Khun Jin Is Already Building Southeast Asia's Biggest Mall

Bangkok is getting a new mall built around a 20,000-seat concert arena, and the person planning it is barely out of a UK and US education himself. Khun Jin, the Mall Group's Assistant General Manager for Leasing and Property Management, told host Mr. Jason and co-host Esther that the company's next project, Bangkok Mall, going up across from BITEC in Bangna, is on track to be the largest mall in Southeast Asia, at roughly a million square meters of retail space.

Khun Jin is third-generation in a company that built Emporium, M Quartier, and the recently opened M Sphere, together rebranded as the M District. His conversation with Students Incorporated covered how that family business decides which brands get space, how it grooms unknown names into anchors, and what a mall built by a 20-something actually looks like.

Straight From Graduation to a Hard Hat

Khun Jin was sent to boarding school at 12 and studied retail environments in both the UK and the US before coming home to Bangkok. He described the return as having "not much of a choice": M Sphere was under construction the moment he graduated. His mother gave him ten days at her beach house before that. Then he came in "straight to work."

His first day on the job was a meeting with IKEA and Prada, two of the anchor tenants signing on for the new development. The building itself was still just a poured foundation. "I just saw going in with my bare hands and everything with a helmet on site with the leasing team," he said. It wasn't his first exposure to the business. He'd been sitting in on floor plans since he was six or seven years old, which he credits for an early interest in interior design and an instinct for how shoppers actually move through a space.

Turning a Mascot Into a Storefront

The standard retail lease in Thailand runs about three years, but Khun Jin said M Sphere is leaning increasingly on much shorter pop-ups, six months to a year, specifically to let online-only brands test a physical footprint without committing to a full storefront. The example he pointed to is Butterbear: it started as a mascot, Nong Nui, that the Mall Group asked tenants to create for a Children's Day event. It "exploded" in popularity from there, he said, and now has its own permanent pop-up store. He mentioned two friends behind similarly small-scale brands, referred to as MP1 and MDEL, that grew the same way, proof, in his telling, that a mall's job now includes functioning as an incubator, not just collecting rent from brands that already made it.

Reading the Trends Before They Land

Asked what categories he's watching, Khun Jin named lifestyle, wellness, and longevity (the run-club and active-wear surge that followed COVID) as well as pets, which he called an increasingly important category as Thailand's population growth slows. On disruption, he drew a sharp line between departments and main retail: cosmetics sold through department-style counters are getting hit hardest by e-commerce, because shoppers already know which product they want. Full-experience luxury retail, he argued, is more insulated, since customers still want to touch and try before they buy. He also noted that global chains like Zara, Uniqlo, and H&M are constrained by standards set elsewhere, while a mall like his can shape a space around a specific customer in a way a franchise can't.

Leading a Team Older Than He Is

Bringing new ideas into a business "with such an established dominant history," as Esther put it, is Khun Jin's daily reality. He's often the youngest voice in a room where the older generation has decades more experience. His approach, he said, isn't to dictate. He wants a team that pitches ideas back at him. He compared it to a lifetime of playing football: one underperforming player doesn't sink the team, and one person calling every play doesn't win it either. "We're going to win together and we're going to lose together," he said.

What's Actually Going Into Bangkok Mall

Beyond the AEG-partnered arena (AEG also promotes Coachella, and Khun Jin described the smaller UOB Live venue at M Sphere as a "warm-up" for what's coming at the new site), the plans include an aquarium (vendor still being decided) and a floor layout still being finalized. The first three levels will hold conventional retail, still being conceptualized. The fourth floor, he said, will be devoted entirely to food, built around an indoor-market concept he called a "big challenge" to execute well. Concert-wise, the venue is sized for acts in the range of Justin Bieber; Lisa, he said, would need the whole stadium treatment elsewhere. Asked how he felt about the scale of it, Khun Jin didn't hedge:

We have no choice but to succeed in this one. It's the establishment of Bangkok.

Asked what advice he'd give students eyeing a career in retail or real estate, Khun Jin's answer wasn't about spreadsheets. It was about leaving the country and paying attention to categories you don't personally care about, because understanding what a tenant needs and what a customer wants, he said, matters more than any single lecture hall.