Buttonscarves opened a store at Changi Airport. It took nine years.

Buttonscarves opened its first Singapore store at Jewel Changi Airport in October 2025, on Basement 1, with a scarf collection made in collaboration with the Singapore Tourism Board and two colourways you can buy nowhere else.

The founders started the brand in Jakarta in 2016.

Nine years sits between those two sentences, and the gap is the useful part of the story.

What the press release leaves out

Coverage of the opening ran in Inside Retail Asia, Marketing-Interactive and Vogue Singapore. The framing across all of it was arrival: a major leap in regional expansion, a landmark entry, a world-class lifestyle destination.

By the time Buttonscarves signed the lease at Changi, the company ran more than fifty stores across Indonesia and Malaysia and sat inside Modinity Group. It had staged activations in New York, London, Paris and Dubai. It had a customer base that knew the name before the shop existed.

Singapore was not the moment the brand went international. Singapore was the moment a brand that had been international for years bought retail space in an airport that sees tens of millions of passengers.

Why Malaysia came first for the store

Buttonscarves reached Malaysia before Singapore, and many Indonesian brands opening permanent retail do the same. The reasons are unglamorous. Shared language, overlapping modest-fashion market, lower cost of entry, a customer who already recognises Indonesian labels.

That ordering is about rent, not about which country will buy from you. A store means a lease, a local entity, staff, and stock sitting on a shelf for a year before it earns anything. Singapore prices all of that above Kuala Lumpur, and it offers a smaller domestic population than greater Jakarta. As a first place to sign a lease it is an expensive choice, and the brands that went to Malaysia first were reading their balance sheet correctly.

What Singapore does that no other market in the region does is prove you can hold a premium position in front of a demanding regional audience. That is worth something on its own, and it does not take a lease to find out.

The ordering matters if you are reading the Changi opening as a template. The store closes a sequence rather than opening one.

What a brand looks like when it is ready

Buttonscarves arrived at Changi holding things most brands do not have yet.

A recognisable product. Scarves and brooches, consistent enough that a shopper identifies the brand from across a walkway.

People already in the market. Fifty-plus stores across two countries means operations staff, supply lines, and a team that has solved the problems Singapore will hand them.

An institutional partner. Collaborating with the Singapore Tourism Board on a Singapore-themed collection gives a foreign brand local legitimacy that money cannot buy directly.

None of that arrived in year one. Nobody skips to it.

The version available to you now

You are not signing a lease at Changi this quarter. The step that is available runs at a fraction of the cost, and this is the part founders miss: none of the things that make Singapore expensive for a store apply to a weekend.

No lease. No local staff. No Singapore company either — a brand can sell here through a partner who is the seller of record, and only incorporate when its own name needs to be on the channel.

Singapore's weekend market circuit puts foreign brands in front of local shoppers from about S$30 a day, depending on the venue. Crafters Singapore and Fleawhere sit at the low end. A weekend at Night at Orchard starts near S$975, and the curated fairs and the festivals run higher again, most of them quoting only on request. Me-You Market at Suntec discloses its rate on acceptance and selects on brand fit rather than on who pays first.

Two days at one of those answers whether Singaporean shoppers pick your product up. Buttonscarves answered that same question years ago, in cheaper rooms, before anyone wrote about them.

The thing worth copying

Not the store. The order of operations.

Buttonscarves earned the rent before it paid the rent. It built recognition at home, proved the product travelled, and signed at Changi only once the brand could carry both the price point and the lease. Each step paid for the next one.

The mistake is not picking the wrong country. It is picking the wrong commitment. Founders who read the Changi headline and start pricing Orchard Road retail have skipped to the last chapter. The correction is not to postpone Singapore for a few years. It is to enter it at a size that matches what you have actually proved. A weekend costs a booth fee. A store costs a company.

The brands that get to a store ran the cheap steps first, and most of that work happened at markets and pop-ups nobody wrote about.

Talk to us about selling here Free, and we start with what to bring and where to sell it first.

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Sources: Inside Retail Asia, Marketing-Interactive, Jewel Changi Airport. Booth fees indicative, checked July 2026. Buttonscarves is not a landnpop client.