Korean streetwear pioneer Kasina loses ₩13.6B on a subsidiary that went bankrupt

Kasina is one of South Korea's first-generation streetwear select shops. It began in 1997 as a small skate shop in Busan and built its name on limited-edition Nike and Adidas collaborations, later running Stüssy's official distribution and the Stüssy Seoul chapter store for roughly 20 years. With a private equity injection of about ₩40 billion from Arc & Partners, the company set out to grow far beyond the select-shop model.

The expansion money went into adjacent bets: Kasina acquired H Nine Pitch Studio, the company behind the football-culture magazine and streetwear shop Over the Pitch, took a stake in Flattened, operator of the sneaker raffle platform Suprize, and bought real estate in Sinsa-dong. Meanwhile the core weakened: on March 31, 2025, Stüssy ended its two-decade distribution partnership to enter Korea directly, taking one of Kasina's anchor brands with it.

Then the acquisition collapsed. H Nine Pitch Studio was declared bankrupt by the Seoul Bankruptcy Court on January 21, 2026 (case 2025하합1076). Kasina wrote off roughly ₩13.6 billion (about US$9.4M) on the subsidiary: ₩7.41 billion in loans and accrued interest ruled unrecoverable, ₩3.03 billion in bad-debt charges including a ₩2.66 billion receivable wiped entirely, and a ₩3.54 billion equity impairment to zero. To repair its balance sheet, Kasina sold its Sinsa-dong land and building for ₩26 billion in December 2025, paying ₩15 billion of borrowings with the proceeds.