86小舖 built a NT$1.6B beauty retail peak on 15 stores — then closed them all

86小舖 was founded in 2006 by 王閔麒 as an online beauty retailer and grew into one of Taiwan's best-known cosmetics sellers. At its peak in 2015 the company ran 15 physical stores across Taiwan with annual revenue of NT$1.6 billion — a rare success story of an e-commerce brand that moved into brick-and-mortar.

The decline began in 2017. Shopee entered Taiwan with heavy subsidies and a lowest-price mechanism that destroyed 86小舖's price edge, while Japanese and Korean beauty brands and expanding drugstore chains took the store traffic. Facebook advertising costs, the company's main customer-acquisition channel, jumped nearly fourfold in the second half of 2016.

86小舖 closed five stores in 2018 and announced in July 2019 that its last two stores — the Eslite store in Taipei and the Fengjia store in Taichung — would shut by September 2019 and March 2020 respectively. Staff fell from about 500 to 300. A rescue merger with the shopping site ASAP in 2017 failed when ASAP itself shut down the following year. The founder's personal debt once reached NT$100 million and his house was mortgaged.

By 2020 the company was online-only, its physical empire gone. The traffic had arrived, but as the company itself admitted, it had built no membership analysis and no repeat-purchase system — '流量來了，但是沒有會員分析，也沒有經營跟回購'.