During the May Day holiday, the seventh "55 Shopping Festival" main event in Putuo District was held at China Overseas Universe City MAX in the Zhenru commercial area. Putuo District focused on creating immersive consumption scenarios, developing city-level IPs, and operating full-age targeted activities, deeply integrating cultural, commercial, tourism, sports, and exhibition resources. It launched featured events such as Five Themed Nights and the Wild Sparrow · Really Aroma Bread Festival. According to statistics from China Overseas Universe City MAX, the mall's total single-day foot traffic on May 1 exceeded 148,000 visitors, setting a new record for daily visitors since its opening. Throughout the entire May Day holiday period, overall foot traffic increased by 11.45% year-over-year, while sales revenue grew by 15% compared to the same period last year. Key operational indicators saw significant increases, leading the regional market.

The impressive foot traffic and sales figures raise the question: how did Universe City MAX achieve this record-breaking performance since its opening? The answer lies in the mall's deep operational strategies of building scenarios, shaping IPs, and stimulating consumption.

Building Scenarios: Cultivating Themed Nights to Attract All-Age, Pan-Regional Customer Groups During this "55 Shopping Festival," Universe City MAX utilized five themed nights as platforms. Collaborating with multiple units including the Putuo District Commerce Commission, the Communist Youth League Putuo Committee, the District Sports Bureau, and Shiquan Road Subdistrict, the mall customized exclusive content for different customer segments such as young adults, seniors, sports enthusiasts, and families with children. This strategy achieved full-age coverage, penetration across all consumption scenarios, and attracted customers throughout the entire holiday period. For example, the Table Tennis Night on May 2 featured interactive experiences related to the CTTSL, live match viewing, and talk shows, accurately attracting sports enthusiasts to participate and spend. The Youth Night on May 4 focused on university students and young people, bringing campus cultural performances to the commercial stage, further strengthening the mall's appeal and stickiness for younger demographics. As the city's first senior-friendly shopping mall, it has deeply engaged in the silver economy. On May 3, it hosted a special symphony performance for seniors and formed exclusive senior tour groups, allowing the elderly to immersively experience the diverse commercial scenes and continuously unleashing their consumption potential.

In fact, the mall has considerable experience in driving foot traffic through scenario creation. Since its opening in December 2023, it has consistently developed diverse immersive consumption scenarios. This year, the spring "Pastoral Season" transformed the mall into an urban pasture, with retro floats, windmill installations, and floral arrangements complementing each other. The recently concluded "Little Sweet Water Championship" and "Big Eater Championship" brought popular F&B brands together for competitions, creating a sweet atmosphere that boosted food and beverage spending. Additionally, the mall has hosted series of events like "Capture the Wind Season," "Follow the Wild Season," "Ice Cream Festival," and auto markets, continuously activating consumption vitality through diverse scenarios, which accumulated rich operational experience and mature strategies for the success of this "55 Shopping Festival" series.

Shaping IPs: Refining the Really Aroma Bread Festival with Expanded Scale and Upgraded Quality The Really Aroma Bread Festival is a self-owned consumption IP that the mall began cultivating and deepening from its second year of operation. Now in its third year, the event achieved a comprehensive scale expansion and an upgrade in content quality. The bread festival collaborated with the high-quality "Wild Sparrow" market resources, gathering over 60 popular bakery brands for a collective appearance. It also launched "early bird voucher packages" and initiated interactive campaigns like "Recruiting 1000 Really Aroma Bag Ambassadors" and "100 Chief Carb Officers," precisely targeting over 3,000 core customers. Custom promotional buses toured the city to build momentum, complemented by various fun interactive experiences on-site, all aimed at creating a baking consumption feast with city-wide influence. Data shows that from April 30 to May 4, the topic exposure for "Really Aroma Bread Festival" on the Xiaohongshu platform alone exceeded 400,000, effectively encouraging spontaneous user check-ins, shares, and content creation, achieving a two-way empowerment of social traffic fission and offline consumption conversion.

Stimulating Consumption: Multi-Format Synergy Drives Strong Holiday Spending The mall's deep focus on building scenarios and shaping IPs ultimately aims to gather crowds, empower tenants, and ultimately leverage pan-regional consumption to boost overall sales. During the May Day holiday, Universe City MAX saw an 11.45% year-over-year increase in overall foot traffic and a 15% year-over-year increase in sales revenue. The mall collaborated with Taobao Flash Sales to offer large-value group-buying vouchers for categories like apparel, gold, and dining,叠加叠加叠加 with payment discounts for China Everbright Bank credit card holders. Shoppers could spend as little as 550 yuan to purchase retail vouchers worth 1,000 yuan. These substantial discounts effectively stimulated consumer enthusiasm, allowing tenants to capitalize on the holiday traffic and achieve strong sales performance.

The Italian restaurant brand Grande A'moo, located on the first floor and being its first Shanghai outlet, benefited from the mall's consistently gathered foot traffic. During the holiday, the store's popularity surged simultaneously, achieving sales of 390,000 yuan over five days, with foot traffic increasing over 15% year-over-year. The performance of Just Seafood Restaurant on the fourth floor was also impressive, with its holiday foot traffic ranking first among all the brand's stores in Shanghai. Store Manager Zhang Fangyu stated that the steady growth in store traffic is not only due to their own refined operations and promotions but also relies heavily on the mall's常态化常态化常态化 scenario operations and customer base cultivation. Since joining the mall's "Old Friends Club," the proportion of senior repeat customers has continuously increased, leading the restaurant to launch a 358-yuan exclusive special set meal, which has been highly popular among elderly consumers.

The retail sector also showed outstanding performance. The sports brand Saucony, which opened concurrently with the mall and has sponsored the Shanghai Suzhou River Half Marathon multiple times, saw its sales during the holiday period top the list among all its Shanghai stores, achieving double-digit revenue growth. Zhang Bianjie, the duty manager of Lao Feng Xiang Silver Store, reported that, empowered by both the mall's group-buying vouchers and the brand's own promotional activities, sales over the five days increased by nearly 30% year-over-year.

Looking at the mall's overall operational data, the holiday consumption results were highly prominent: Brands like Indicia& and Wonderful Pistachios ranked among the top three in national single-store sales; Boxyuehui Cinema, CHJ Jewellery, and FUNDOLAND ranked in the top three among their stores in the East China region; Fourteen tenants, including Marc O'Polo, Saucony, Just Seafood Restaurant, Young Star Chef, Three Mountains Out, and Xiang La La, secured the number one sales position among their respective brand's stores in Shanghai. The three main business formats—retail, dining, and experience—all performed strongly, with dozens of brand tenants achieving double-digit growth.

The mall management indicated that with the vigorous rollout of events like the "55 Shopping Festival," "66 Nightlife," and the "Shanghai Summer" consumption season, they will continue to optimize the commercial mix, enhance service capabilities, and deepen the all-age-friendly experience. The goal is to continue building a more attractive new urban consumption landmark and contribute sustainably to the high-quality development of the regional commercial sector.