Daniel Lee
Latest Reviews
The Starhill
Eslite's first store in Southeast Asia have just opened! Enjoy Eslite's full spectrum (literally) of retail concepts across an entire floor of Starhill Gallery!
This outlet is enormous, and is so many different things in one. Many buzzwords in their marketing but basically there are 3 main areas - 1st there's the fashion/accessories/deco retail area with a number of upmarket artisan brands that are less known. Feels like Design Orchard. 2nd there's the bookstore area, taking up almost half the entire space. Lastly there's the exhibition and exquisite retail space with enclosed stores located at the back. It currently has a jewelry store from Taiwan and two small art exhibitions. A few small cafes dot around the space too!
Now onto the bookstore - brightly-lit, wide selections, and user friendly. It has a few subzones, namely the Forum that hosts talks and workshops, the Children's section, the Stationeries section, and a main zone. Book selections are pretty good, many more recent ones than Tsutaya but I feel the star of the show is the amount of newer Mandarin books they have there, really amazing to me. Stationeries available are just decent though, kinda comparable to Tsutaya, same with the children's section. Forum is pretty new to me and I like it, but they need to continue with many more events for years to come. I also like that there are many seating areas for book lovers as well.
At last, the membership system. I would say it is pretty underwhelming, unsustainable and expensive to maintain once all the grand opening goodies are gone. A spending of rm800 annually is needed to maintain a gold card membership that doesn't really offer much benefits except accumulating points faster. The black card membership that requires rm6000 annually is worse, with zero real benefits compared to gold. There are no special discounts offered to the different tiers and u can only redeem discount vouchers that use too many points for a small amount. Pretty disappointing I would say.
Overall, good experience but second thoughts on buying anything here unless really needed and unavailable anywhere else due to the high prices and sad membership system.
This outlet is enormous, and is so many different things in one. Many buzzwords in their marketing but basically there are 3 main areas - 1st there's the fashion/accessories/deco retail area with a number of upmarket artisan brands that are less known. Feels like Design Orchard. 2nd there's the bookstore area, taking up almost half the entire space. Lastly there's the exhibition and exquisite retail space with enclosed stores located at the back. It currently has a jewelry store from Taiwan and two small art exhibitions. A few small cafes dot around the space too!
Now onto the bookstore - brightly-lit, wide selections, and user friendly. It has a few subzones, namely the Forum that hosts talks and workshops, the Children's section, the Stationeries section, and a main zone. Book selections are pretty good, many more recent ones than Tsutaya but I feel the star of the show is the amount of newer Mandarin books they have there, really amazing to me. Stationeries available are just decent though, kinda comparable to Tsutaya, same with the children's section. Forum is pretty new to me and I like it, but they need to continue with many more events for years to come. I also like that there are many seating areas for book lovers as well.
At last, the membership system. I would say it is pretty underwhelming, unsustainable and expensive to maintain once all the grand opening goodies are gone. A spending of rm800 annually is needed to maintain a gold card membership that doesn't really offer much benefits except accumulating points faster. The black card membership that requires rm6000 annually is worse, with zero real benefits compared to gold. There are no special discounts offered to the different tiers and u can only redeem discount vouchers that use too many points for a small amount. Pretty disappointing I would say.
Overall, good experience but second thoughts on buying anything here unless really needed and unavailable anywhere else due to the high prices and sad membership system.