Anyway, I got the address beforehand and used a combination of GPS and Naver maps (sort of like a Korean version of Google maps) to get the location. It's in Hongdae, which is a more hip/happening place (so is Volks, by the way. Volks is in the active region though, while Ninestyle is not in as busy an area), but the cafe is located in a quieter area. It's almost residential/what I would see near school. Yeah. The cafe is on the 3rd floor and as with Volks, I was looking upwards for any signboards to show me I was in the right place, lol.
Found it.
This is the shop that's beside the building Ninestyle cafe is located. I mean, there wasn't much landmarks or anything special around, save for signboards.
There isn't a lift either, but the only stairs I found looked a bit...private? Like it doesn't look like the public should be venturing in anytime. But it's open so I went up. Passed by what looks like a tailoring shop's working room (thought I might be in the wrong place), but continued up the stairs and finally I saw this sign.
It all feels a bit...random? Haha. I mean, it is a small shop, so I guess the location and all isn't the best.
The door to the shop :) Also. The toilet is right beside the entrance...
I didn't take any interior shots but I saw some when googling for ninestyle cafe before going, and it pretty much looks the same. There's a cafe part of it, and a shop part. The cafe part was packed - no empty tables for me, cos I went at about 3pm, and I guess the doll owners who want to have meetups there are there early. There's display booths for people to take photos of their dolls in, but the general feel of it is kind of like how the doll meets in Singapore are (except ours are at non-doll cafes, so sometimes we kind of just invade the cafe for too long >_<)
The shop part of it was pretty wonderful. There's dolls from different companies on display. I saw BeWithYou dolls (Age27 Wood) on the cafe counter (He's so huge in real life, I totally can't imagine it. And soooo gorgeous. The body and the face and gah, really nicely sculpted. His feet are gigantic, by the way), and the doll models on the ninestyle page (The dollshe, sch A and Yeonho are the ones I remember), and the clothes are organised by sections with the dolls placed around as display (I think some in the display glass case might be for sale?). They sell wigs from Formydoll, Wig Wing, and they also have stuff from Sadol (and a little bit from Anotherspace), so it's not all Ninestyle items, like I thought. Oh, and they sell makoeyes and Enchanted doll urethane eyes at the counter too. Supplies as well (strings, s hook etc).
One thing that took me a while to figure out was the price tags. At first I thought they didn't have a price tag, but later I realised that the sticker with the long string of numbers under the barcode has the price (take the last 5 digits of the barcode number, I think). Yeah. That part wasn't too user friendly. But once I got that out of the way, I spent way too long in the shop trying to stretch my limited budget. Got stuff for Elly and I wanted to get some yosd jeans for Cypher but nope, didn't have enough money for that. I totally skipped out the SD13 and SD17/70cm boys section because I didn't want to see what I didn't have enough money to buy, haha. It's much harder to resist when the goods are in front of you compared to when it's an online shopping cart.
Anyway, for anyone who might want to know, I got a 5% discount on my total because I paid in cash (vs paying with a card, I guess?), so that was an unexpected surprise :D The lady behind the counter (there's only 1 person manning the whole shop) wasn't really able to speak English well, but she's friendly and she asked where I'm from etc. Haha. She gave me a pair of doll panties as gift after I paid (well, she walked over to the shop area and gestured to the small items, saying "gift" and asking me to choose 1, haha). Yeah. Overall, a nice experience though I totally skipped out on the cafe portion of it (too engrossed with the shop).
Maybe next time I'll bring Elly out or something and sit around in the cafe, but I don't really want to battle with the subway crowd to Hongdae with a doll in my bag. The passengers have a habit of just pushing you out of their way if they're trying to move from carriage to carriage... I'll see how.
Anyway, have a photo of Elly with her new wig and clothes (I know the photo doesn't show much of the clothes though, ahhhh)
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