600,000 visitors in a year: BO&MIE keeps growing in Korea

In March 2026, the business daily Money Today devotes an interview to the Shinsegae Gangnam counter for its first anniversary. The figure that opens the article: around fifty thousand visitors a month, six hundred thousand over the year. The journalist photographs the queue outside the entrance.

≈ 600,000

visitors in the first year

≈ 50,000

visitors a month

≈ 80

products on the counter

A range made for Korea

For the anniversary, the house brings over Matthieu Favier, thirty-eight, ten years as head baker at the Bristol and then head baker of the three-star Epicure. Six multigrain loaves come out of his visit, alongside an existing line whose recipes he fine-tunes.

The most fundamental philosophy of BO&MIE’s products is quality — and what demands the most attention is the way the leaven is managed

Matthieu Favier, Money Today

The point he stresses is not the recipe but the living matter: unlike baker’s yeast, which has a single strain, a natural leaven ferments with several micro-organisms and takes far more time. What he came to Seoul to pass on is therefore less a set of formulas than the handling of a leaven — the house’s own has been kept alive for twenty-five years.

The fundamentals don’t move — stone-ground flour, natural leaven, entirely handmade — but the formats and the balances are designed for eating habits that are not ours. Around eighty products hold the counter, between Paris recipes and Korean reinterpretations.

One limit is named in the interview, and it is instructive: some loaves have not yet come out in Korea for want of finding spelt locally. The raw material decides, not the marketing calendar.

From an opening to a foothold

This is the second stage, and the harder one. A successful opening can be told in a press release; a lasting foothold is measured by what it produces on its own. Seoul is beginning to build its own product story, distinct from that of our Paris shops.

Long-fermented bread belongs to no Korean tradition. That it finds its public in Gangnam is therefore not a matter of French exoticism: it is a product that has been judged on what it is, by people who had no reason to know it.