Nay Mai Tạp Hóa

Nay Mai Tạp Hóa was founded by Tân Nguyễn and his partner Ý, who opened the shop in 2024 in Bình Thạnh, Ho Chi Minh City. Both grew up in Vietnam, moved to the United States for high school and college, and met while working a cafeteria job at Seattle Central College. After graduating and trying to build design careers in Seattle, the pair returned to Saigon in late 2022, prompted by a difficult creative-industry job market and the pandemic's lingering effects. The shop occupies a property with personal significance: it is the house where Tân grew up, and the couple lives on the second floor behind the studio space, describing the whole building as 'their home.' Nay Mai operates as an umbrella for several ventures at once, stocking clothing, artwork, zines and jewelry from Vietnamese and international designers alongside two in-house labels, Soulvenir and Nay Mai. Soulvenir began in 2017 as Tân's personal graphic-design project exploring Vietnamese culture through single-color screen prints; its name is drawn from a Vietnamese saying printed on the shop's own doors, 'Here Today, There Tomorrow,' which also gave the store its name. As Ý has put it: 'Soulvenir is the connection with the cultural part of us, and Nay Mai is our playground.'