Again, I am in respect of the next pop -up circle Pokemon Center. For many fans, the annual World Championship series has become a shopping powers with a main tournament on the side. Endless streets of art, pads, clothing, plush items, and a sufficient amount of limited edition stores to make every Salivate seller to become a Pokemon Worlds' Pokemon Center for themselves, and enlarges and improve every year.
TPCI realizes that the Pokemon Center is a huge draw for the worlds, so last weekend at the Anaheim World Championship series, the pop -up window was open for the first time to local participation. From Wednesday to Sunday, tens of thousands of the largest and most impressive Pokemon Center so far. If you couldn't get to the event (or all the shelves were empty at the time you got), you missed.
Three themes of Pokemon Worlds 2025
Every Pokemon WCS has a topic tied to the host city. Last year's worlds were in Honolulu, so all goods were underwater snorkeling Pokemon. Yokoham's theme in 2023 was Pokemon, who ate the bowls of the shoulders. Last time Worlds was in Anaheim in 2017, introducing Pikachu, who held a clenched coconut. To this day, no one knows why.
This year, TPCI really replaced the 2017 world by providing three different and fully realized topics: Socal Beach Skater, Varsity and Rockabilly. The topics three times mean three times the goods, or at least that is how the Pokemon Center felt last week. The endless corridors of supplied shelves woven back and forth throughout the Hall D Congress Center and create an experience as absorbing as dizziness. It seemed to me to be lost in the Willy Wonka chocolate, just instead of Oompa-Loopas wherever you looked, there were Pikachus.
The whole Pokemon WCS 2017 took place in Hall D. This year the whole hall was used only for the Pokemon Center.
All three of this year got their own part of the store. The first section was mainly about the theme of the beach skater. This is where you would find an exclusive bodyboard, as well as photographs such as a lifeguard tower, half a trumpet and a skatepark motif at sunset, which wrapped around the area. From there, the store went into the topic of Varsity, which was transformed by a pop -up window into 50 years and a cinema ride. Here you would find a varsity jacket, jerseys, patches, baseball caps, Duffel bags and posters.
In the end, the Rockabilly section was about the music scene in the middle of the century. The Jigglypuff Store served as a connecting thread between Varsity and Rockabilly, where you would find leather jackets, ropers and many goods with arcanin and tattoo inspired by a pink pattern. I spent most of the time in a shop that dealt with all the cold accessories of TCG Rocks.
While the largest, this year's pop -up window has been the most center of Pokemon. With three different topics, there was a risk that things would feel blurred, but the TPCI did a great job and gave each of its own reflectors to create a natural flow from one section to another. This is a Disney topic for a shopping experience, which in my opinion is appropriate, given that Anaheim is the country of the mouse. Disney even holds his own Convention in the same space.
Large changes in POKEMON Center pop -up in 2025
Together with access to local uninterested, TPCI has made a number of major changes in the way the Pokemon popping up this year works. The most sought -after items were sent to the lottery system in which the shoppers would decide to register their time slot for the store. You could only buy this year's Bear Walker Skateboard, a glossy statue of Gyrados Jojwares, Elite Trainer Pokemon Center for Black Bolt and White Flare, or Jukebox Worlds 2025 if your name was drawn in lottery.
TPCI also implemented much stricter purchase limits compared to previous years. Each item exclusive to the world had basically a one -time limit. This included double on -board boxes, mats, dice and coins boxes, Reyn Spooner clothing, bodily, jerseys and much more. In recent years, these items have sold out quickly, which means that everything was sold out before those with Sunday meetings had a chance to buy. Each day was made an effort to allocate available items, but that meant more items were sold out during the day.
On Wednesday morning I visited the Pokemon Center with a group of media and content creators when the shelves were fully supplied. But from what I saw on social media, many things were sold out at 1 pm. When more and more people have shown that they are waiting for their appointment slot, promotion outside the Congress Center has become a problem. Workers who were still preparing the event for the weekend were unable to move their vehicles through crowds, so the organizers had to trigger a firefighting marshal to get people out of their way.
Chris Brown, director of Pokemon for Esports and events, says this year's worlds have seen at least twice as many participants as last year's worlds in Hawaii.
Inside, things got even more chaotic. Too many people were released into the pop -up window simultaneously, causing traffic jams around high demand objects like Arcanine. Employees tried to get the shelves supplemented and at the same time desperate customers who desperately try to buy what they could.
It was a bit scary to see the kind of behavior that recently led to violence in Costco at the Pokemon Center. Pokemon fever reached the peak during the pandemic, but thanks to the popularity of TCG, customers are as greedy as always. Here in Anaheim, where retailers chase Disney shops for new stores daily, it seems that this kind of behavior is just a part of culture. The next time Pokemon Worlds comes to Anaheim, maybe the topic of Pikachu with a shopping cart full of ETB should be.
Fortunately, these problems seemed not to transmit to the rest of the weekend. Arcanine Merch was moved to Kiosk the next day to keep people calm and organized and there were no other crowds in the store. Despite the rocky start, TPCI operated a remarkably well organized pop -up shop. An incredibly high bar was set up in San Francisco next year. Start your savings plan today.
- Formed
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Satoshi Tajiri
- First movie
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Pokemon: The first movie
- The latest film
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Pokémon The Movie: Secrets of the Jungle
- First Episode Air Date
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April 1, 1997
- Video game (s)
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Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, Pokemon Legends Arceus, Pokemon Sword and Shield, Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearla, Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra, Pokemon Sun and Moon, Pokemon Black and White, Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, Pokémon, Pokémon, Pokémon Pokemon, Hozemon, Hozemone, Ex, Pokemone, Pokemon, Pokemone, Pokemon, Hozemone, Pokemon Rivo
