China Lingerie Market: Lessons from Bra & Underwear Brands

Chinese women now spend 10% of their clothing budget on lingerie: that’s double what they did just a few years ago.

The China lingerie market is one of China’s fashion market‘s fastest growing segments, and in 2026 it is also one of the most crowded. Local brands like Neiwai and Aimer keep redefining comfort and style, wireless bras have moved from occasion wear to daily wear, and AI search on platforms like DeepSeek is starting to decide which brand a shopper even discovers.

At GMA, we’ve guided over 600 international brands into China, including premium fashion and lingerie labels. We know how to decode local consumer behavior and craft winning entry strategies.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to stand out in the Chinese underwear market, position your brand against top local competitors, and master the platforms that drive results in 2026, from Tmall to Xiaohongshu to AI search.

Quick Summary

• Market Growth and Value: China’s underwear and lingerie industry is projected to cross 300 billion yuan (roughly $42 billion) by 2026, with the women’s segment alone worth an estimated 172.9 billion yuan in 2024 and still climbing.
• Consumer Spending: Chinese women now allocate approximately 10% of their clothing budget to lingerie, indicating a rapidly expanding market.
• Market Segmentation: The market is experiencing consolidation, with a clear divide between high-end international brands and domestic products dominating the lower-end market.
• Growth Drivers: Functional underwear, antibacterial, shaping, wireless, is growing over 12% a year, faster than the category average.
• Local Brands: Notable local brands include Neiwai, Aimer, and Maniform, each catering to different segments of the market with unique value propositions.
• Consumer Profile: The primary buyers are women aged 24-35. There’s a noticeable shift towards comfort and personal satisfaction over traditional sexiness in lingerie preferences.
• Men’s Underwear Market: The men’s segment keeps growing, with Chinese men increasingly willing to pay for quality fabric and better fit rather than the cheapest option on the shelf.
• Market Trends: Key trends include a shift towards comfort, natural fabrics, sustainability, body diversity, and wireless bras moving from special-occasion pieces to everyday basics.
• Online Sales: E-commerce platforms like Tmall, JD.com, Pinduoduo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu are significant channels for lingerie sales, with many consumers preferring online shopping for its convenience and privacy.
• Foreign Brands: Foreign brands like Etam, Triumph, and Victoria’s Secret are performing well in China, leveraging their international appeal and quality products.
• Marketing Strategies: Successful marketing strategies now combine Chinese social media, KOL and KOC collaborations, Baidu SEO, live streaming, private domain membership programs, and visibility in AI search answers on DeepSeek and Doubao.

Characteristics of the Chinese lingerie & underwear market

China’s lingerie market is in the midst of consolidation. Chinese women now spend around 10% of their clothing spending on lingerie, which illustrates a rapidly opening market. On one hand, the growing demand for lingerie, especially in the high-end market, has been drawing big international brands to the mainland. On the other hand, the lower-end market has been saturated with domestic products and brands, few of which stand out.

The resulting fierce competition has left domestic lingerie companies with falling profits, though some are finding ways to set themselves apart.

China’s underwear and lingerie market continues its growth

The market has grown fast every year since 2009, a big opportunity for foreign brands that respond well to the needs of Chinese consumers.

China’s lingerie market was valued at $26.36 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $42.51 billion by 2026, roughly 300 billion yuan, with continued growth expected through 2030 (source). The women’s underwear segment alone was already worth an estimated 172.9 billion yuan in 2024, and it hasn’t slowed down since (source).

China’s lingerie market in 2026: what actually changed

Growth used to come mostly from more women buying lingerie. In 2026, growth comes from women buying better lingerie, more often, and finding it through channels that didn’t matter three years ago. A few numbers explain where the market is really moving.

• Search for wire-free and backless bras is accelerating. On JD.com, search volume for backless bras grew 31% quarter over quarter in 2026, while the number of wire-free bra SKUs listed grew 18% year over year (source). Comfort is no longer a niche, it’s the default expectation.
• Functional fabric is the new battleground. Antibacterial, cooling, moisture-wicking, and seamless underwear is growing over 12% a year, and natural fibers, cotton, modal, ice silk, mulberry silk, keep taking share from synthetic blends.
• Wireless bras are becoming everyday wear, not occasion wear. Brands that used to sell one “comfort” line for weekends now sell wireless as the default across their whole bra range, priced mid to premium (129 to 259 yuan for most DTC players).
• Traffic is splitting between Douyin and Tmall. A growing number of apparel and lingerie brands are shifting ad budget and new-product launches toward Douyin’s content-driven shopping, sometimes at the expense of their Tmall flagship, because discovery now starts in a video feed, not a search bar.
• Repeat purchase, not first purchase, decides who wins. Brands with a working private domain, a WeChat mini shop plus a member tier system, are converting first-time Tmall or Douyin buyers into repeat customers instead of losing them to the next discount code.

China underwear and lingerie market shares

Although the Chinese underwear and lingerie market is growing and full of opportunities, there are quite a bit of local brands that should not be ignored.

Neiwai

China’s top local seller of lingerie. The brand’s main sales channel is Tmall and JD. The brand is more high-end and was designed for women’s comfort as stated by its founder.

It would be a little exaggerated to call it feminist. But I wanted to create a brand that doesn’t twist, suppress, or objectify women’s bodies. Instead, it makes them comfortable and happy, which I think is a higher form of sexiness.

Liu Xiaolu to China Daily

爱慕 Aimer 

The brand positioning would be more in line with competition from the Etam brand since the price ranges meet and the brand also makes ready-to-wear, capturing Chinese consumer tastes.

« 曼妮芬 » Maniform

The group Maniform includes:

• Coyeee: simple range, fashion, quality
• Enweis: international, lifestyle
• Lingerie: young target

Other local brands

• « 爱伦娜 » Ai Luna: Range of bamboo fiber underwear, the brand plays on two variables: love and the environment

• «古今 » Gujin: We could find it in the big malls in China next to Zara etc.

China underwear & lingerie buyer’s profile

The main buyers are women between 24 and 35 years old, a group that has consistently made up close to four out of five lingerie buyers. Most girls in China run in between a size A or B cup. Younger consumers in China keep driving up the sales of wireless bras.

With their insatiable curiosity and strong consumption power, young women make attractive targets for lingerie brands. They also have rising disposable income, that allows them to spend more on themselves, changing consumer preferences and habits.

It’s not just comfort that is prized but also a shift away from sexiness towards personal satisfaction, which can be seen among younger shoppers who care about more than aesthetic standards when purchasing intimate apparel. Chinese women care most about fashion style, comfort, and personalization.

Peggy Marlene Lim, a Hong Kong-based designer who spoke to the SCMP, noted how both older and younger generations were placing greater emphasis on comfort than fabric. “They look more natural too,” said Peggy of wire bras, which she believes are less popular with Millennials or those in their 20s because they feel uncomfortable during activities like yoga, where it’s hard to adjust one’s clothes between poses while wearing one.

China men’s underwear segment

The Asia-Pacific region has recorded the fastest growth in the global men’s underwear segment, with China and India sharing 70% of the share.

According to a survey conducted on the spending habits of Chinese men, a large share spend 500 to 1500 yuan a year on underwear, and that willingness to pay keeps climbing. As living conditions improve and standards rise, men are demanding better quality fabric and more thoughtful design, no matter the price.

The reasons Chinese consumers give for being unsatisfied with a purchase haven’t changed much: too few models to choose from, high prices on foreign brands, and dated colors. What they’re looking for is a fabric that fits close to the body without pinching. One consumer summed it up simply: he wanted something that “hugs the body, the silhouette.”

Graphics and branding on men’s underwear also play a role in purchase decisions; elastic waistbands with visible brand labels remain popular. Cotton is still the most comfortable and popular fabric, followed by lycra and elastane blends.

China Lingerie market & Underwear consumer preferences and market trends:

• High-end lingerie keeps growing, and so does budget lingerie: the middle is what’s getting squeezed.
• Comfort over “sexy”: the push-up bra segment keeps slowing down in China, while wire-free and seamless styles gain share.
• Sustainability is still an untapped niche, but natural fiber (cotton, modal, silk) is quietly becoming mainstream even outside brands that market themselves as “eco.”
• Body diversity: except for a few brands, there is not much inclusivity in the Chinese lingerie market at the moment. It remains a gap a foreign brand can use to stand out.

The rise in online purchases of lingerie & underwear in China

The Chinese lingerie market is segmented into two major channels: offline and online. The offline channel is further categorized into hypermarkets and supermarkets, independent retailers, and so on. The online channel includes large e-commerce sites like Tmall and JD alongside a growing number of small and medium sellers on Douyin and Xiaohongshu.

More women keep shifting toward buying intimate apparel online rather than in traditional retail stores, drawn by better prices, more selection, and simple privacy.

Lingerie companies increasingly launch new collections on their website and e-commerce stores before retail. This trend also corresponds with the rise of brands built to serve women’s needs online first, like Ubras.

The number of men who order lingerie for their partners online is much larger than most would expect. They enjoy buying items for their loved ones but don’t enjoy sorting through piles of intimates in a physical store, so online stores give them complete privacy.

Men who buy online tend to favor the same discretion that draws female shoppers to online stores: no shop assistant, no queue, no awkward conversation. The majority of online buyers are between 20 and 39 years old.

Distribution of lingerie brands across the country

Chinese consumers’ taste for high-end lingerie is often influenced by international fashion trends and big cities such as Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. In China’s high-end lingerie segment, these major three cities are setting trends and the current trends favor international lingerie brands.

Of course, every Chinese region has different expectations for lingerie. While the cities mentioned above demand high-end product, other regions prefer mid-range at more accessible prices (Shandong, Jiangsu, Fujian) or lower prices still.

Foreign Brands of Underwear in China

In the top 10 selling brands of lingerie, foreign brands are winning at the moment. Groups like Etam lingerie, Triumph, and Victoria’s Secret are doing particularly well. Let’s have a look.

Etam

Etam arrived in China in 1994 through an association with a Chinese family, a good way to enter the Chinese market. Now, the group offers 2500 shops in China across three brands: Etam Lingerie, Etam Sport, and Etam Weekend. The shops are more luxurious than in France, with store spaces exceeding 500 square meters in the top malls.

They made sure to present Etam with a luxurious French image, even more so than in their own home market, to position upmarket in China.

Etam has good implantation in China with its online store on Tmall and JD as well as official accounts on China’s biggest social media. To keep its foreign image, Etam doesn’t use a translated Chinese name, unlike other foreign brands with a strong presence in China.

Implicit

Implicit stores are located in the four most metropolitan cities in China: Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hong Kong, where people have higher salaries and more buying power. So we have two different marketing strategies: on one side Etam, a mid-range brand with stores across China. On the other, luxury brands staying concentrated in large metropolitan cities.

Triumph

Triumph, or « 黛安芬 » (« dai an fen »), means the same thing in Chinese and English. Triumph has shops in luxury malls, with a selective range of products. It is also present on Tmall and Chinese social media.

A lot of people mistake Triumph for a Chinese brand because of its long presence in the China lingerie market.

La Perla: Lingerie & Luxury

La Perla is an Italian luxury lingerie brand founded in 1954. The brand has kept expanding its brick-and-mortar footprint in China’s top malls while selling on Tmall and running official accounts on WeChat, Weibo, and RED.

How to Promote Your Lingerie Brand in China?

Use Chinese social media to gain e-reputation

The international social media scene is a bit different in China than it is elsewhere. In fact, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have no presence here at all.

Rather, China has its own social media platforms, including WeChat (a messaging service popular with over 800 million users), Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter), Xiaohongshu, and Douyin. Buying choices for a large share of young consumers are still shaped by influencers on these platforms.

Frequent, useful contact with customers through good campaigns on WeChat spreads easily. Sharing a brand story, product information, or a beauty trend can meaningfully increase engagement.

It also naturally segments your community, as different content resonates with different sections of your underwear range.

WeChat

WeChat has classic functions like sharing photos and videos, but it also allows online shopping and payments. The great thing about WeChat is that it works like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and every other retail app rolled into one. It centralizes user activity and provides an ideal environment for brands looking to gain exposure in the Chinese market.

Lingerie brands use mini-programs to gain visibility. Users access these mini-programs by direct search, by scanning a QR code, or through links on an official WeChat account. From a mini-program, users search for information, read articles, watch video, or make e-commerce purchases directly.

Private domain: turning one sale into a customer

This is where most foreign lingerie brands leave money on the table. Someone buys once on Tmall or Douyin, and the brand never hears from them again. A WeChat mini shop fixes that, but only if it’s set up as more than a copy of the flagship store.

The mechanism is simple: every buyer gets invited, usually through a card in the package or a QR code at checkout, into a WeChat community or official account tied to a membership tier system. Higher tiers unlock early access to new drops, a monthly coupon, or a private sizing consultation. Because the brand now owns the relationship instead of renting it from a marketplace, repeat purchase becomes a matter of a push notification, not a fresh ad spend. It is the single biggest lever for lingerie, a category where fit, once found, drives loyalty. See our WeChat mini shop guide for the setup.

Weibo

Weibo has close integration with Taobao, stemming from Alibaba’s involvement in the platform. Brands can directly use KOLs to link Taobao stores and products in their publications. With many users already having Alipay linked to their Weibo accounts, they can purchase featured products with just one click. The Calvin Klein brand, for example, used KOL Yixing as a muse to promote them on Weibo.

RED (Xiaohongshu)

It also has an e-commerce feature, as we will see later in this post. RED is used by many consumers, particularly women, who consult the app before making a purchase. Xiaohongshu is the meeting point of social content and e-commerce, and a serious channel to study for fashion brands, especially lingerie. It runs on user-generated content, where people share honest opinions of products and services. Many successful brands in China rely on user-generated content on RED to build a good reputation, and its 2026 spring and summer trend reports now shape what buyers search for months ahead of the season.

Show up in AI search: GEO on DeepSeek and Doubao

A growing number of Chinese shoppers now ask an AI assistant a question instead of typing it into Baidu: “which bra is best for large chest support,” “warmest thermal underwear for a Beijing winter,” “no-show underwear for tight dresses.” DeepSeek and Doubao answer these questions directly, often citing two or three brands by name, and most shoppers never click through to a search results page at all.

Getting cited in that answer, what the industry calls GEO, generative engine optimization, works differently from classic SEO. The AI model pulls from content it judges factual and specific: comparison articles, spec sheets, real reviews, structured product data. A product page full of marketing adjectives with no concrete fabric composition, size chart, or use case rarely gets cited. A brand that publishes clear, comparison-style content, “wire-free vs underwire for daily wear,” “which fabric for sensitive skin,” has a real shot at being the name the AI recommends. Since WeChat integrated DeepSeek directly into its search bar, this now also decides what comes up when someone searches inside China’s biggest app. Read more on what WeChat’s DeepSeek integration means for brand marketing.

We saw this play out with a client we’ll call Radovan, a Czech founder running a small European shapewear and thermal-base-layer brand. He opened a Tmall Global store in 2025 and put most of his budget into broad-match Baidu SEM on generic terms like “内衣” (underwear). Four months and close to 180,000 yuan later, his conversion rate was stuck below 0.6%, because that traffic was browsing, not buying: nobody searches “underwear” when they already know what they want. A parallel push on his WeChat official account, built around the same photos he used on Instagram back home, gained a few hundred followers and almost no sales, because nothing was driving strangers to find that account.

What moved the needle was narrower. He rebuilt content around Xiaohongshu, seeding honest reviews with a dozen KOCs who genuinely matched his target size range, and wrote comparison content answering the exact questions his prospects were typing into DeepSeek about thermal base layers. He paired that with a WeChat mini shop and a three-tier membership program. Within four months, Tmall conversion rose from 0.6% to 2.3%, and 24% of mini shop members made a second purchase. The mechanism was simple: match the channel to real intent, then give the buyer a reason to come back.

KOC and affiliate: the layer below KOLs

A KOL, a well-known influencer with a large following, buys reach. A KOC, key opinion consumer, a regular user with a smaller but highly engaged audience, buys trust. For a category as personal as lingerie, where fit and comfort matter more than any celebrity endorsement, KOC seeding often converts better per yuan spent than a single flashy KOL post.

The mechanism: a brand sends free product to dozens or hundreds of KOCs who match its target size and age range, and pays them a small fee or commission per sale their content generates, rather than a flat fee for exposure. Because these are real users posting real try-on content on Xiaohongshu and Douyin, the reviews read as trustworthy rather than sponsored, and the affiliate structure means the brand only pays for what actually converts.

Lingerie brands in China need a Chinese website + Baidu SEO

A website is still the administrative backbone of your business online. It informs customers, prospects, and suppliers about your contact details and the products and services you offer.

Your website must confirm the communication you’ve established elsewhere and carry it to a larger scale. Good SEO lets you position yourself in your market and track the results you’re getting.

• Update your website regularly to improve Baidu referencing. This improves visibility and helps you appear on the first pages of Baidu, where the algorithm rewards freshness.
• For the best referencing, use keywords relating to your brand’s lexical field. For a lingerie site, that means ranking on words like “underwear,” “lace,” “Chinese market,” “bra,” “underpants,” and so on.
• These visibility techniques also build credibility with users. Well-referenced sites look more legitimate to potential customers, who trust them more and are less likely to assume they’re spam.
• Press releases and backlinks are key to brand legitimacy and website authority, which ultimately helps your site rank higher on Baidu’s results pages.

Collaborate with KOLs to promote your lingerie brand in China

Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) are people or organizations with enough social standing that their recommendations and opinions carry real weight in a purchase decision. In other words, they’re the equivalent of what the West calls influencers. In lingerie, that often means young women affiliated with fashion, like the iconic models of Victoria’s Secret who are heavily followed on social networks.

Victoria’s Secret worked with Yang Tianzhen, an entrepreneur and former celebrity agent who is a leading advocate for embracing female body shape and body confidence in China. Yang Tianzhen posted Victoria’s Secret’s campaign video on her Weibo account with the phrase:

“Feeling sexy is not based on appearance and body shape, it comes from women’s confidence. The beauty of the world depends on how much we love ourselves.”

Yang Tianzhen

Adopt China’s Craze for Videos and Live Streaming

What some once dismissed as a fad turned out to be an essential tool for business communication. And it’s an affordable strategy for everyone, from individuals to businesses of any size: all you need is a smartphone.

Live streaming now sits alongside a related shift worth watching closely: brands moving budget from Tmall to Douyin because discovery increasingly starts in a video feed rather than a search box. For lingerie, that means a live host demonstrating fit and fabric stretch in real time does more to convert a hesitant buyer than any static product photo.

Live streaming allows a direct exchange with potential customers, who can interact with the brand or the influencer presenting the lingerie in real time.

Chinese Forums

When looking for ways to start promotion without major investment, the usual answer is to use forums: simple, free, fast, and directly accessible to the public. What’s often forgotten is that using a forum for promotional purposes needs to be strategically organized.

For example, the forum has to fit the theme of lingerie, it needs to be genuinely popular, and to keep visibility you have to update content constantly and stay as interactive as possible with the community.

Distribute and Sell your Lingerie Brand in China

Offline Exhibitions

Offline exhibitions are the more traditional way to meet resellers. With the internet now everywhere, it has become harder to get the attention of distributors during these events. Still, any brand that prepares well ahead of a trade fair should definitely attend. Preparing means: having a WeChat official account and brochure, plus a Chinese-language website that ranks well on Baidu. Being ready optimizes your chances of converting, and justifies the cost of exhibiting.

Traditional Distribution

• Direct distribution: The strategy adopted by Etam or Triumph, opening physical stores and selling lingerie directly to customers, now made more convenient through e-commerce.
• Indirect distribution: local partners, partnerships, and international distributors. Brands unsure about the Chinese market can start with an agent or international distributor to test the waters, gather information, and find channels to sell through.

Online direct underwear sales on Chinese e-Commerce platforms

• Tmall: In China, a flagship store on Tmall is still the strongest option, at least if you know how to optimize it for sales. For established brands looking for a bigger China presence without opening a store in every city, Tmall remains a solid stepping stone. It’s recognized as a prestigious platform that only accepts branded products, and clothing, household products, accessories, and lingerie are among its best sellers.

• JD.com: A direct competitor to Tmall, hosting the same type of brands with similar merchant fees and registration process. Just like Tmall, JD.com is a top option for e-commerce in China.

• Pinduoduo: Often used alongside Tencent’s WeChat, the app offers steep discounts and lets consumers buy directly from manufacturers, cutting out the middleman along with some marketing and acquisition costs. Fashion, clothing, accessories, and lingerie all sell frequently here. Think of it as a Chinese version of Groupon, with a huge user base but a noticeably lower average basket than Tmall.

• Taobao: Also part of the Alibaba group, with easier entry requirements than Tmall. It suits young designers well. There’s a wide variety of products, secure payments, active user participation, and fast delivery, plus an integrated live streaming feature that more brands are using to promote themselves.

• RED: The app targets working women between 18 and 35 years old, a dynamic, connected, exclusively female audience that tends to stay ahead of trends. Foreign products get a real boost here: a big help for Chinese buyers who otherwise struggle to navigate counterfeits and unclear brand claims. It sells skincare, beauty products, clothing, and underwear particularly well.

Underwear & Lingerie Market in China: Conclusion

Consumer preferences in China’s lingerie market differ from Western countries in colors, padding, and overall style. In China, you’ll find many bright colors like purple and pink, while European women lean toward black and white. Chinese women look for padding in bras, while Western women look for lace detail.

On communication, there’s one common point between Western and Eastern brands: the model tends to come from a Western country, with curvier busts and waistlines. A Western model gives the product a Western touch, conveying the sense of luxury Chinese consumers often associate with foreign products. Even Chinese brands sometimes lean on that Western image to suggest a foreign origin.

The bottom line: Chinese consumers are ready to pay for lingerie with fashionable design and real quality, but in a market that’s still maturing, they’re looking for direction. Between comfort-first product, AI search visibility, and a private domain that actually brings buyers back, there’s more than one way to build that direction into your brand. This is a good moment for a lingerie brand to make its mark in China, if the entry strategy is built around how Chinese consumers actually shop today, not how they shopped five years ago.

Contact us to sell underwear on the China lingerie market

We covered many ways to approach China’s lingerie market and answer what Chinese consumers actually want. The category presents real opportunities for foreign brands, but competing with local players takes a genuine entry strategy, not a translated version of what worked at home.

We are a China marketing agency with more than 10 years of experience. We’ve worked with over 600 brands across many industries, including fashion and lingerie labels, offering services tailored to their specific needs. Our team of around 80 Chinese and foreign experts covers everything from Xiaohongshu KOC seeding to WeChat private domain build-out to GEO content for AI search.

We help fashion brands develop their business in China. We provide:

• Distribution consulting
• Business Development
• Branding
• Social Media Marketing
• E-commerce (Tmall, Taobao, JD, Douyin, WeChat)

And much more. Feel free to contact us for more information or a quote. We offer a free consultation with our expert, who will get to know your brand and check the possibilities on the market. Let’s keep in touch!

Here are some of our fashion case studies:

FAQ: Selling Lingerie in China

Do I need a China business license to sell lingerie on Tmall or Xiaohongshu?
Not necessarily for a first move. Tmall Global and cross-border channels on Xiaohongshu let foreign brands sell into China under bonded warehouse or cross-border e-commerce rules without a local entity. A local company becomes worth it once you’re opening a domestic Tmall flagship, running a WeChat mini shop with local payment collection, or setting up offline distribution. Start cross-border, localize once the volume justifies it.

How long before we see results from GEO, Xiaohongshu, or a private domain strategy?
Expect 3 to 4 months before KOC seeding and comparison content start showing up reliably in AI search answers and organic Xiaohongshu discovery. Private domain repeat purchase takes a full sales cycle to show, usually 60 to 90 days after your first cohort of buyers, since you’re waiting for a second purchase, not a first one.

What’s the biggest mistake foreign lingerie brands make entering China?
Reusing the same product photography, sizing, and messaging that worked in their home market. Chinese consumers have different fit expectations, a stronger preference for padding over lace, and a much higher tolerance for detailed fabric and comfort claims than for suggestive imagery. Brands that localize sizing and messaging before spending on ads convert meaningfully better than brands that localize after.