Following Morning's &#34;Jiumu General Store,&#34; more stationery manufacturers are entering the collection store business.
Recently, foreign-trade-oriented stationery enterprise and A-share listed company Cre8 Direct disclosed its intention to make an external investment. It plans to acquire assets of more than 30 stores within the &#34;Cool Play&#34; system through acquisition, entering the offline retail sector of trend toys and cultural creative sundries.
This marks the first truly significant external merger and acquisition since Ningbo state-owned capital took control of Cre8 Direct four years ago, and is also seen as a key step for this export-oriented cultural creative manufacturing enterprise to transform towards the domestic consumer market.
There was already a foundation for cooperation between Cool Play and Cre8 Direct.
In October 2025, the two parties reached a three-party strategic cooperation with Tianluohang, a domestic original IP brand operator, to jointly integrate IP development, original design, AI empowerment, supply chain management, and channel resources within the Ningbo Digital Cultural Industrial Park.
Just over five months later, the business cooperation relationship evolved into deep equity binding.
Transforming from a cultural creative product R&amp;D and production manufacturer to a comprehensive cultural creative operator with branding and channels is the core narrative behind Cre8 Direct's M&amp;A this time.
However, practical problems remain: given that Jiumu General Store under Morning Shares has been loss-making for many years, the idea of stationery companies opening trend cultural creative collection stores has not itself been proven to be a &#34;good business.&#34;
So, what exactly did Cre8 Direct buy this time?
<h2>Only 30 Stores</h2>
Established in 2013, Cool Play is one of the earlier domestic offline retail brands to combine trend toys with cultural creative sundries.
Its stores are mostly located in shopping malls in first- and second-tier cities. The product matrix covers blind boxes, figures, vinyl plushies, and cultural creative peripherals across multiple categories. It cooperates with multiple top-tier IPs such as Disney and Sanrio, while also incubating its own IPs like TunTunZai and PolkaDotCat.
Currently, Cool Play has over 300 stores nationwide. Its scale is close to TOP TOY, placing it in the industry's first tier by size.
However, what the listed company is interested in is not Cool Play as a whole, but rather a &#34;selection&#34; of its high-quality store assets.
According to the arrangement, Cre8 Direct plans to acquire 90% equity of Ningbo Cool Play and its newly established company, &#34;Zhejiang ChuangKu Future Cultural Creative Co., Ltd.,&#34; controlled by its actual controller Wu Shengfeng.
The company will take over the operating assets and core team of more than 30 mature stores within the system and serve as the subsequent operating entity.
At the same time, the counterparty promises to grant Cre8KuFuture an irrevocable, royalty-free license to use the &#34;Cool Play&#34; brand and related intellectual property rights for a period of no less than 10 years.
Behind this prudence lie both constraints of reality and the reflection that, against the backdrop of enhanced IP supply, the dominant ability of a single channel in bargaining and pricing is weakening.
Cross-border entry by stationery enterprises into the trend toy retail collection channel is not a verified smooth path.
A senior practitioner who once worked for a top trend toy brand told All-Day Tech that Cool Play and Jiumu General Store have highly overlapping site selection and product structures. &#34;If Jiumu next door is losing money, Cool Play's operating performance won't be great either.&#34;
Since its establishment in 2016, Jiumu General Store under Morning Stationery has only achieved brief profitability in 2023; all other years were loss-making.
In 2025, Jiumu General Store generated revenue of 1.537 billion yuan, up 9% year-on-year, but losses expanded from 12.44 million yuan the previous year to 84.51 million yuan. Despite having a store scale exceeding 860 locations and having opened franchise opportunities long ago, the overall profitability model remains unproven.
Cool Play's development trajectory also shows similar characteristics. Although it announced the opening of franchises in 2022, public information in recent years shows its store scale has remained around 300 without breakthroughs.
The practitioner further pointed out that the inclusion of only 30 stores in this transaction may be related to the uneven profitability of other stores, with some still in a loss-making or low-efficiency state.
Transaction terms also corroborate this point.
Regarding pricing, both parties based their valuation on a simulated net profit for 2025 of no less than 10 million yuan, applying an 8x price-to-earnings ratio, resulting in a total valuation of approximately 80 million yuan. With Cre8 Direct acquiring 90% equity, the consideration is expected to fall within the range of 70 million to 100 million yuan.
Cre8 Direct has already paid a 30 million yuan letter of intent deposit and agreed that if due diligence does not meet expected conditions, the transaction can be terminated and the funds returned.
On this basis, the transaction also sets clear performance commitments.
The target company commits to non-recurring net profits of no less than 6 million yuan, 12.6 million yuan, 13.23 million yuan, and 13.89 million yuan from the second half of 2026 to 2029, respectively.
Calculated based on the number of stores included, the annual profit contribution per mature single store is approximately 400,000 yuan.
&#34;If we reverse-calculate based on a net profit margin of about 10%, the corresponding annual revenue per single store would be around 4 million yuan, translating to a daily sales figure of just over 10,000 yuan,&#34; the practitioner told All-Day Tech: &#34;This is better than Miniso but worse than most trend toy stores.&#34;
For comparison, TOP TOY's 50 direct-operated stores in May 2025 generated total revenue of 444 million yuan, averaging a daily sales figure of approximately 24,000 yuan per store.
In his view, the spatial value of these store assets exceeds that of the brand and turnover alone. This transaction is essentially paying for scarce commercial district traffic entry points and helping Cool Play recover funds.
<h2>Unfulfilled IP Accounts</h2>
The trend toy collection store business where Cool Play and Jiumu General Store operate was not always so difficult.
In the early stages of the industry, trend toy retail relied more on channel dividends. High-quality shopping mall locations were relatively scarce, and IPs provided premium pricing power for products, further amplifying store attractiveness and becoming offline internet-famous gathering spots.
However, as Pop Mart completed market education and players like TOP TOY entered the fray, IP supply increased rapidly, co-branding frequency rose significantly, &#34;blockbuster&#34; lifecycles shortened continuously, and the premium capability of single IPs declined persistently.
Meanwhile, under the background of rationalized consumption, the revenue level each single store could sustain dropped, and the cost pressure of the heavy-asset direct-operation model began to emerge.
Top players like Miniso saw a high-single-digit decline in domestic same-store sales and GMV in fiscal year 2024, occurring even as average transaction values and average product prices rose, reflecting diminishing marginal growth momentum on the channel side.
Against this backdrop, IP capability has become the key variable determining profitability.
Since 2025, Miniso, relying on its financial strength and supply chain system, has continuously strengthened its own IPs through co-branding and M&amp;A, leveraging channel momentum to amplify them.
Its founder Ye Guofu gave a revenue expectation of approximately 1 billion yuan for its self-developed IP &#34;YOYO Jiang&#34; in 2026 during a recent earnings call.
In contrast, Cool Play, with a scale of only about 300 stores, has a significant gap in IP building and amplification capabilities.
Furthermore, taking the path of manufacturing enterprises extending to the retail end as a reference, the issues go beyond the IPs themselves.
Taking Jiumu General Store as an example, some views suggest its operational goals are not driven solely by store efficiency but are constrained by upstream product and brand strategies.
Within the Morning Shares system, Jiumu General Store essentially bears a dual role of &#34;channel + brand upgrade&#34;: on one hand, it undertakes retail functions; on the other, it is responsible for undertaking its own products and brand image upgrades.
It attempts to enhance premiums through core commercial district stores and unified displays, yet still relies on the student demographic for basic foot traffic; it sells its own products while moving closer to trend toy collection retail. The overlay of multiple objectives makes it difficult to form a clear, replicable profitability model.
In comparison, as a cultural creative manufacturing enterprise primarily focused on foreign trade, Cre8 Direct's domestic business is still in its infancy, possessing greater adjustment space in product structure, pricing strategy, and channel positioning.
Although its domestic business grew nearly 50% year-on-year in 2025, total revenue was only 39 million yuan.
Strategically, Cre8 Direct's domestic sales layout has clearly pointed towards directions such as IP trend toys and cultural creative items, cooperating with Tianluohang and Cool Play.
Tianluohang is a participatory company of the shareholder group Wenhua Exhibition Group, which holds a controlling stake in Cre8 Direct. It possesses deep accumulation in IP licensing and operation, covering cultural IP resources such as the Dunhuang Museum, China Aerospace CNSPACE, and the Terracotta Warriors of Qin Shi Huang, while also representing numerous international IPs.
The combination of &#34;IP + Manufacturing + Channel&#34; constitutes the basic path for Cre8 Direct's extension to the retail end. However, whether this model can succeed still depends on the actual operating performance at the store level and market acceptance of IP products.
This IP account still needs to see true realization in actual implementation operations.

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Cre8 Direct Acquires 30 Cool Play Stores: Can the Math for Trend Toy Collection Stores Still Work Out?