Three findings
One building hosts 10% of the market. 68 of the 680 tracked pop-ups ran inside The Hyundai Seoul in Yeouido, the single densest pop-up venue in the country.
The district race is three-way. Gangnam (98) leads on count, Yeouido (99) is department-store driven, and Seongsu (83) is the street-level scene where brands build standalone spaces.
Fashion is the biggest category, but character IP travels best. Fashion takes 28% of openings, while character pop-ups score highest with foreign visitors (88.4 of 100 on our foreigner-relevance score).
Openings by month, 2026
June peaked at 177 new pop-ups and July nearly matched it at 177. August (142) is undercounted: the weekly capture missed the last ten days of the month, so it is a floor, not a reading of the market. Entries that opened before 2026 appear in the totals but not in this chart.
View as table
| Month | Openings |
|---|---|
| Jan | 3 |
| Feb | 3 |
| Mar | 17 |
| Apr | 44 |
| May | 107 |
| Jun | 177 |
| Jul | 177 |
| Aug | 142 |
Where pop-ups happen
Seongsu highlighted: it is the only top district where the count is carried by standalone street venues rather than a department store.
View as table
| District | Pop-ups |
|---|---|
| Yeouido | 99 |
| Gangnam | 98 |
| Seongsu | 83 |
| Jamsil | 80 |
| Hongdae | 52 |
| Apgujeong | 46 |
| Elsewhere in Seoul | 222 |
What kind of pop-ups
View as table
| Category | Pop-ups |
|---|---|
| Fashion | 193 |
| Character IP | 99 |
| Food & drink | 98 |
| Art & exhibition | 74 |
| Lifestyle | 73 |
| Beauty | 39 |
| K-pop | 33 |
| Experience | 30 |
| Other | 29 |
| Tech | 12 |
How long they run
The median run is 18 days. The over-90-day tail is mostly ticketed exhibitions rather than retail pop-ups.
View as table
| Run length | Pop-ups |
|---|---|
| 1 week or less | 110 |
| 8 to 30 days | 345 |
| 31 to 90 days | 156 |
| Over 90 days | 69 |
What travels with foreign visitors
Average DealSeoul foreigner-relevance score (0-100) per category: language barrier, IP recognition, payment and location friction, scored per pop-up at publication. Character IP highlighted: globally recognizable franchises need no translation.
View as table
| Category | Avg score |
|---|---|
| K-pop | 92.5 |
| Character IP | 88.4 |
| Fashion | 77.1 |
| Experience | 75.7 |
| Beauty | 75.1 |
| Food & drink | 74.4 |
| Art & exhibition | 72.6 |
| Lifestyle | 68.0 |
The repeat players
Brands and IPs that ran more than one Seoul pop-up in the window.
Methodology, honestly
What this is: every pop-up tracked by DealSeoul's editorial pipeline (venue announcements, department-store schedules, brand channels, on-the-ground checks) that was live or opened between May 1 and 2026-09-01, 2026. Each entry carries verified dates, a street address, a category and a foreigner-relevance score, with a last-verified stamp.
Revision 2026-09-01: the dataset was refreshed from the live DealSeoul pipeline (729 raw rows, up from 432 in the July edition), so June and July are now complete and August is added (August remains partial: the weekly capture did not run in the last ten days of the month, and late-August openings will be backfilled as they are captured). The July edition's headline figures are superseded by the numbers on this page.
Cleaning (rev 2026-07-18): 6 duplicate records (same title and window, or a re-scraped window for the same event) were collapsed, and 43 long-running entries (over 184 days: museum-length exhibitions, permanent brand spaces, one end-date error) were excluded so the report counts limited-run pop-ups only.
What this is not: a census. Coverage skews toward major venues and pop-ups relevant to foreign visitors; a neighborhood cafe collab we never saw is not in here. Counts are floors, not totals. The foreigner-relevance score is our own editorial metric, published per entry on dealseoul.com/popups.
Reuse: the underlying dataset is served live at dealseoul.com/data/popups.json. Cite the report and link back.