Why Vietnam Has More Than a Hundred Photo Booth Brands, Yet None Dominates the Country

Vietnam’s photo booth market has more than a hundred brands opening stores at the same time, yet none of them dominates the country. This article found three reasons:

• The wave is very young: the company registrations and first stores that can be traced cluster in 2022 and 2023, and the main brands started almost at the same time.
• Two kinds of people are opening stores: brands brought in by Koreans and home-grown Vietnamese franchise chains are expanding at the same time.
• The tools for opening a store can be bought: some businesses specialise in selling photo booth machines and offering start-up consulting, so anyone can open a store without joining a franchise. That fits the unusually large number of single-store brands.

Here are the numbers. The Vietnam photo booth map on photobooth.joelin.cc records 464 venues and 124 brands, and 80 of those brands have only one store. The five brands with the most locations together account for 189 venues, or 40.7%. We opened the page on October 2, 2026; the page itself is marked “checked and updated 2026-08-30”, and its footer separately says the data was last updated on 2026-10-01.

These are distributions of what this site has recorded. They are not the nationwide store counts published by each brand, and they are not market shares. The page itself states that its figures should not be used to rank brands by size.

The article has five parts: how young this wave is, which two kinds of people are opening stores, where the long tail comes from, why there is no dominant player, and finally the official store counts and this site’s counts side by side.

1. A very young wave: every traceable starting point falls in 2022 or 2023

Korean-style self-photo studios in Vietnam are not a thirty-year-old industry. The earliest dates this article can match all fall in 2022 and 2023:

The dates in this table are of different kinds: a trademark application, a company registration and a store opening are each a different thing, so the table cannot be read as “photo booths in Vietnam began in 2022”. What it does show is that, for the brands that now have the most locations, the companies and first stores almost all appeared in 2022 and 2023, with less than two years between their starting points.

Which store was Vietnam’s first photo booth store, and in which year it opened, could not be established. No official page or named media report was found that identifies any store as the first in the country, and no earlier store-opening records were found, so this article does not add a section of earlier history.

Fun Studio’s website gives a detailed timeline of its own: its first store in Hanoi in July 2023, its first franchise store in December 2023, expansion to central Vietnam in May 2024 and to the south in August 2024, 50 stores in May 2025, its 61st store in August 2025 and its 80th in 2026. This is the brand’s own history, not a national history, but it shows one thing: a brand that opened its first store only in 2023 could claim 80 stores just over two years later. The market is expanding so fast that latecomers enter before the early arrivals have had time to fill the territory.

2. Two kinds of people opening at once: brands brought in by Koreans, and home-grown franchises

Looked at by operator, Vietnam’s photo booth brands fall roughly into two groups.

Brought in by Koreans

• Photoism’s Vietnamese trademark is registered to its Korean head office (details and the parent company’s financial reports are in the Photoism study, and are not repeated here).
• Haru Film has a foreign-invested company in Vietnam, HARUFILM VINA, headed by CHANG JAESEK and registered in June 2023.
• According to Vietnamese media, Photo Time is a chain founded in Vietnam by a Korean. On October 4, 2025, Soha published an interview by reporter Trần Hà describing Photo Time as “chuỗi do người Hàn sáng lập tại Việt Nam” (a chain founded in Vietnam by Koreans), whose founder and director (giám đốc) is Back Chanyoung, a Korean born in 1987. The same article also interviewed Nguyễn Thanh Sang, general manager of Photoism Vietnam (Soha original article, checked October 2, 2026; CafeBiz ran the same article the next day).

Two figures in that report are worth noting, but each must be labelled with who said it and when. Photoism’s first store in Vietnam opened in Mỹ Đình, Hanoi, in May 2023 and reached 13 stores a year later. Photo Time had 51 stores by September 2025, in “less than three years”. These are the interviewees’ own statements in an interview, not company registrations, and 51 is a snapshot from September 2025, not today’s store count.

Home-grown Vietnamese franchise chains

Fun Studio represents the other group. Its homepage says its photo booth system is “được phát triển hoàn toàn bởi người Việt” (developed entirely by Vietnamese people), and it expands through franchising: it opened its first franchise store as early as December 2023.

The wording on its franchise recruitment page is direct. Fun Studio’s recruitment page (checked October 2, 2026) calls itself “chuỗi photobooth nhượng quyền lớn nhất Việt Nam” (Vietnam’s largest photo booth franchise chain) and says “Hoàn vốn nhanh (6-8 tháng)” (fast payback in 6 to 8 months). Both are recruitment claims that this article has no data to verify, and it does not adopt them.

For comparison, in the same Soha report Photo Time said the average payback period is around 6 to 12 months “or longer”, depending on location and initial investment, with no fixed figure. That both brands put a payback period into their public statements shows that they are recruiting investors, not just customers.

Photo Time is recruiting too. Its website (phototimevn.com, checked October 2, 2026) has a franchise section and form on its homepage, with fields for “budget” and “province”.

With both groups expanding at once, my reading is that no brand has had the chance to fill one city before moving on to the next. In that same report, Photoism talked about exclusive K-pop idol frames and Photo Time about its own app and merchandise, while Fun Studio’s recruitment page talks about franchisees’ payback period. Each of the three has its own approach, and each is opening its own stores.

3. Where the long tail comes from: if you can buy the machine, you can hang your own sign

Of the 124 brands, 80 have only one store. One reason is that the things needed to open a photo booth store are sold directly in Vietnam.

MAY Photobooth is one example. Its website (checked October 2, 2026) lists four services: selling photo booth machines (Bán máy Photobooth), building the booth room (Thi công phòng chụp), start-up consulting (Tư vấn khởi nghiệp), and event photo booths. The website says it was founded in 2024, while the company in its footer, Công ty TNHH MAY XIN CHÀO, gives its first registration date as January 5, 2026. This site records 7 venues under MAY’s own sign; whose signs hang on the machines it has sold is not disclosed on its website, and this article does not estimate it.

This kind of “sell the machine and teach store opening” business lowers the threshold from “you need a brand system” to “you need some money and a location”. Once the machine, the room build-out and the know-how can all be outsourced, newcomers do not have to join anyone’s franchise; they can open under their own sign. The 80 single-store brands in the table below fit this way of opening a store. However, this article did not check which of them use purchased machines, so it says only that the two fit, not that a causal link has been proven.

The 124 brands in the table account for 464 venues in total (this site’s records, opened October 2, 2026). More than 60% of the brands have only one store, and only 7 brands have 20 or more. A very long tail and a very thin head is the most obvious shape of this market.

In the Soha report, Photoism Vietnam’s general manager described the current market as “mọc lên như nấm” (springing up like mushrooms after rain). That is an interviewee’s description, not a statistic, but it says the same thing as the table above.

4. No dominant player: the distribution in the two biggest cities

If one brand dominated the country, the two biggest cities would be the first place to see it. In fact, neither city shows it.

The Hanoi page records 148 venues and 62 brands. The brand with the most recorded venues is Fun Studio with 13, or 8.8% of the page; next come Photo Palette with 10, and Photo Easel and Photoism with 9 each.

The Ho Chi Minh City page records 128 venues and 46 brands. The brand with the most recorded venues is Photo Time with 26, or 20.3% of the page; next come Life4cuts with 11, and Fun Studio and Photo Palette with 10 each. The 128 includes the former Bình Dương and Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu provinces, which became part of Ho Chi Minh City in the provincial merger of July 1, 2025, so it is not a figure for the old city boundary.

Both pages were opened on October 2, 2026, and both are marked as checked and updated on August 30, 2026. The most concentrated brand in Hanoi has less than a tenth, and in Ho Chi Minh City about a fifth. And the brand with the most venues is different in each city: the north and the south each have their own centre of gravity.

Hong Kong makes the contrast clearer. Hong Kong’s SNAPIO is a different model: it does not open stores, but embeds machines in mall foot traffic through a single network, so one brand can cover a whole city’s top malls. Vietnam has gone the opposite way. Many brands each rent their own shopfronts and open their own stores, and every new store is a separate rent and fit-out. The pace of expansion is limited by franchisees’ money, which makes it hard for any one brand to grow fast enough to push others out.

5. Store counts in two columns: what the brands say, and what this site recorded

Below, official statements and this site’s counts are set side by side. The two columns measure different things: official lists may include closed stores or stores still being prepared, while this site records only venues with evidence that they are operating or venues marked unconfirmed. So the two columns are not subtracted from each other, and this article does not judge which is right. The official column is filled in only for pages this article reopened on October 2, 2026; pages that were not reopened are marked as such.

The Fun Studio row has three figures: 80 in the website title, 57 store cards when the store page is fully expanded, and 55 recorded by this site. The three measure different scopes. The title may include franchise stores still in preparation, the store cards may not yet be updated, and this site records only venues for which it can find evidence. This article lists all three and does not calculate differences between them.

The top five (Photo Time 56, Fun Studio 55, Life4cuts 27, Photoism 26, Photo Razzle Dazzle 25) total 189, or 40.7% of the 464 venues recorded nationwide. Photo Palette and Photo Story both have 24, only one fewer than the fifth, so the “top five” line itself is blurry. In other words, even if the five brands with the most recorded venues are bundled together, they account for only about 40% of this site’s records.

To find a photo booth store in Vietnam, go straight to the Vietnam photo booth map on photobooth.joelin.cc. The background of the whole industry, from Japan and Korea to Taiwan, is in A History of Taiwan’s Photo Booth and Korean-Style Photo Booth Industry.

The two other Southeast Asian markets in this series: in Malaysia, machines are placed mainly in mall corridors, cinemas and neighbourhood malls (see Why Malaysia’s Photo Booths Grow in Mall Corridors); Indonesia has three overlapping layers of arcade machines, self-service stores and a home-grown chain (see The Three Layers of Indonesia’s Photo Booth Market). To compare markets country by country, see the World Photo Booth Map.

Article keywords: Vietnam photo booth, Vietnam photobooth, Vietnam self-photo studio, Vietnam photo booth brands, Fun Studio, Photo Time, Photoism, photo booth industry