Paris Gashapon Pop-Up Brings 300 Capsule Machines and Labubu to Rue de Rivoli

Rue de Rivoli now has 300 machines waiting for your tokens. France's first Gashapon Bandai Official Shop opened at number 37 on Saturday, April 4, pressing 150 m² of capsule-stacked walls into service a short walk from Pop Mart's Carrousel du Louvre location, the Paris address Labubu collectors already treat as a mandatory stop.

The store is a partnership between Bandai, the global originator of the gashapon format, and King Jouet, France's largest toy retail chain. Each pull costs €5 or €6 depending on the machine, with tokens sold exclusively on site at €1 each. Philippe Duval, commercial director of Bandai in Europe, put average visitor spend at €15 to €20 per trip, a figure that tracks precisely with pull logic: most people who spin once find it hard to stop. The 3,000-item inventory runs across licensed universes including Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Tamagotchi, Zelda, and Mario. Open seven days a week from 10am to 7pm with no reservation required, the store is planned to hold its Rue de Rivoli location for at least a year, with King Jouet's leadership signaling intent to expand the format to other French cities if Paris proves the model.

For Labubu fans, the gashapon opening completes a collector corridor that had already been forming on this street. Sonny Angel's Fioko Shop and Miniso were in the mix before April 4; now France's first Bandai-official capsule destination sits in the same neighborhood as Pop Mart. The format gap matters here: a gashapon pull at €5 sits well below the entry price for most Pop Mart blind boxes, creating a lower-commitment way for tourists and impulse shoppers to participate in the same surprise-mechanic culture that built Labubu's global reputation. The capsule format is not competing with the Labubu flagship nearby so much as widening the on-ramp for people who might end up queuing there next.

If you are planning a visit with 10 pulls to work through, roughly €50 to €60 in tokens, the sharpest move is to scan machine labels for series with the widest variant counts before committing. Bandai builds some machines around six-figure sets; others run to ten variants or more. A larger set in the first few pulls significantly reduces the chance of duplicating before you rotate to the next machine. With the store only six days into its run as of this writing, initial stock across all 300 machines is still near full capacity, making now the window with the widest available selection before popular series begin depleting. Follow the Gashapon Bandai Official Shop's official social channels for any rare variant announcements tied to specific machines as the rotation progresses.

The King Jouet partnership is what separates this from a one-season novelty. France's biggest toy chain owning the retail relationship means genuine logistics infrastructure behind the machines, the kind that keeps inventory maintained and cycling rather than running empty. The collector stretch on Rue de Rivoli that started with Labubu is now operating at a different scale entirely.