What the Nayuki PRO closure says about coffee beverage development

The Nayuki PRO store in the sunken plaza of Guangzhou Tianhuan Plaza shut without notice, its signboard removed and windows covered. It opened in May 2021 as the first PRO location on the city's central CBD axis, selling tea drinks, coffee, baked goods and merchandise, and it hosted co-branded theme store takeovers for more than four years with steady traffic.

The quiet exit highlights the chain's wider store contraction and the pressure on flagship-format outlets that carry coffee alongside tea. Such stores serve as brand showcases and event spaces, so closing one removes a visible marketing asset. The episode also feeds debate over how coffee beverage development and multi-category menus are sustained when a single high-profile site underperforms.

The Nayuki store in the sunken plaza of Guangzhou Tianhuan Plaza quietly withdrew without any prior announcement. The orange-pink signboard was removed, and the floor-to-ceiling glass was covered with advertising cloth, leaving many regular customers astonished. This Nayuki PRO store, which opened in May 2021, was the first PRO store on the central axis of Guangzhou's CBD. In addition to regular tea drinks, it also offered coffee, baked goods, and snack merchandise, and had long served as a display space for the brand's co-branded theme stores. After operating for more than four years with stable customer flow and constant events, it suddenly disappeared one day, sparking various speculations among consumers about the reason for the closure and drawing renewed attention to Nayuki's ongoing store contraction in recent years.

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Recently around noon, a Guangzhou netizen passing by Tianhuan Plaza discovered that the Nayuki store that had originally occupied a prominent position in the sunken plaza was gone. The orange-pink signboard had been completely removed, and the original floor-to-ceiling glass windows were tightly covered by advertising cloth, giving no indication that a Nayuki store had ever been there.

This scene surprised both the poster and onlookers. According to multiple sources, this Nayuki store, located in the C position of Tianhuan Plaza, officially opened in May 2021 and was the first Nayuki PRO store on the central axis of Guangzhou's CBD. The store offered a fairly rich range of products, including not only regular tea drinks but also coffee, baked goods, and snack merchandise.

In the memories of many longtime Nayuki customers, this store, which had operated for more than four years, was almost equivalent to the brand's flagship presence in Guangzhou's CBD area. Whenever Nayuki launched a co-branded project, the store would synchronously change to the corresponding limited-edition themed decorations and transform into a co-branded theme store, attracting a large number of fans to come and take photos. Although the store was not necessarily full every day, its overall business condition had always been relatively stable.

However, it was precisely such a uniquely significant Nayuki PRO store that suddenly ceased operation without any advance notice, and the store signboard was removed completely overnight. Many fans could hardly hide their shock upon seeing this and left comments one after another: "Business here was so good, how did it close down," "I went last Saturday and by this Saturday it was gone," "My God, so fast, gone just like that," "It was still there when I went yesterday, I didn't expect it to disappear so quickly," "I went not long ago, and it just closed like that."

While expressing regret, onlooking netizens also began offering their own views on the reasons for the closure of this brand image store. Some customers who had visited pointed out that the Nayuki Tianhuan Plaza store had many comfortable seats, which led some passersby who had not made a purchase to enter and occupy seats to rest. Over time, the store became noisy and messy, trash could not be cleared in time, and staff could not keep up. Consumers who valued the store environment might therefore have been deterred and never returned.

On the other hand, Nayuki has adjusted its product line multiple times in recent years, cutting many baked goods categories with good reputations, while tea drinks, coffee, and other beverages also lacked novelty in research and development. Some users gradually lowered their expectations for the brand's new products and turned to other chain brands. Therefore, in the view of netizens, under multiple pressures such as high rent and customer loss, the Nayuki Tianhuan Plaza store may have long been caught in a situation where expenses exceeded income, and the brand's choice to close the store was very likely to stop losses in time.

In fact, since last year, consumers in various places have successively noticed that Nayuki was continuously closing multiple stores, even quietly withdrawing from a certain city or region. Watching this once highly successful tea drink brand continuously shrink its scale of operating stores, loyal users cannot help but feel worried about the brand's future direction.

However, some views hold that Nayuki's closure of a brand image store that had operated for many years was the result of multiple overlapping factors, including intensifying market competition, adjustments to the brand's market layout, and changes in the external business environment. The public need not feel overly regretful or worried about the closure of a single store.

Image source: Internet

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.