Mr DIY Brand Guidelines: A 2005 Kuala Lumpur Hardware Shop, MR.TOY and a Bursa Listing

One hardware shop in Kuala Lumpur, 2005.

Mr DIY, which the company writes as MR.DIY and stylises as MR.D.I.Y., began in July 2005 as a single consumer hardware store on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman in Kuala Lumpur. English Wikipedia names the founder as Tan Yu Yeh, and says his younger brother Tan Yu Wei joined the business in 2011. By the end of its first year, the same account says, there were three outlets.

The chain then moved into shopping centres. English Wikipedia says its first mall store opened in 2009 in an AEON shopping centre at Taman Equine, Selangor, followed in 2010 by its first store inside a Tesco, at Setia Alam. It reached East Malaysia in 2014, with a store at 1 Borneo Hypermall in Kota Kinabalu, and Brunei in 2015, with a store at Plaza Abdul Razak in Bandar Seri Begawan.

By 2017 there were 250 Malaysian stores, English Wikipedia says, and in 2018 the company opened a flagship at Mid Valley Megamall and launched its own e-commerce website. The New Straits Times reported in June 2019 that the company had just opened its 500th store, at 1 Utama Shopping Centre, which it presented as a flagship concept store, and that it had opened about 100 stores a year in each of the previous three years. The same report said the company declined to answer questions about a possible share listing.

The range is broad for a business that began with hardware. English Wikipedia lists hardware, household and furnishing products, stationery and toys among its categories, alongside electrical goods, car accessories and gifts, and says most stores average around 10,000 square feet and carry more than 17,000 product varieties.

A Bursa listing and a second set of banners.

The share listing came in October 2020. The Edge Malaysia reported on 26 October 2020 that Mr D.I.Y. Group (M) Bhd had made its debut on the Main Market of Bursa Malaysia and that it topped the exchange’s list of most-traded counters on its first day. The listed business covered operations in Malaysia and Brunei. Its chief executive told reporters the group had started 2020 with 593 stores, and that the main focus was Mr DIY stores, with the MR.DOLLAR and MR.TOY formats as secondary growth drivers.

Those formats arrived close together. English Wikipedia says MR.TOY was introduced in 2019 and MR.DOLLAR in 2020, followed in April 2021 by MR.DIY Express, a smaller format meant to reach more easily accessible locations including rural communities, and in 2022 by MR.DIY Plus at Mid Valley Megamall, a larger store combining products from the three main banners.

The store count kept climbing. English Wikipedia says the 800th store opened at Pavilion Bukit Jalil in January 2022, that the Malaysian and Bruneian network ended 2022 with 1,080 stores, 2023 with 1,255 and 2024 with 1,429, and that the 1,000th MR.DIY-branded store opened at Taman Sejahtera in Sik, Kedah, in 2023. It gives 1,556 stores in Malaysia and Brunei as of 31 December 2025. The Star wrote in June 2026 that since its listing the group had built a network of more than 1,400 outlets under banners including MR DIY, MR.TOY, MR.DOLLAR and EMTOP.

The wider network is organised differently from the listed company. The Star reported that many of Mr DIY’s international businesses are held privately rather than under the Bursa-listed company, and that the company declined to comment on its questions about that structure. English Wikipedia says much of the network outside Malaysia and Brunei is held through Mr D.I.Y. International Holding and a second holding company, in which the founding brothers are substantial shareholders, and that the listed company provides shared services such as merchandise procurement and logistics to the international businesses, whose results stay outside its consolidated accounts.

Discount, home and hobby retail.

Discount, home and hobby retailers in Europe, Britain, Australia and Malaysia tend to present themselves first through the store itself. The sign over the door, the logo on the bags and the layout of the aisles carry most of the identity, and many of these chains repeat one standard format from town to town, so a shopper meets the same look in a high street, a retail park or a shopping centre.

Own-label ranges are a second layer. Many of these retailers sell established consumer brands alongside goods under their own names, and they publish those range names on their websites, packaging and shelf cards. For a design guide, the useful facts are the ones the companies state themselves: what each range is called, what it covers and how it sits beside branded stock, rather than any claim about quality or price.

Store networks are the third. Chains in this group publish their store counts, the countries they trade in and the mix of company-run and franchise branches, and those figures move quickly as new sites open and others close. Any count is only as good as its date, so the guides in this series give each figure with the year of the source that reports it.

Ownership is the fourth. Some of these businesses began as a single shop run by a founder or a family, and later passed to private-equity firms, listed parent groups or stock-market investors. Their corporate pages usually tell that story, from the first store to the current owner, and the guides here describe family and group ownership plainly, with dates, as the sources set it out.

One name, many banners, many countries.

Abroad, the name arrived market by market. English Wikipedia gives entry years of 2016 for Thailand, 2017 for Indonesia, 2018 for the Philippines and Singapore, 2019 for India and Cambodia, 2021 for Turkey, 2022 for Spain, 2023 for Vietnam, 2024 for Bangladesh and Poland, 2025 for South Africa and 2026 for Romania, and puts the wider network at more than 6,000 stores across 15 countries as of August 2026. The Star wrote in June 2026 that the brand operated in 14 countries besides Malaysia.

Two of those businesses have their own share listings. English Wikipedia says the Indonesian operator, PT Daya Intiguna Yasa, listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange on 19 December 2024, and that MR. D.I.Y. Holding (Thailand) listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand on 5 November 2025. The Star described Thailand as one of the group’s most successful overseas ventures, with more than 1,000 stores, and noted that it was listed on its own rather than folded into the Malaysian company.

For a design reader, the interest lies in how one name was stretched across formats and countries. The sub-brands share the parent’s construction, a short capitalised word after MR., as in MR.TOY and MR.DOLLAR, while MR.DIY Express and MR.DIY Plus add a single word to the parent name to mark a smaller or larger store.

For a design guide, Mr DIY shows how a single hardware shop name can be extended into a family of store banners and carried into more than a dozen countries through separate companies. Compare it with Miniso and Daiso, two other Asian variety retailers. For this guide we use an ochre, a tool red, a slate blue, a charcoal and a warm off-white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mr DIY’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.