former AEON Vietnam General Director and now AEON Retail president — set out a different goal in a 2023 interview with Vietnamese media. The plan is to push private-brand (PB) revenue, meaning products AEON designs and labels itself instead of sourcing from outside brands, from the current 1-2% of sales to at least 10%.

That kind of jump means AEON wants to upgrade in Vietnam from a retailer to a retailer-plus-brand.

By battlefield, AEON Vietnam's PB lineup breaks down into: TopValu for food, Home Coordy for home, MY CLOSET and GIORNO MIMOSA for apparel.

This strategy targets the territory of specialty retailers like Uniqlo and Nitori.

Uniqlo is Japan's leading fast-fashion brand. Nitori is Japan's leading home furnishings retailer.

What AEON is doing in Vietnam is using its own brands to intercept the value of these specialty retailers — inside AEON's own malls.

▍ Apparel: MY CLOSET as the Anti-Uniqlo

MY CLOSET hit the Vietnamese market three years before Uniqlo (AEON entered in 2014, H&M in 2017, Uniqlo in 2019).

But what really sets MY CLOSET apart from Uniqlo is three deliberate design choices.

First, it deliberately drops the AEON brand.

In Vietnamese consumers' minds, AEON is a Japanese supermarket and a family mall.

Young women shopping for fashion don't think of AEON.

So MY CLOSET cuts ties with the parent brand — from store signage to packaging — and presents itself as a stand-alone label.

Second, Korean fashion consultants drive the trend research and design direction.

The aesthetic reference for Vietnamese women aged 16 to 24 is Korea.

AEON saw this clearly and tailored MY CLOSET to that generation's wardrobe rather than going Japanese minimalist.

Third, new inventory rotates every two months.

That is the standard fast-fashion cadence — significantly faster than Uniqlo's basic-staples-on-repeat model.

On price, MY CLOSET T-shirts run $6 while Uniqlo's comparable items go for around $8 to $12.

Furusawa said in a 2022 interview: "We aim to make it AEON's first fast-fashion foray."

▍ Home: Home Coordy Built to Vietnamese Household Size

Home Coordy is AEON's home-goods PB, covering kitchenware, bedding, and furniture.

Over the past few years, locally produced items have come to make up 40% of Home Coordy's Vietnam sales.

In other words, four out of every ten Home Coordy products on AEON shelves in Vietnam are made in Vietnamese factories.

The product design is built around Vietnamese household reality.

Frying pans 30 cm or larger are now bestsellers — sized to match Vietnamese family cooking volumes.

Sofas come in larger formats, beds in queen-size — both calibrated to Vietnamese households of four to five people.

From 2024, Home Coordy expanded into furniture: beds, sofas, and dining sets.

This integrated home-goods playbook follows a path very similar to Japan's Nitori: pick a product segment, design and produce in-house, control price, and slot it into a major retail venue.

The difference is that Home Coordy doesn't need its own stores. It sits inside the home-goods section of AEON Mall, sharing foot traffic with the mall.

When a shopper walks into AEON Mall looking for home goods, what they see is the Home Coordy section.

▍ Food: TopValu Locks Down the Supermarket Entrance

TopValu is AEON Group's food PB.

The Vietnam-exclusive TopValu range runs to about 800 SKUs (stock keeping units, meaning distinct product codes), spanning dry goods, fresh items, condiments, and household supplies.

In Vietnam, TopValu has carved out dedicated zones for cut fruit and organic vegetables, targeting health-conscious urban consumers — the middle-class households of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Food is the highest-frequency category in supermarket retail.

A PB that owns the food shelves owns the customer flow.

Every time a shopper walks into AEON for groceries, they see the TopValu label.

That repeated exposure is brand-building by accumulation.

▍ Backstage: Turning Vietnamese Factories Into AEON Factories

A PB strategy needs more than product design. The factory side has to be ready too.

In 2023, AEON Vietnam launched a program called "Accompany & Level Up Enterprises," starting in Hue.

In December 2025, the Ho Chi Minh City session drew over 250 enterprises.

In January 2026, AEON Ha Dong in Hanoi hosts the next session, expecting around 160 northern Vietnamese enterprises.

The program is not just business matchmaking.

AEON Vietnam teaches suppliers how to meet AEON's supplier standards, build quality management systems, run product traceability (the requirement that every step from raw material to shelf can be checked), perform testing, and prepare documentation including self-declarations and product labeling.

The target audience is specific: medium-to-large manufacturers with food safety certifications, stable production capacity, and environmental practices.

Nguyen Thi Ngoc Hue, senior general manager at AEON Vietnam, framed the program's purpose: bring local enterprises into AEON's distribution channels, build their competitiveness, and help them reach international export opportunities.

Translation: AEON turns Vietnamese factories into supply nodes for its own PB products — and into export sources for AEON's overseas markets.

▍ The Three-Layer Integration

Stripped down, AEON's PB strategy in Vietnam is a three-layer integration.

Layer one: the venue.

AEON Mall is AEON's own real estate. Its own PBs get shelf priority and pricing leverage inside that venue.

Foreign specialty brands like Uniqlo and H&M operate as tenants in AEON Mall — their conditions aren't in the same league as AEON's own PBs.

Layer two: the brands.

MY CLOSET (apparel), Home Coordy (home), and TopValu (food) each lock down one consumer segment, spanning fast fashion through furniture to fresh produce.

Layer three: the supply chain.

The Accompany & Level Up program turns Vietnamese factories into AEON's own supply nodes, while also opening export pathways through AEON's overseas channels.

Pushing PB revenue from 1-2% toward 10% is, at its core, about pulling distribution, brand, and supply chain into a single hand.

AEON shifts in Vietnam from being a retailer to becoming a retailer-brand-supplier all at once.

The opponents this strategy is really fighting are the specialty retailers — Uniqlo, Nitori, and others operating in their own dedicated lanes.