Pilot turned shop owner David Leyva opens The Gundam Place in Cumming

The Gundam Place opened March 5 at 580 Atlanta Road in Cumming, bringing Gundam model kits, known as Gunpla, and related hobby supplies to Forsyth County. The shop is owned by 46-year-old David Leyva, a Forsyth County resident and airline pilot whose retail operation now includes a storefront, a separate warehouse and almost a dozen employees.

Leyva traces the business back more than a decade to a single moment in Tokyo, Japan, when he saw an RX-78 model in a shop. The sight transformed a childhood hobby — Leyva grew up building models of military jet aircraft — into a vocation. “It's weird to explain, but it just really inspires you,” Leyva said. “It really opens your imagination, like, ‘Wow, imagine if this was real. How gigantic this thing would be.’” Leyva is married and a father of two.

The Gundam Place evolved from Leyva’s personal collection. Customers in the Atlanta area began messaging him to avoid shipping costs, and he met local fans in shopping mall parking lots to complete purchases. “Customers were eager to take them off his hands,” and those frequent in-person pickups prompted Leyva to buy a warehouse to store inventory and run retail out of a small storefront attached to that space before opening the dedicated shop at 580 Atlanta Road.

A promotional partnership with a popular Gundam influencer, combined with burgeoning word-of-mouth notoriety, helped push the operation from private sales into a full retail business. Leyva said growth has been steady: “Every year, I get surprised,” he said. “It just keeps happening. We grew at least 30-40 percent every year.” That pace of expansion, Leyva said, has allowed the business to outearn his job as an airline pilot, although specific revenue figures were not disclosed.

The Gundam franchise, which includes television shows, movies, novels, manga and plastic model kits, supplies the core inventory at the Cumming shop. The store’s address, warehouse capacity and staff size position it to serve collectors and builders across the Atlanta metro area who previously picked up purchases in parking lots to avoid shipping fees. More than a decade after the RX-78 encounter in Tokyo, Leyva has turned that inspiration into a growing specialty-retail operation anchored at 580 Atlanta Road in Cumming.