South Korea’s low birth rate fuels $5.1 billion baby goods retail boom

SEOUL – South Korean entrepreneur Mah Seungeun rarely talks herself out of buying something for her 10-year-old daughter.With no siblings to share the family’s attention – or its spending – each childhood milestone feels like a one-time opportunity.“Because I have just one child, I always think: ‘this is the last year my kid will be five, this is the last year they’ll be six.’ So even if I hesitate over a purchase, I end up buying it,” said Mah, 38.“The grandparents buy a lot of gifts, and so do the aunts and uncles.”That impulse is turning South Korea, home to one of the world’s lowest birth rates, into an unlikely hotspot for premium baby goods.Its dwindling number of children are becoming what Korean marketers dub VIBs – “Very Important Babies” – showered with pricey strollers, designer clothes and toys by families determined to spare little expense for their only progeny.Online spending on baby and children’s products reached a record 5.48 trillion won (S$5.15 billion) in 2025, up about 67% since 2017, according to the Ministry of Data and Statistics.Top chain Hyundai Department Store saw sales of luxury children’s clothing jump 50% in the first half of 2026, while rival Shinsegae reported growth of more than 20% in the same category.At Lotte Department Store, sales of premium baby goods, including high-end strollers and bottle sterilisers, more than doubled.The trend reflects a well-known dynamic in fertility economics: as families have fewer children, they tend to invest more in each one.Variations are visible in China, where the one-child policy concentrated family resources, and the US, where many millennial professionals are having fewer children later in life – and spending heavily on them.What sets South Korea apart is how broadly intensive parenting has spread, said Choi Seulki, professor of demography and sociology at KDI School of Public Policy and Management. “In the past, people had many children and raised them in a fairly hands-off way. Now they have fewer children and there is a powerful drive to raise them intensively, to give them everything possible,” he said, a tendency amplified by South Korea’s highly competitive culture.Known locally as “ten pocket syndrome,” the phenomenon describes how parents, two sets of grandparents and other relatives and friends can concentrate their spending on a single child.For children’s brands, that can soften the blow from a shrinking customer base.It also taps into parental anxieties: with only one child, the stakes of getting parenting “right” can feel higher, fuelling spending on products, education and experiences promising to give them the best possible start.“We see a clear emergence of the ‘VIB’ consumption trend – the desire to give a single child better products and experiences,” said Kevin Choi, general manager at the Korean unit of Stokke.The Norwegian manufacturer’s Tripp Trapp high chair, a status symbol among parents globally, sells for up to 700,000 won in South Korea – even without accessories.Stokke calls the country one of its “most important and strategic markets” and chose Seoul’s trendy Seongsu neighbourhood for the global launch of its latest stroller in 2026.“It’s not as bad now but not long ago, supply couldn’t keep up with demand, so people would practically order one as soon as they found out they were pregnant. It was that popular,” said Kim Seo Eun, a childcare-products buyer at home-shopping network Lotte Homeshopping, referring to the Stokke chair.“Even with the low birth rate, people are tending to have just one child and spend a lot more on that one child,” said Kim.“They’re buying luxury goods for their babies as well, so even though prices have gone up quite a bit, sales don’t seem to be falling.”Concentrated spendingThere has been some improvement in South Korea’s demographic picture.Births rose 6.7% to about 254,300 in 2025 from the year before, and the fertility rate – the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime – climbed to 0.80 from a record-low 0.72 in 2023.Still, it remains far below the roughly 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population, according to the United Nations. Government efforts to reverse the decline have included expanded childcare and parental leave, but high housing and education costs, demanding work practices and the career penalty faced by mothers continue to discourage bigger families.Retailers are adapting.Retailer Musinsa Co’s fashion and lifestyle platform 29CM said transaction value in its kids category jumped more than 170% from a year earlier in the first nine months of 2026.The company’s niche baby goods, including handmade wooden mobiles and natural rubber teethers, proved so popular that it opened its first 29CM KIDS offline select shop in 2025, adding a larger second location in May 2026.Premium toy retailer IQBOX Co is seeing a similar shift toward quality over quantity.“While the number of units we have sold has declined this year, our average order value has actually risen by a double-digit percentage,” chief executive officer Kang Yoojin said. “We interpret this as spending on each child becoming more concentrated.”For some parents, spending extends well beyond clothes and toys.Lee Gabin, 41, has spent 15 million won on educational tools including Montessori sets for her 20-month-old son and fills his days with play centres and private lessons.She and her partner have no plans for a second child.“I think all parents feel the same way about their children, it’s just the methods that differ,” she said.The spending extends beyond immediate family.At a 29CM KIDS store in Seoul, Lee Sooji, 33, was shopping for a friend’s baby and said price wasn’t much of a concern.“These days a single child is so rare and precious,” she said. 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