Taraval Street, in the Parkside neighborhood of San Francisco, was typically quiet on this sunny Friday afternoon — restaurant workers wrapping dumplings, the periodic passing of the L Muni bus, a parent walking hand-in-hand with their child.
But SarangHello, the Korean pop music shop on the corner of Taraval and 31st Avenue, was brimming with anticipation over the boy group Seventeen. One group had gathered around a young woman who had five cards fanned out on her hands. Flipping them over one by one, she showed her hand to the crew. The others gasped and squealed with delight: she had gotten a card of her favorite member, Joshua — her bias.
This is a typical Friday at SarangHello, the only store in San Francisco dedicated to selling albums, merchandise, and other K-pop themed swag. Since opening up as a digital storefront — and months into the pandemic, as a pop-up — the store has become a mecca for K-pop fans across the Bay Area.
Around 100 people had stopped by within a two-hour stretch Friday afternoon, most, if not all, to celebrate the release of 17 Is Right Here, Seventeen’s latest album — a sort of greatest-hits anthology. (This is still a pretty mild day. On its busiest days, one fan said, they see people sitting cross-legged on the store floor to trade and hang out.)
Even as the genre has slowly inched toward the mainstream, SarangHello’s most passionate regulars say that no other space like it exists in San Francisco, let alone the broader Bay Area.
And it’s not just for the wealth of memorabilia they have on the packed shelves throughout the store. The shop has grown into a community space for K-pop fans, who flock from across the City and all over the East and South Bay to bask in their shared obsession of their favorite groups and artists.
“This is something I always dreamed about, you know, just a community, a place where anyone can go regardless of age, and just meet other people and share a hobby that’s positive,” longtime SarangHello regular Kim David told Gazetteer.
And as SarangHello grows, it’s become an ecosystem unto itself, helping to enliven this sleepy stretch of San Francisco with pure, unadulterated K-pop fandom.
‘Happy people around me’
Carats, as the most devout fans of Seventeen call themselves, have gathered en masse on this day for a cup sleeve event. For the K-pop-curious, these are fan gatherings usually held in tandem with a major event — a group’s album release or a member’s birthday, for example — where fans will make and print their own sleeves to wrap around a plastic boba cup. (SarangHello has partnered up with the nearby Foam Tea House as their boba vendor. More on that later.)
The store has hosted photo card trading events, launch day release parties, and has reached a level of notoriety where artists and groups themselves stop by for “fan-signs,” or meet-and-greets. Behind the counter are signed posters from acts that have stopped by, including much-loved singer, ex-girl group member and TV host Chuu and all-girl rock group Rolling Quartz.
“I think they're the first ones who started doing these big trading events, and then slowly the other ones are catching on,” said Sinai Garcia, a 22-year-old Carat from San Jose.
Co-owner Chesca Rueda credits being in a more quiet part of the city, as well as snagging more real estate at a reasonable rate, as the reason why they’re able to host so many of these events.
“We definitely just wanted something that wasn't super congested,” Rueda said. “We did want foot traffic but we also did know that people would probably prefer to have a space where they can experience and be comfortable and enjoy the space, versus us trying to find something super small in the middle of everything else.”
More space means more breathing room for people to gather. Inside the shop, along with shelves packed with albums, light sticks, notebooks (and a large-scale photo booth in the corner of the shop), are larger communal tables intended for recording your hauls for TikTok and Instagram.
Julianna Castro was sitting alone at one of the unboxing tables, with her iPhone propped up to record herself opening up her album. A second-year San Francisco State student, Castro had skipped her Friday classes to celebrate the latest Seventeen release. She was effusive in talking about her favorite group (her “ult," in the lingua franca of K-pop fandom), rattling off all the things she liked about the group — their special friendship, their sense of humor, their talent, their performances, their music. She took a second to exhale.
“Literally, it’s just … I like everything about them,” she said. (Her bias? She can’t pick just one.)
At another table was a group of seven regulars, with a mess of albums and card binders and a box of cookies strewn on the table. The group had an easy rapport with workers and store guests alike.
David, one of the regulars, was having a particularly good day. The thirty-year San Francisco resident had already drawn and traded photo cards of her favorite Seventeen members — her bias is the sweet-faced group leader Woozi, though she admits to being partial to the group’s entire “vocal unit,” the five vocalists of the thirteen-member group. (She declined to provide her age, but copped to being a Gen X’er, with a wry smile.)
“Today, I came in just to meet my friends and hang out, or to buy one album,” David said, before looking over at all the album boxes to her side. “I ended up with four.”
Key to K-pop fandom is having a collectors’ mindset. Once you stan a group or artist, or better yet, they’re your ult, you hoover up as much as you can from them. You want all the albums, and one copy isn't enough — multiple purchases mean a higher chance of collecting photos of all your biases, obviously."
To be sure, that consumerist thrill is key to maintaining SarangHello’s success. With a dearth of options for in-store album shopping in San Francisco, SarangHello has, by default, become the de facto gathering spot for obsessives who want to collect without having to trek to other parts of the Bay. (It also explains how K-pop albums often top Billboard charts, which prioritize physical copies in its weekly ranking.)
But the community that’s taken root here goes beyond total consumerism. For its visitors, it’s not just a store. It’s a community space for K-pop fans who have finally found their people.
Falon Simmons, a 40-year-old resident of Novato, has been coming to SarangHello with her daughters for a couple of years now. It’s become a weekly (or, on occasion, twice-weekly) visit for her. The community she’s found here is “good, wholesome people just wanting to have fun.” Many of them have become friends outside of their shared allegiance to K-pop (She joked about going on trips together and having wine days at her home, with their favorite music videos playing on the television, naturally.)
“Sometimes I'll just come because I'm doing work from home and I'm bored or frustrated and I'm like, ‘I just need happy people around me.’” she said. “I just come with my computer and set up and talk to Chesca and everybody's always friendly.”
It helps that the owners are, themselves, obsessives. Rueda has two tattoos on her right arm dedicated to BTS, her own ult (and the reason, she joked, why SarangHello opened in the first place). In the back, she had General Mills cereal boxes with the faces of another boy group, Tomorrow x Together. She’s even seen the buzzy boy band Enhypen live dressed up as the Duolingo owl, an in-joke among fans of the group.
There’s a “for fans, by fans” quality that informs the store’s decision making, even if it cuts into the store’s profits. They pay to print cup sleeves for these events, which are typically fundraised for by fans themselves, for example. They also regularly invite fans who make merchandise to the store to sell their wares in-person. The store has a free bin of albums, posters, and other memorabilia that fans leave behind, say, after collecting their desired photo cards or posters.
“From the very beginning, our mission was to build community and to make K-pop accessible to the Bay,” Rueda said. “Every single endeavor that we've done for the store has always been more geared towards our community building and what the customer wants, sometimes to our detriment, honestly.”
A key to Taraval’s recovery
The popularity of SarangHello — and, ostensibly, the mainstreaming of the K-pop genre itself — has helped boost the surrounding stretch of Taraval.
“I think we are a destination store,” Rueda said. “A lot of people go out of their way to come here. … It's not like a high foot traffic complex or strip mall or mall where you'll just get a lot of people, period.”
Even David admitted to being initially surprised at SarangHello’s location when she first visited.
“It's not where you'd expect it to be, like Japantown or Geary or Inner Sunset or Richmond, where there’s more foot traffic,” she said.
And for all of the economic challenges burdening San Francisco at large, the largely-residential Parkside neighborhood has faced a unique obstruction to its recovery: The years-long refurbishment of the L-Taraval line.
The improvement project, which started in 2019 but descended upon Taraval in 2022, has proven to be anathema to businesses in Parkside. Despite $1 million in city relief funding and promises of completion by the end of the year, business owners and advocates say that they’re still reeling from the one-two punch of the construction closing down roads and COVID hammering businesses more broadly.
Albert Chow, the president of neighborhood business advocacy group People of Parkside Sunset, was unflinching when asked about how the community has fared amid the construction: “Just one word: Horrible.”
“We’ve lost some merchants, too, in fact, and we had some that actually started during COVID or during the construction and just could not make it,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to see, as a small business owner myself.”
SarangHello has been a rare bright spot on the street. He’s noticed more foot traffic from stylish young people around the vicinity from his own shop, Great Wall Hardware, he said, and wondered aloud how he could get his own store to benefit from the neighborhood K-pop boom.
“It's just a very challenging place to prosper right now and yet because they have a unique product there is definitely a demand,” Chow said.
Argentinian cafe Chalos’ co-owner Annie Leong has also noticed a few more customers, and an overall uptick in Taraval. Weekends in particular are “pretty decent,” she told Gazetteer SF, and any visitorship to the community helps. But she admitted that challenges continue to persist for as long as construction remains.
“We’re slowly treading water, trying to get out of survival mode,” she explained.
Mayor London Breed, in a video spotlighting SarangHello, pointed to the neighborhood’s sales tax revenue increasing by 8% since the pandemic. The extent to which SarangHello contributed to this uptick is unclear. Certainly, the success of one store can’t revive a neighborhood single-handedly. But other stores in the vicinity have seen visitors trickling in from SarangHello. Fans see kindred spirits with Versus Game Store, a nearby trading card shop that attracts its own set of loyal customers and where they buy cardholders to store their photo cards.
Regulars at the store said they visit neighboring restaurants, like Chalos and Chinese restaurant Dumpling Kitchen after the store closes up shop at 6 p.m.
And perhaps the biggest beneficiary in the area of SarangHello’s success is Foam Tea House, the store it partners with for those cup sleeves and other K-pop themed events. A representative for the shop did not immediately respond to a list of questions from Gazetteer SF, but Rueda estimates that she handed out around 200 cup sleeves in the two days they held Seventeen events.
Chow admitted to listening to a few K-pop songs just to see if he could buy into the hype. He couldn’t. And yet, he admits that the neighborhood lucked out with getting SarangHello and its fans to the area.
“It could have landed anywhere in San Francisco and done just as well,” said Chow. “We're happy to have them as a neighbor. We’ll hold them tight and want to collaborate and be with them.”
