In August 2026 Shanghai Jahwa sold its 19 percent stakes in the Sephora Shanghai and Sephora Beijing joint ventures for €70 million, closing a partnership that began in 2004 and leaving LVMH as sole owner. The exit lands at an odd moment: the business is finally stabilizing, and it is stabilizing on the back of 26 Chinese brands that Douyin and Xiaohongshu validated first. What is a 320-store prestige chain for when the discovery work has already been done somewhere else?

For the first time, Golden Week has two crowds shopping in China at once. Several hundred million domestic travellers are moving through a retail market that grew 0.4 percent in August, and a record number of foreign visitors are arriving visa-free into a tax refund system that has quadrupled in two years. We look at what foreign visitors in China actually buy, why the answer is not luxury, and why the inbound shopper may be the cheapest overseas marketing a Chinese brand can

Between 17 and 22 September 2026, Fenty Skin, Glow Recipe and Huda Beauty all put forward the same sliced eye patch in the same twist-and-dispense container. A Korean brand had been selling that format since July, and Huda Beauty's founder said publicly that the brands had been lied to about packaging exclusivity. The interesting part is not the copycat argument. It is that packaging and formulation can now be bought by anyone, which leaves brands defending something they nev

TikTok Shop closed the first half of 2026 with US$50.3 billion in global GMV, up 92 percent, and the US reclaiming its place as its largest market. The platform is now live in ten European markets, but Germany, France, Spain and Italy together generated roughly €499 million in 90 days, about 70 percent of it through affiliated creators. For Chinese brands weighing TikTok Shop Europe as their next channel, the early numbers are both a signal and a warning.

Mixue Bingcheng's overseas store count shrank for the first time in 2025, down a net 428 to 4,467. The easy read is that its low-price playbook finally failed abroad. The real story is more interesting: the pullback was an active restructuring in Indonesia and Vietnam, where new stores now earn 1.7 times the revenue of old ones, while the group's revenue still grew 35%. Low price was never Mixue's sin. It is an industrial output built on a vertically integrated supply chain.

Drunk Elephant was once synonymous with clean beauty, built on a 'Suspicious Six' exclusion list and a 'skincare smoothie' ritual that carried it from zero to an $845 million price tag. But after Shiseido acquired it, TikTok virality brought in young teens and pushed out the adult, high-spending users who made it. Stockouts, recalls, and a 65% quarterly sales slide slowly turned it into a case study of a big-group integration gone wrong.

Since May, roughly 700,000 orders have been placed on a delivery platform that never delivers anything. That is FoodNeverComes, out of South Korea. China has a homegrown version of the same mechanism: the digital wooden fish. At the same time, China’s snack industry keeps growing while guzi merchandise stores churn through openings and closures. Read together, the three stories form a three-tier ladder of emotional consumption, from real goods, to emotional symbols, to pure a

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

Olive oil spent decades cosplaying as wine: dark glass, corks, labels that whispered do not use too much. Graza put the same product in a green squeeze bottle that says the opposite, named its SKUs after what to do with them, and became the fifth-largest olive oil brand in the US on less than US$3 million of outside capital. The packaging was the product.

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.