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 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.

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.

SHEIN paid US$100 million for Everlane, and CEO Alfred Chang has already promised Everlane will stay independent under SHEIN ownership. We unpack why the business case is clean, why the integration temptation will be enormous, and which leading indicators over the next 12 months will tell us whether SHEIN can stick to its promise or quietly drift toward full absorption.

Anta is now the largest sportswear company in China, ahead of Nike. But the more interesting story is what it owns abroad. Arc'teryx, Salomon, Wilson, Descente, Maia Active and a fresh 29% stake in PUMA: a portfolio that looks less like Nike and more like LVMH in sport.

Chinese games have become China's most successful cultural export. Genshin hit US$10 billion in lifetime spending, Black Myth: Wukong sold 25 million copies, and Infinity Nikki crossed US$69 million in its first year. Consumer brands are often asked to follow the same playbook, but games and consumer goods sell very different things.

In 2023, KANS proved that short dramas could sell skincare at scale. In 2025, over 40,000 new short drama series launched in China, ReelShort generated US$130 million in a single quarter overseas, and AI-powered productions cut costs to one-fifth of traditional methods. The short drama marketing model KANS pioneered has evolved far beyond what its creator imagined. This is the story of how it started, why it nearly collapsed, and where it is heading.

The Paris-Shanghai Perfume Show marked the first major collective appearance of Chinese fragrance brands in France. With LVMH and Estee Lauder backing brands like To Summer and Melt Season, the ambition is real. So is the challenge.

Walking the halls of Cosmoprof Bologna 2026, the shift was unmistakable: Chinese beauty brands are no longer just exhibiting, they are competing. But K-beauty still leads the conversation. Meanwhile, European niche brands looking at China face a market that has fundamentally changed.