Chinese consumers still buy a lot of imported brands. But “still” is doing more work in that sentence than it used to. Ten years ago, a foreign label on a box was enough on its own. In 2026, it isn’t. I run GMA from Shanghai, and I watch foreign founders make the same mistake every few weeks: they assume the passport of their brand is the pitch. It used to be. Now it’s a starting point, and a shrinking one.
Olivier Verot has run GMA from Shanghai since 2012, positioning both Western and Chinese-owned brands in front of buyers who no longer purchase a product just because the label says Paris or Milan. This article is about the categories where “imported” still carries real weight, and why the reasons have almost nothing to do with the country stamped on the box.
Guochao changed the baseline, and you need to know the number
Start with the uncomfortable part. China’s domestic-brand movement, known as guochao (国潮), is not a niche trend anymore. Jewelry maker Laopu Gold listed in Hong Kong in 2024 and its share price had risen roughly 800% by January 2026. Songmont, a domestic handbag brand, grew its online bag sales around 90% year on year in the first three quarters of 2025, in the same window that Gucci’s handbag sales in China dropped more than 50%. Industry researchers now project the broader guochao market will pass 3 trillion yuan by 2028, according to People’s Daily’s coverage of the sector. We wrote a longer piece on how this shift happened, and what it means for foreign luxury specifically, in Made in China: How the Luxury Label Flipped.
So if you are selling into China assuming “foreign” is a category advantage across the board, stop. It isn’t, in fashion, in beauty basics, in home goods, in a growing list of categories where a domestic brand now makes a better product at a better price with a story that lands harder locally. What follows is where imported brands still hold ground, and it is a shorter list than it was five years ago.
Good Reputation of Foreign Brands
Reputation is still the deciding factor at the point of purchase. Social status still matters enormously in China, and being able to buy and wear brands with an established European or American pedigree still signals something. Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, Yves Saint Laurent: these names carry the reputation wealthy Chinese consumers have chased for two decades.
But that same category is under real pressure. Chinese luxury spending intentions swung from a net +10% in 2025 to a net -8% in 2026, with 40% of consumers planning to cut luxury spending this year, according to AlixPartners’ 2026 Global Consumer Outlook for China. Two thirds of the people cutting back say they’re shifting toward more rational, less impulsive buying. That is not a temporary dip. It is the same consumer who grew up watching guochao brands get genuinely good, deciding a logo alone no longer justifies the price gap. We cover this shift in more detail, including what it means for how brands should now pitch themselves, in Why the Chinese Are Buying Luxury Goods in 2026.
The mid-tier “affordable luxury” segment (Tory Burch, Kate Spade, Michael Kors, and their peers) still does well with China’s middle class, precisely because it competes on style and price rather than pure prestige. In the mind of most Chinese consumers, an imported product still carries an assumption of quality control. That assumption is a loan, not a gift. Skip Chinese-language quality documentation, skip a local return policy, skip a coherent story, and the loan gets called in fast.
A story behind the brand
“Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury,” said Coco Chanel.
Chinese consumers still research heavily before buying, and a brand with a real story still earns emotional attachment that a generic one doesn’t. Chanel understood this before most competitors: it built a content calendar around Coco Chanel’s own history, and Chinese audiences responded to it. That instinct hasn’t gone away. What changed is where that story now has to live.
In 2026, the story doesn’t get discovered through a glossy magazine spread. It gets discovered on Xiaohongshu, through search, and increasingly through AI answer engines like DeepSeek and Doubao, which Chinese shoppers now consult the way they used to consult a friend. If your brand’s founding story, ingredients, and sourcing aren’t written up clearly enough for those systems to summarize accurately, you’re invisible at the exact moment someone is deciding whether to trust you. That’s a mechanical problem, not a creative one: publish the story in structured, factual language across your own site and Xiaohongshu notes, and both human readers and AI search start citing it the same way.
The star products
A brand’s iconic products still do the heavy lifting. Chinese buyers are heavily influenced by what other people are already buying and talking about, so a small, well-known “hero” range converts better than a sprawling catalogue nobody has heard of. Clinique built years of dominance in China around its “Three Basics” cleanse-tone-moisturize set: three products, one simple routine, endlessly repeated in reviews and recommendations.
That logic still holds, but the products it favors have shifted. Categories where formulation, safety testing, and traceability genuinely matter, skincare actives, infant nutrition, supplements, are where a verified foreign origin still buys real trust, because Chinese consumers can point to something concrete: a registration number, a customs record, a lab result. Categories built more on taste, style, or cultural cue, apparel, home goods, everyday food, have moved toward domestic brands faster, because those brands now match the quality and undercut the price. If your product’s edge is genuinely technical, lead with the proof, not the flag.
A Swedish founder’s plateau, and what actually moved it
Elin, a Swedish skincare founder, launched her Stockholm-based brand on Tmall Global in 2023 through a distributor. The pitch was simple: Nordic water, minimalist packaging, “Made in Sweden” on the box. Eighteen months in, sales had plateaued around RMB 40,000 a month, and the product page’s conversion rate sat at 0.6%, well under the category norm.
For the first year, the team leaned entirely on that Nordic origin story and ran paid traffic to a bare product listing. Four months of banner ads produced almost no lift. The problem wasn’t visibility, it was that “Swedish” alone answered no question a Chinese buyer actually had: why this cream, why this ingredient, why trust a brand nobody had ever mentioned.
What changed the curve was narrowing to one hero product, the day cream, and building a Xiaohongshu content series around a real, checkable detail: the water source, the dermatologist who formulated the first batch, and the actual clinical test numbers on sensitive skin. Fifteen mid-tier KOCs tested it on camera and posted honestly, including the two who said it didn’t work for their skin type. That honesty is what made the rest of the posts credible. Within six months, conversion on the day cream’s page rose from 0.6% to 1.8%, and monthly GMV grew to roughly RMB 130,000, with the hero cream alone accounting for close to 60% of that revenue. The mechanism was never the Swedish flag. It was giving Chinese buyers something specific and verifiable to attach their trust to, the same reputation math foreign brands have always needed, just built for a Xiaohongshu-and-KOC world instead of a magazine-ad world.
Exclusivity
Scarcity still pulls Chinese consumers toward foreign-branded products. Limited editions and region-locked releases create the same pressure they always have: owning something hard to get separates the buyer from everyone else, and that pressure has kept the resale and reseller economy alive. The daigou channel, individuals who buy goods abroad and resell them into mainland China, is smaller than its 2018 peak but still moves real volume for products that are genuinely hard to find domestically.
What has changed is the second path around scarcity: official cross-border e-commerce. China’s cross-border e-commerce imports and exports reached 2.75 trillion yuan in 2025, up 69.7% from 2020, according to the Ministry of Commerce. That’s not daigou, that’s Tmall Global, JD Worldwide, and bonded warehouses shipping registered, tax-compliant imported goods directly to Chinese buyers, often faster and cheaper than a personal shopper ever could. If your brand isn’t set up on at least one of these channels, you’re pushing your own customers toward daigou resellers you don’t control and can’t guarantee. We break down the mechanics, costs, and platform choice in our Cross-Border E-Commerce Guide for Brands.
Gifts
Gift-giving remains one of the steadiest reasons Chinese consumers buy imported goods. A foreign product still reads as a considered, higher-effort gift for family, colleagues, and superiors, especially around Chinese New Year and mid-autumn festival, when relationship maintenance through gifting is still a real social obligation, not a marketing cliché. Travelers who go abroad still bring back foreign products specifically for this purpose, and the ones who can’t travel look for the same items through cross-border platforms instead. Understanding who actually receives these gifts, and why, matters more than the product spec sheet; we go deeper into that buyer psychology in Get To Know Your Target Chinese Consumers.
What this means for your 2026 positioning
Put the five reasons together and a pattern shows up: none of them are actually about being foreign. They’re about reputation you can prove, a story someone can verify, a hero product people already trust, scarcity that’s genuine, and an occasion that calls for something considered. Guochao brands are now competing on every one of those same points, and increasingly winning. The brands still doing well as “imported” in China in 2026 are the ones that stopped selling their passport and started selling the specific, checkable reasons a Chinese buyer should pick them anyway.
Frequently asked questions
Does being a foreign brand still help us in China in 2026?
It helps less than it did five years ago, and the effect is now category-specific. In skincare actives, infant nutrition, and supplements, a verified foreign origin still buys real trust because consumers can check registration and safety records. In fashion, home goods, and everyday food, domestic brands have closed most of the quality gap and often win on price and cultural relevance. Know which bucket your product sits in before you build a campaign around your country of origin.
Should we hide or highlight our foreign origin?
Neither, on its own. Highlighting origin without proof reads as empty in 2026; hiding it removes a genuine asset in categories where trust still runs through country of origin. The better move is to treat “foreign” as one data point among several: pair it with a checkable story, a registration number, real reviews, or a specific ingredient claim, so the origin supports a concrete reason rather than standing in for one.
How fast can a foreign brand build reputation on Xiaohongshu without a big budget?
Faster than most founders expect, if the content is specific rather than promotional. A small, honest KOC program (10 to 20 mid-tier creators, real product use, including the negative feedback) built around one hero product can move conversion measurably within three to six months, as it did for the Swedish skincare case above. What it can’t do is substitute for an actual reason to trust the product; content amplifies proof, it doesn’t invent it.
How GMA can help
We build the reputation infrastructure that makes “imported” mean something again: Xiaohongshu content strategy anchored in checkable product facts, KOC programs sized to your real budget, and structured brand-story content written so both Chinese buyers and AI search engines cite it accurately. If your brand’s China sales have plateaued on origin alone, talk to us through our contact page and we’ll tell you honestly whether your foreign-brand advantage still exists in your category, and what to build instead if it doesn’t.
