Hair care in China stopped being a commodity aisle. It is now a category worth around RMB 68 billion (about USD 9.4 billion) that behaves like skincare: diagnosis first, active ingredients second, price per millilitre third. The volume growth is modest, 3 to 4% a year on the total market. The money is in the […]
The Chinese furniture market is no longer a growth story you can describe with one number. It is a big, mature, oversupplied market that changed direction after the property crisis. Demand did not disappear. It moved: from furnishing empty new apartments to replacing what people already own. If you sell furniture and you are still […]
In early 2025, a small neighborhood café in Shanghai posted a simple lifestyle article on its WeChat Official Account. Nothing unusual: a few photos, a short story about the owner, no promotion. Within 48 hours the article had reached ten times its usual readership. Most of the new readers had never followed the account. They […]
If you run a hotel with 20 rooms, a restaurant, a shop or a small activity business, you no longer need a Chinese tour operator to bring you Chinese guests. That is the single biggest change of the last ten years. The group bus has stopped in front of your door for the last time, […]
China is still the world’s largest toy exporter and its second-largest toy market. But the market a foreign brand walks into in 2026 has almost nothing to do with the one described in the trade press ten years ago. The buyer is no longer only a parent shopping for a child. Very often it is […]
The dietary supplements market in China keeps growing, and foreign brands keep arriving with the wrong plan. Most of them treat China as a distribution problem. It is a regulatory problem first. Before you think about Tmall, Xiaohongshu or a distributor, you have to decide one thing: does your product make a health claim in […]
China has more than 1.4 billion inhabitants, and marriage is still one of the most expensive events in a Chinese life. Families put pressure on their only child to settle down early. It is read as proof of stability, and therefore of social success. Parents wait for the grandchild. Couples wait longer before saying yes. […]
Bubble tea, also known as pearl milk tea, came out of Taiwan in the early 1980s, invented in Tainan and Taichung. It is a milk tea base with tapioca balls inside, the “pearls”. For twenty years it stayed a snack. Then it crossed to mainland China and turned into something else entirely: an industry called […]
High-End Beauty in China: a Market Under Pressure High-end beauty used to be the easy part of China. A lipstick let a shopper buy into a French house without saving for a Hermès bag, and the margins were excellent. That logic still works, but the ground has moved. Chinese premium brands took real share. The […]
Finding the right local partner to distribute your products is never easy, and it is particularly true in China. The consequences of a bad choice can be brutal: poor sales, your product parked in a warehouse while the distributor pushes another brand, a licence problem you discover too late, counterfeits, and a contract you cannot […]
Explore key trends driving folic acid for pregnancy sales in China and see how international supplement brands can compete.
Most foreign brands that come to me with a China plan have already decided who their customer is. She is 28, she lives in Shanghai, she scrolls Xiaohongshu, she buys with her emotions. That persona sits in nine decks out of ten. It is not wrong. It is half the market, and it is the […]
