🍵 Every week I look at what is trending on Chinese marketing platforms, and this week one story stood out for a simple reason: a tea brand decided that the best way to sell a drink was to stop hiding how it makes it.
Heytea (喜茶), one of China’s biggest new-style tea chains, just opened a new store format called “喜茶 工艺” (Heytea Craft), its first of this kind in the country. It opened on July 8, 2026, in Guangzhou, at Shipaiqiao. That address is not random. Heytea has run a store on that exact spot since 2015. For ten years, it was a normal shop. Now it has been rebuilt from the ground up into something closer to an open kitchen than a counter you order from and walk away.
What Heytea Actually Built
The center of the new store is a long bar. Behind it, staff prepare tea in full view of every customer, from the raw tea base to the final cup. Nothing happens in a back room. You can watch the leaves get simmered, watch the extraction, watch the pour. Heytea calls this “工艺”, which translates roughly to craft or craftsmanship, and the store is built entirely around proving that word instead of just printing it on a cup sleeve.
The menu backs this up with real depth. The store launched with 7 custom tea bases and 5 distinct preparation methods, among them pot-simmering, slow extraction and hand pour-over. Combined, these methods and bases produce 25 limited-edition drinks split across five product series, including a pot-simmered milk tea and a craft dark chocolate blend. This is not a seasonal drop of two or three new flavors. It is a full menu built to demonstrate a process, not just to sell a taste.
Before opening, Heytea did not launch the store quietly. It used interactive countdown content and perforated barriers around the construction site so passersby got small visual teases of what was coming, building curiosity in the neighborhood for weeks before the doors opened. This matters in a market where a new store opening is easy to ignore. Heytea made sure the block noticed before day one.
Why This Fits Heytea’s Bigger Strategy
Heytea Craft is not a one-off idea. It is the latest layer in a store matrix the brand has been building for years, alongside its black gold stores and Lab stores, each one built around a different part of the brand’s identity. Where the black gold stores lean into premium design and the Lab stores lean into experimentation, the Craft store leans into process and honesty. Together, these formats let one brand speak to different customer moods without diluting what Heytea stands for.
The store is also a quiet rebuttal to where most of the tea category has gone. Chinese milk tea and fruit tea brands compete hard on speed, price and how fast a new flavor can hit social media. Heytea’s own past growth leaned on that same game. With this store, the brand is arguing the opposite point: that in a crowded, fast-moving category, slowing down and proving your process in public is itself a competitive move. It is a case of the week for good reason. SocialBeta, one of China’s top marketing case libraries, picked it as one of six standout campaigns in its weekly roundup, 案例一周 Vol.405, precisely because it turns manufacturing into marketing without a single paid ad.
How Customers Are Reading It
What makes this case worth studying is not the design of the counter. It is what watching the process does to trust. When a customer sees a tea base get simmered and strained in front of them, they stop wondering what is in the cup. The brand no longer has to claim quality. The customer just watched it happen. That is a very different kind of proof than a certification logo or a line of ingredients on a menu board, and in China it lands harder, because it removes the gap between what a brand says and what a customer can check for themselves.
Source (Chinese): SocialBeta, “本周值得关注的 6 个品牌营销案例 | 案例一周 Vol.405.” The article covers Heytea Craft as one of six notable brand cases of the week, describing the new Guangzhou Shipaiqiao store, its long open bar counter, the 7 custom tea bases, 5 crafting methods and 25 limited-edition drinks, and its place inside Heytea’s wider store matrix strategy.
What This Means for Foreign F&B Brands in China
I have sat across the table from a lot of food and beverage brands entering China, and trust is almost always the real obstacle, more than price or even taste. Chinese consumers grew up with real food safety scares and a flood of counterfeit goods, so a claim on packaging carries less weight here than in most Western markets. That history is exactly why a store built entirely around “come and watch us make it” works so well. It answers the doubt directly instead of asking the customer to just believe a label.
You do not need a flagship store to borrow this idea. If you sell tea, coffee, snacks or any packaged food, film your actual production line and post it raw on Douyin or Xiaohongshu, not a polished ad, the real line. Put a QR code on your packaging that leads to a short video of the batch being made or the ingredient being sourced. If you work with a factory in China, invite a local key opinion consumer to walk through it on camera and ask hard questions. None of this needs a big budget. What it needs is a willingness to be watched, because in this market, being watched is what earns belief. If you sell food more broadly, this guide on what actually works in China food advertising covers the same trust problem from a few other angles. If tea specifically is your category, I also put together a full walkthrough on how to sell tea in China. And for anyone studying how the bubble tea and modern tea category evolved to this point, my colleagues at SEO Agency China wrote a solid full business analysis of bubble tea in China worth reading alongside this case.
About the author. Philip Chen is CEO of GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency), a digital marketing agency focused on the Chinese market. GMA has helped more than 1,000 brands grow in China across Baidu, WeChat, Douyin, Xiaohongshu and cross border e-commerce. Connect with Philip on LinkedIn.
