Herborist, or 佰草集 (Bai Cao Ji), is one of the most interesting case studies in Chinese cosmetics. It is the only Chinese premium beauty brand to have built meaningful distribution in both Asia and Europe simultaneously. That combination is rare enough that it is worth studying carefully, both for what Herborist did right and for what has changed since the brand’s peak years.
The brand was created by Jahwa Group, a Shanghai-based personal care conglomerate with over a century of history. Jahwa is one of the few Chinese consumer goods companies that understood premium positioning before it became fashionable. Herborist launched in 1998 with a clear brief: traditional Chinese medicine principles, premium packaging, and prices that competed with European cosmetics rather than with domestic mass-market brands.
Olivier Verot, GMA’s founder, writes: I have watched Chinese heritage beauty brands try to defend premium positioning as Xiaohongshu-native challengers took over the conversation, and Herborist is the clearest test case I know. This piece draws on Jahwa’s latest earnings and on the same dilemma two of our own cosmetics clients are working through right now.
What Made Herborist Different
Most Chinese cosmetics brands in the late 1990s competed on price. Herborist went the other direction. The brand positioned itself on heritage: Chinese herbal formulations, refined Shanghai aesthetics, packaging designed to sit alongside Lancôme and Estée Lauder at department store counters. The logo was deliberately minimalist. The product range skewed female and focused on skincare rather than color cosmetics, which was the right call for a brand trying to build credibility on ingredient quality.
The communication strategy was split by market. In China, Herborist pushed an international and contemporary image. The message was essentially: this is a Chinese brand sophisticated enough to compete with the Europeans. In Europe, the message reversed: this is an authentic Chinese brand bringing TCM wisdom to Western consumers. Both framings worked because they were honest. The brand genuinely had the heritage and the formulations to back them up.
The European expansion, particularly through Sephora France, was a genuine achievement. Getting a Chinese cosmetics brand into European prestige retail in the 2000s required not just product quality but a very clear brand story. Herborist had one.
The Competitive Landscape Has Changed Completely
In 2026, Herborist operates in a Chinese cosmetics market that looks nothing like the one the brand launched into. The rise of domestic premium brands has been one of the defining commercial stories of the past five years. Proya, Florasis (Huaxizi), Perfect Diary, Winona, and a dozen other Chinese brands have built genuine premium positioning, invested heavily in Xiaohongshu and Douyin marketing, and captured significant market share from both foreign and older domestic brands.
Florasis in particular has done something Herborist never quite managed at scale: combine traditional Chinese cultural elements with aggressive digital marketing to build a fanbase that feels emotional loyalty to the brand. Florasis products are collectibles. Herborist products were premium purchases. That is a meaningful difference in how consumers relate to a brand, and it is one reason a wave of Chinese beauty brands is rewriting the playbook that Herborist helped write two decades ago.
At the same time, foreign luxury cosmetics brands have deepened their China operations significantly. L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, LVMH Parfums and Cosmetics, and Shiseido have all invested in local formulations, local manufacturing, and local marketing teams. The middle ground that Herborist occupied, between domestic mass market and foreign luxury, has become much more crowded than it was even five years ago.
What Herborist’s Own 2026 Numbers Show
The brand’s own numbers give a more precise picture than the market narrative alone. Shanghai Jahwa had a rough 2024: group revenue fell sharply and the company recorded its first net loss since its 2001 listing, driven mostly by writedowns in an unrelated maternal and baby-care division. Herborist itself was not the source of the trouble, but it got pulled into the broader retrenchment along with the rest of the portfolio.
The recovery shows up clearly in the Q1 2026 results. Jahwa’s group revenue reached RMB 1.795 billion for the quarter, up 5.4% year on year, and online sales for Herborist specifically doubled, up 100% year on year. A mud-based cleansing mask and a newer herbal oil line each crossed RMB 100 million in revenue on their own. Jahwa has been explicit that the recovery is being driven by online channels and Douyin livestreaming, not by the department store network that built the brand in the first place. That is the clearest evidence yet that the shift described in this article is not theoretical for Herborist. It is already on the balance sheet.
The Digital Marketing Reality
Herborist’s original strength was department store distribution and a strong retail presence in tier-1 cities. That channel still matters, but it is no longer sufficient. Beauty discovery in China in 2026 happens on Xiaohongshu before it happens anywhere else: the platform now counts more than 400 million monthly active users and over 800 million daily searches, and beauty and personal care searches alone peak above 100 million in a single day. Skincare brands that are not generating organic review content there are essentially invisible to the consumers who matter most for premium positioning.
The brands that have figured this out are investing in three things simultaneously:
- Xiaohongshu seeding: working with micro and mid-tier KOLs to generate authentic product reviews that appear in search results when consumers look for skincare recommendations. The key word is authentic. Xiaohongshu users are very good at detecting promotional content that tries to look organic.
- Douyin live commerce: either running brand-owned live streaming and Douyin advertising, or partnering with established live streamers who host product demonstrations and sell directly through the platform. Beauty is one of the highest-performing categories in Douyin live commerce: by January 2026, 38 beauty brands were already clearing over RMB 100 million in monthly sales on the platform, up from 29 a year earlier.
- WeChat CRM: using Official Accounts and Mini Programs to maintain relationships with existing customers, offer personalized recommendations, and run loyalty programs. Premium skincare has high repeat purchase rates if you maintain the relationship correctly.
A brand with Herborist’s heritage and ingredient story has strong raw material to work with on all three channels. TCM-inspired formulations, a century of Shanghai beauty history, dual recognition in China and Europe: these are compelling content angles. The question is whether the brand is investing the resources to execute consistently across all three platforms, at the pace Jahwa’s own Q1 numbers suggest it finally started doing.
How This Plays Out for a Foreign Brand: Ingrid’s Case
Ingrid, who runs a small Icelandic skincare brand built around glacial and marine ingredients, came to us wanting a China entry that echoed the old Herborist playbook: heritage story, premium price, department store ambitions. She had already tried the traditional route, a distributor deal that put her products on shelves in three Shanghai department stores. After eight months, sell-through was under 15%, and the distributor stopped reordering. Nobody in China had heard of the brand before it appeared on a shelf, so nobody went looking for it once it was there.
What worked was reversing the sequence. Instead of asking for shelf space first, we built content first: roughly 40 Xiaohongshu posts over three months from mid-tier skincare KOCs, each one built around a genuine ingredient story, glacial water sourcing, cold-climate formulation, rather than a product pitch. Search impressions for the brand name on Xiaohongshu went from close to zero to around 60,000 a month by month four. Only then did we open a Tmall flagship store, which launched already searchable instead of anonymous.
In its first quarter, the flagship did just over RMB 380,000 in sales, modest by China standards. But repurchase rate came in above 20%, which told us the ingredient story was landing with the right buyer, not just curious first-time shoppers chasing a discount. That is the part of the Herborist story worth copying: heritage sells when the audience already recognizes it before they see the price tag.
What Herborist Gets Right That Others Can Learn From
The original Herborist playbook contains lessons that are still relevant for any foreign or domestic brand trying to build premium positioning in China.
Clear ingredient story. Herborist did not try to compete on price or on trend-chasing. It competed on a specific, defensible ingredient philosophy. TCM-derived formulations are not something you can fake. That credibility is built over decades, not marketing campaigns. Brands entering China with a genuine ingredient or heritage story should lead with it rather than trying to look like everyone else.
Premium packaging as category signal. In Chinese prestige retail, packaging quality is a direct proxy for brand credibility. Herborist invested in packaging that was genuinely beautiful from the beginning. This is not vanity: in a department store environment where consumers are comparing products side by side, packaging communicates brand confidence before a single word is read.
Differentiated positioning per market. The brand did not tell the same story in Paris and Shanghai. It adjusted the emphasis based on what gave it credibility in each market. Foreign brands entering China should do the same: what makes you interesting in your home market may be completely different from what makes you interesting to a Chinese consumer.
Department store as credibility anchor, digital as the actual growth engine. Getting into the right retail environment early still establishes brand positioning more effectively than advertising alone. Herborist’s presence alongside European luxury brands in Chinese department stores told a story that marketing could not. But for brands entering China in 2026, a Tmall flagship store or a Douyin storefront serves the credibility function online, and increasingly does more of the actual selling too.
The Numbers in Context
China’s cosmetics and personal care market reached approximately RMB 900 billion in 2025, with skincare accounting for the largest single segment of China’s e-commerce beauty sales. Premium skincare grew faster than the mass market, driven by younger consumers trading up and by the growing middle class in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. The domestic brand share of premium skincare has increased from under 20% in 2018 to over 35% in 2025, a shift that created real pressure on brands like Herborist that occupied the premium domestic tier before it got crowded.
The cross-border e-commerce channel has also changed the competitive dynamic. Chinese consumers can now easily purchase international skincare brands directly through Tmall Global, JD Worldwide, and Douyin’s cross-border feature. The pool of brands competing for the Chinese premium skincare consumer’s attention is larger than it has ever been.
For brands studying the Herborist story, the takeaway is not that heritage positioning does not work. It clearly does. Florasis has shown you can build a billion-dollar cosmetics brand on Chinese cultural heritage in the digital era, and Herborist’s own Q1 2026 numbers show the same heritage story can still pull a legacy brand out of a slump when it finally gets the digital execution behind it. The lesson is that heritage alone is not enough. It needs to be translated into content, community, and commerce across the platforms where Chinese consumers actually discover and buy beauty products today.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a heritage or TCM ingredient story still a viable China strategy in 2026?
Yes, but it is not sufficient on its own anymore. Florasis and Herborist’s own 2026 turnaround both show heritage still converts, provided it is backed by real formulation credibility and pushed through Xiaohongshu and Douyin content rather than left to sit on a shelf. A heritage story with no digital seeding behind it will lose to a less interesting brand that shows up in search.
How long does it take to build Xiaohongshu visibility before a retail launch?
Plan for three to four months of consistent seeding before you expect meaningful organic search volume around your brand name. That is roughly what it took in Ingrid’s case, and it lines up with what we see across most premium skincare launches. Rushing a retail or Tmall launch before that content base exists usually means paying for traffic you should be getting for free.
Do we need a Tmall flagship store from day one?
Not necessarily, and opening one too early can hurt you. A flagship store with no search demand behind it just sits empty and looks abandoned, which damages credibility rather than building it. Sequence content first, then open the store once people are already searching for the brand.
What budget should a premium skincare brand plan for a first year in China?
It depends heavily on category and ambition, but for a credible first-year push covering Xiaohongshu KOC seeding, a Tmall or Douyin storefront, and basic WeChat CRM, most premium skincare entrants we work with budget in the low-to-mid six figures USD. Brands that try to do it for less usually end up with visibility in no single channel rather than real traction in one.
Planning a China entry for your cosmetics or beauty brand? GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency) has been working with international beauty brands in China since 2012. We handle everything from Xiaohongshu KOL seeding to Tmall flagship setup to WeChat CRM, and we know which platforms drive real results for premium skincare versus mass-market beauty. Get in touch to talk through your China strategy.
