Lotte Duty Free launched a fashion brand with 1MILLION — it lasted seven months

In November 2024 Lotte Duty Free entered fashion: Singular, a dancewear and street brand created with 1MILLION Dance Studio — some 26.3 million YouTube subscribers — whose co-founder Lia Kim led the design. It launched while the division sat under emergency management, a new-growth bet on the 'Jalpa generation' of Gen Z and Alpha plus foreign customers. Pop-ups ran at Lotte World Mall in Jamsil from 9 November, then at the Myeong-dong flagship, and the line sold through an official online mall and the Lotte Internet Duty Free.

Awareness came easily — 1MILLION's reach and social marketing did their work. Sales did not follow: the duty-free market was depressed, consumer sentiment was shrinking, and the customer base for a duty-free dancewear brand proved too narrow. Singular belonged to a new-growth portfolio alongside the Katz B2B platform, a Myeong-dong smart store and the 'Now in Myeongdong' showroom — initiatives wound down one by one between December 2024 and mid-2025.

In June 2025 the wind-down was confirmed: the official Singular mall stopped sales on 16 June and shut entirely on 17 July, with whatever remained pushed into the Lotte Internet Duty Free store. Chief executive Kim Dong-ha's direction was profitability over volume — selection and concentration — and the pivot showed at division level: first-quarter 2025 operating profit of ₩15.2 billion, the first quarterly surplus since the second quarter of 2023, on revenue down 22.2 percent.