A retail empire built at twelve, wound down on purpose

Founder & CEO · Ulaanbaatar → New York · zero external funding

From a single-product online operation to Mongolia’s largest toy seller in a calendar year, then a deliberate exit for Columbia, not a collapse.

$1M+ revenue · ~50% gross margins · 4 locations · 60+ SKUs · peak team 15 · 100K+ followers

Curated toy retail inventory — Trend Mart · toys verticalOmnichannel retail

Why the number matters

Mongolia’s GDP per capita sits around four to five thousand US dollars. Consumer purchasing power is a fraction of the American market. Adjusted for local PPP, a million-plus in Mongolian consumer revenue is several million in US-equivalent spending, extracted from a constrained, competitive landscape where every dollar is harder to earn.

The group

Trend Mart Group ran three verticals. Trend Mart was the flagship toy brand, sixty-plus SKUs, curated and developed through original work, white-labeling, and supplier relationships, and at peak the country’s single largest toy retailer by annual volume. Smart Kids was an English-literacy bookstore for young families. Home Essentials diversified into home and lifestyle appliances so revenue was not hostage to one category.

Four storefronts sat in Ulaanbaatar’s highest-traffic hubs: Shangrilla Mall, Hunnu Mall, the Urgoo 2 Cinema district, and Sukhbaatar Square. Online and in-person channels shifted with the pandemic, heavier in-store before, online and Facebook Live commerce after, live-selling before live-commerce was a global cliché.

China without Chinese

Sourcing was not a catalog click. As a Mongolian founder who did not speak Chinese, I traveled to China to work manufacturers and retailers directly, terms, products, supplier relationships, learning culture and logistics in real time. That on-the-ground pipeline is where the SKU portfolio was built.

Full-stack, then exit

Early on there was no co-founder to absorb functions. Product, logistics (including deliveries), marketing, Live selling, hiring up to fifteen people, and unit economics at roughly fifty percent gross margin all sat on one desk. In 2024 the company was strategically wound down as I moved to Columbia, an exit on my own terms, reallocating focus rather than abandoning a failed bet.