Pop Mart reported 23.8% revenue growth for the first half of 2026, and its share price fell anyway. Overseas sales declined 11%, the Americas shrank despite a wave of new store openings, and THE MONSTERS, the family behind Labubu, saw its share of revenue drop from 34.7% to 26%. Greater China, meanwhile, grew 47.3%. Why the overseas engine stalled, what separates a viral IP from a durable brand, and what Sanrio’s recovery from Hello Kitty dependence suggests about the road ah

Chinese shoppers used to fly to Paris to buy handbags. Now foreigners fly to Shanghai to buy Songmont. The 2013-founded label built by two designers from Shanxi has become Tmall's top handbag brand, filled its 600-square-metre flagship with overseas customers, and drew LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault through its doors. This is how a slow brand became the fastest story in accessible luxury.

Over the May Day holiday, foreign tourists queued more than 40 minutes outside a sneaker store on Shanghai's Huaihai Road. The brand is Pane, a four-year-old Chinese label most Chinese consumers have never heard of. Instead of winning at home and then exporting, Pane seeded Instagram and TikTok first, kept its stores inside China, and let visa-free tourism bring the world to its door. This is what the reverse going-global model looks like, and where its limits are.

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.

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.

A 5,999-yuan LABUBU mini-fridge drew nearly 38,000 preorders and resold for close to 90,000 yuan. Behind the spectacle, Pop Mart is testing whether an emotional toy IP can carry a functional product, and whether its new overseas retail engine can carry both.

A DTC brand breakdown of Augustinus Bader using the WWW.HER framework (customer, product, marketing, brand story). The Augustinus Bader strategy inverted the standard DTC playbook to build a US$1 billion premium brand. Here is what Chinese brands going global can actually take from it.

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.