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FUNNY ELVES Base Makeup: How a Chinese Brand Took the Category Foreign Giants Owned

  • Jun 30
  • 6 min read

Key Takeaways


  • FUNNY ELVES (方里), a Chinese base makeup specialist, became the No.1 powder brand across Tmall and Douyin in the first ten months of 2025, with RMB 611 million in GMV and an 11.64% share, overtaking Florasis.

  • Base makeup was the hardest color cosmetics category for domestic brands. In 2020, among China's 15 leading base makeup brands, foreign brands held 37% of the market versus just 15% for domestic players.

  • The brand won on a single hero product, a soft-focus pressed powder, paired with a values platform fronted by Maye Musk, not on aesthetics or price-cutting alone.

  • The risk: it won the category on accessibility, its share is now slipping on both platforms, and a cheaper challenger is closing in.

  • For international operators, the assumption that the 2028 China base makeup leader will be an imported brand needs resetting now.



When global beauty executives list the Chinese brands worth watching, they tend to name the color cosmetics disruptors and the heritage groups. They rarely name a base makeup specialist, because base makeup is the category Chinese brands were not supposed to win. For most of the past decade, the foundations, cushions and setting powders that sit closest to the skin belonged to CPB, NARS and Estee Lauder. That is exactly the category FUNNY ELVES (方里, romanized as Fang Li) just took.


In the first ten months of 2025, FUNNY ELVES became the No.1 powder brand across Tmall and Douyin, with RMB 611 million (around US$85 million) in GMV and an 11.64% share, overtaking Florasis, after its annual GMV roughly doubled every year to top RMB 2 billion in 2024. For a brand whose makeup line only launched in May 2020, claiming the top of a category long defended by imported names is the kind of result that should reset a few assumptions.


[Image 1 — see image guide]



Why Was Base Makeup the Category Chinese Brands Could Not Win?


China's domestic beauty brands spent the 2016 to 2020 wave breaking through on the categories with the lowest technical barriers. Lip glazes, setting powders and eye palettes were where brands like Florasis, Perfect Diary and Judydoll first found room against the international incumbents. Base makeup was different. It carries the highest formulation complexity in color cosmetics, and consumers judge it in seconds on tone match, oil control and how it wears across a long day. That made it the category domestic brands left alone the longest.




How Did FUNNY ELVES Base Makeup Reach Number One?


The answer is unusually concentrated: one hero product, built for one clearly defined job. The brand's soft-focus pressed powder is the engine. By the end of April 2024, FUNNY ELVES had sold close to 21 million compacts of the powder, roughly one every 2.6 seconds, after more than seventy formula iterations. Rather than chase the color cosmetics arms race of new shades and seasonal palettes, FUNNY ELVES base makeup positioned itself as a base specialist engineered for Asian skin, with oil control and anti-transfer wear as the core claim.


That focus was underwritten by capital and supply-chain depth, not influencer spend alone. Founder Yang Ju came out of the imported-cosmetics supply chain, and in 2022 the brand raised tens of millions of RMB in a Series A led by Botanee, the parent of sensitive-skin leader Winona, with Qingrui co-investing. A base makeup brand backed by a clinical-skincare group is a telling combination, because base makeup rewards formulation credibility more than packaging.



What Is the Values-Plus-Product Layer?


Product alone rarely builds a category of one. FUNNY ELVES paired its base makeup claim with a values platform. In 2024 it built its messaging around the idea of diqi, an inner confidence or grounding, and signed Maye Musk as a global brand ambassador, carrying the line that a woman's real confidence comes from within rather than from external validation. The same year it began entering the Japanese market, an early signal that the brand sees its Asian-skin base makeup positioning as exportable rather than China-only.


This is the part international operators tend to underrate. The values layer does work the product features cannot, giving a functional powder an identity that travels beyond being a cheaper alternative to an imported foundation. It is also why FUNNY ELVES reads less like a discount challenger and more like a brand trying to own a category on meaning as well as performance.


[Image 2 — see image guide]



Where Does the Model Break?


The bull case has a clear weak point: FUNNY ELVES won the category on accessibility. Its average selling price sits well below premium domestic players, a structural reminder that it won on reach, not on price power. That position is now being tested. Its share on both Tmall and Douyin slipped year on year in 2025 even as it held the top rank, a cheaper challenger has emerged underneath it, and an attempt to push into higher-priced sensitive-skin foundation stumbled.


There is a precedent worth holding up against this: blank me. It was also a Chinese brand built around base makeup. Founded in 2016, it rode hero foundation products from the edge of Tmall's base-makeup category to the number-one domestic spot by 2021, priced at 250 to 450 yuan, briefly proving that a Chinese base-makeup brand could hold a mid-to-premium price band. But the peak gave way to a fall. After ranking No.1 among domestic brands in Tmall's base makeup category on Singles' Day 2022, its share of voice was steadily overtaken by newer entrants. L Catterton, the LVMH-backed private equity firm, had agreed to invest in late 2023, but terminated the deal in early 2024 after due diligence fell short and surfaced undisclosed legal disputes, and the firm has said it never actually invested. By 2026, its parent company, Shanghai Yongxi, faced a bankruptcy petition from a marketing-services provider and was being chased for debt by suppliers and contract manufacturers. blank me's trajectory shows that in base makeup, a hero product plus a price breakthrough can take a brand to the top fast and pull it back down just as fast when the commercial fundamentals do not keep pace. That is precisely what FUNNY ELVES needs to guard against as it moves up.


The strategic question is whether a brand that took the category from the bottom can defend it while moving up. The international incumbents it displaced on Douyin still own the premium tier on Tmall, where margin and brand equity concentrate. Holding the No.1 volume position while building the price power to matter at the top is the needle FUNNY ELVES has to thread. The market itself is not the constraint: China's online base makeup market topped RMB 50 billion in 2024, roughly half of all color cosmetics online.



What This Means for Brand Operators


For international brand teams, the headline is a planning assumption that needs updating. If your China base makeup strategy still assumes the category leader in 2028 will be an imported brand, FUNNY ELVES is the data point that should change the model. The white space in domestic base makeup, long treated as structurally foreign, is being claimed now, and the brand doing it is one most international teams have not yet briefed. Flower Knows showed that a Chinese brand could win on aesthetics, and Into You showed it could create a texture category. FUNNY ELVES is showing it can be done in the category that was supposed to be off-limits.


For domestic operators, the lesson is about sequencing. FUNNY ELVES did not win by out-discounting the color cosmetics field. It picked the hardest category, concentrated on one hero product, backed it with formulation credibility, and wrapped it in a values story that gives the brand somewhere to go. The open question, the one worth watching over the next two years, is whether the next domestic brand to claim base makeup leadership does it the same way, or finds a route that starts from price power rather than accessibility.




Double V is a cross-border operating partner and intelligence house for emerging consumer brands, based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. We help brands connect China and the world through three businesses: Brand Operation (marketing and distribution for brands on retainer), Brand Incubation (sister company Glam Infinite and our own-built brands), and Industry Intelligence (cross-border research and reports). Talk to our team.

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