UNIQLO Opens Thane Store With 300-Person Launch Queue

UNIQLO opened a new store at Lakeshore Thane on November 14, 2026, and the line formed before the doors did. Nidhi Rastogi, the company's marketing head in India, said 300 people queued up for the launch, and the store opened with a piece of merchandise that exists nowhere else in the chain: a limited-edition UTme! collaboration with Bombay Sweet Shop, exclusive to the Thane location.

"UNIQLO is finally in Thane," Rastogi said. "We opened our UNIQLO store at Lakeshore Thane, and the response was incredible, with 300 people queuing up for the launch. We also brought a special local UTme! Collaboration with Bombay Sweet Shop to life, featuring a limited-edition UT exclusive to this store. Always special to see the love and excitement from a new market."

The local collaboration is the store's opening argument. UTme! is UNIQLO's customization line, and tying the Thane version to Bombay Sweet Shop, a Mumbai-area sweets name, gives the first store in the city a product that reflects its own market rather than a standard opening assortment. A shopper who wants the design has exactly one place to get it.

The store also lands in a market the chain already knows from the other side of the bay. UNIQLO's established Indian markets include Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Chandigarh and Lucknow, and Thane sits inside the wider Mumbai metropolitan region, close enough to draw on the same customer base and far enough to need its own front door. That geography is the point of the opening: the company isn't testing a new region, it's filling in the map of one where its stores already trade, and giving shoppers who previously crossed the city a shorter trip.

Thane is a deliberate step in a longer build-out. UNIQLO entered India in 2019 with its first store in New Delhi, and the company aims to scale its Indian network to more than 100 stores by 2031. Each opening in a new city tests whether the chain's basics-led range travels beyond the metros where it first planted itself, and a 300-person first-day queue is the earliest signal a new market can send.

The parent company brings scale to that patience. UNIQLO operates 2,499 stores across 25 countries and regions, a network that began in 1984 when Tadashi Yanai opened a casual clothing store in Hiroshima under the name Unique Clothing Warehouse. The name was shortened to UNIQLO in 1988, and the format hasn't changed its core pitch since: high-quality casual wear, sold the same way in every market.

What happens after the opening weekend decides whether Thane becomes a fixture or a headline. The exclusive UT design gives local shoppers a reason to return that the standard range doesn't, and the company's 2031 target means India will keep getting new stores either way. Thane's first contribution to that plan is a queue of 300 people and a sweets-shop T-shirt nobody else can sell.