In early July 2026, a Suzhou court ordered tea chain Molly Tea to pay Louis Vuitton RMB 10.3 million for infringing its quatrefoil trademarks. Within days, the losing brand was drawing queues across China while the winner absorbed a wave of cultural backlash. This case is a study in what a legal victory can cost, and what legal carelessness can cost even more.

Chagee went public in April 2025 on the promise of a global brand. A year on, overseas is under 5% of its stores, the home market is sliding, and the premium tea playbook is proving harder to export than Mixue's price-led model. What its expansion really shows.

Foreign beauty is growing in China again, but the recovery is not a giant recovery. Inside Estee Lauder and L'Oreal, the growth is coming from La Mer, TOM FORD, Le Labo and Aesop, while the mass megabrands merely stabilise. Le Labo China, a 50 square metre store co-authored with a Chinese artisan label, shows what the winning model actually looks like, and why it is finally affordable for independent foreign brands.

For fifty years the acne industry sold one promise: make it disappear. Starface sold the opposite, and turned a commodity surgical dressing into a yellow star that Gen Z wants to be seen wearing. The brand is now profitable, sits in more than 20,000 doors, and just raised US$105 million while its founders kept control. The lesson for emerging brands is not the star. It is the method behind it.

Qian-Gua's H1 2026 report reframes Xiaohongshu beauty around an emotion, aesthetics and efficacy triangle. For brands entering or leaving China, the move from what works to what fits me changes the brief.

A record European heatwave has collided with a continent where only about one home in five has air conditioning. Chinese AC brands, led by Midea, Gree, TCL, Haier and Hisense, are selling out across France, Spain, Germany and the UK. The question is whether a cooling crisis becomes a durable brand position.

Molly Tea opened in Flushing in 2024 to roughly US$500,000 a month, the strongest debut Chinese new tea had seen in North America. Eighteen months later, four New York stores went nameless and the brand and its US partner were suing each other. The collapse is a case study in what growth narratives hide.

For years base makeup was the one beauty category Chinese brands could not win, ceded to CPB, NARS and Estee Lauder. FUNNY ELVES just became the No.1 powder brand across Tmall and Douyin. Here is how it built a category of one, and where the model is now under pressure.

In May 2026 Proya paid 351 million yuan to lift its stake in Flower Knows to 51 percent, valuing the brand at 2.83 billion yuan on a 595.76 percent appraisal premium. This is why the most-watched Flower Knows acquisition of the year was rational, what Proya was really buying, and how it marks a split in how Chinese consumer giants do cross-border M&A.

Six months ago, Lululemon's China business looked like the cleanest premium-import story of 2025: comparable sales surging in the +30s, US$1 billion in revenue, a textbook portfolio bet against a softening US business. Today, with Calvin McDonald gone, growth decelerating, and lower-tier expansion meeting domestic incumbents, the bet looks less clean.