China signals: Pop Mart courts LVMH, Aesop rejigs, Goodbai expands, D2C goes offline

Four developments this week point the same way: China’s consumer market is rewarding operational discipline over speed. Pop Mart founder Wang Ning (王宁) met Bernard Arnault at LVMH’s Paris headquarters, the first meeting between the two men and the latest in a run of high-level exchanges, as the toy maker works through a difficult year overseas. Aesop closed four stores across mainland China and Hong Kong while pushing into new cities, caught between preserving niche appeal and chasing commercial returns. Actor Bai Jingting (白敬亭) added two more sub-labels to his Goodbai group in Shanghai. Online-born womenswear labels are taking space in premium malls, moving from digital-only selling to integrated retail. Pop Mart courts LVMH as founder studies global brand playbook Market intel: Pop Mart founder Wang Ning visited LVMH’s Paris headquarters to meet Bernard Arnault and senior executives, the latest in a run of high-level exchanges between the Chinese toy maker and the French luxury group. LVMH Greater China president Andrew Wu (吴越) joined Pop Mart’s board as a non-executive director in December 2025. The company, valued at HK$205.1 billion ($26.3 billion) at the time of the meeting, has shifted from rapid overseas expansion to internal consolidation. Wang said on the company’s interim results call that Pop Mart set 2026 as an adjustment year, and that sales growth was not the priority. Wang made a comparable visit in July to Apple Park in Cupertino, where he met CEO Tim Cook and then-incoming CEO John Ternus. No partnership or investment was announced in Paris. Pop Mart reported first-half revenue of 17.17 billion RMB ($2.56 billion), up 23.8%, but overseas revenue fell 11.1% to 4.97 billion RMB ($741 million). Sales dropped 9.7% in Asia-Pacific and 16.5% in the Americas, while Europe and other markets rose 5.9%. Market indicator: LVMH offers Wang something Apple cannot. Pop Mart is no longer a company with one hit product; it runs multiple IPs at scale, a theme park business, a jewelry line and a store network across three continents. That is a portfolio problem, and running a portfolio of brands across markets and price tiers is what LVMH has spent four decades learning to do. Wang appears to be treating the meeting as research. Consolidation is the harder test. Management’s own account of the overseas decline is instructive: when demand surged in 2025, the store network was not built out, so a disproportionate share of sales ran through online channels. As that traffic normalized, revenue fell with it. The lesson is not that Pop Mart expanded too fast but that it expanded unevenly, and that is an operations problem rather than a brand one. Whether the company can fix it inside a single year is the question its share price is now pricing. Aesop closes flagships but expands into new cities as it navigates the niche-mass dilemma Market intel: Aesop has closed three of its most recognizable mainland China stores in under 18 months. Its Dongping Road store in Shanghai, the brand’s mainland debut, shut in May 2025 after two and a half years. Its South China debut at Shenzhen MixC Phase III closed in May 2026, also short of three years. The Hongqiao Airport T2 store, the brand’s first airport site on the mainland, closed recently, less than three years after opening. Parent company L’Oréal has attributed the exits to expiring leases and described them as routine optimization of the offline network. Expansion has continued alongside the closures. Aesop opened five mainland stores in 2026 at Guangzhou IGC, Chongqing Beicheng Tianjie, Shanghai HKRI Taikoo Hui, Wuhan Wushang Mall and Wuhan SKP, entering Chongqing and Wuhan for the first time, and plans to enter two further cities. L’Oréal said in its 2025 half-year results that Aesop maintained double-digit growth, and said in July that the brand performed very strongly in North Asia over the first half of 2026. Pressure is building underneath that. Chinese consumers have grown more alert to cross-border price gaps, and rapid store openings have eroded the scarcity the brand was built on. Storytelling alone no longer carries the premium. Market indicator: The closures are a recalibration rather than a retreat. Aesop is trading landmark real estate for geographic spread, betting that presence in more cities beats presence on the right streets. The risk is that scale corrodes the scarcity the brand was built on, and scarcity is most of what a 1,275 RMB ($190) bottle of perfume is selling. For niche brands entering China, the trajectory is a useful warning. Cult status has a shelf life. Sooner or later a brand has to decide whether it is building for a mass market or a narrow one, and China’s economics — high mall rents, crowded markets, consumers alert to cross-border pricing — push hard toward the former even when the brand’s identity depends on the latter. Aesop’s answer so far has been to try both at once, closing the stores that made its name while opening in cities that have never heard of it. Bai Jingting turns Yanqing Road into a celebrity retail destination with two more sub-labels opening Market intel: Actor Bai Jingting has added two more labels to the cluster of stores he controls on Shanghai’s Yanqing Road. Ayrae, a womenswear line, joins a strip that already holds the original Goodbai clothing store, opened in 2023, a Goodbai cafe at No. 104 and the Goodees World IP store at Yanqing Fang. Netizens have taken to calling the street Bai Jingting’s (痛街), or “ita street” — a term borrowed from Japanese fan culture for a space saturated with merchandise devoted to a single figure. Palomove, an urban sports line whose debut sneaker drew on 1980s tennis club styling, has opened separately on Yuyuan Road, about three kilometers north in Changning district. Goodbai’s product matrix now runs to seven lines: the main label, 916 for menswear, Goodees for IP merchandise, Flashback for reissues, Ayrae for womenswear, and Palomove and 30C in sportswear. 30C, positioned around trail-running fashion, launched in late May 2026. Bai founded Goodbai in 2021 with designer Shangguan Zhe (上官喆), who serves as creative and design director. Corporate filings show Bai holds 41% of parent company Zheting Hao (Shanghai) Brand Management, Shangguan 29% and a third partner, Li Yong (李勇), 10%. Market indicator: Celebrity fashion labels in China usually stall at the merchandise stage: the star supplies the traffic, fans supply the revenue, and the brand never develops a reason to exist without either. Bai's operation has cleared that bar. Five years in, Goodbai runs seven product lines, permanent stores in Shanghai, Chengdu and Aranya, a cafe business, pop-up space across three continents and wholesale distribution through Musinsa in South Korea. Bai’s apparel interests are now spread across five registered companies. Clustering is what makes Yanqing Road work. A single store on a 496-meter street is a shop; four Bai-linked sites on the same street is a destination, and destinations generate the returning foot traffic that celebrity stores tend to burn through once the opening queue disperses. The method is borrowed from luxury retail, where brands that cannot yet compete on global scale compete on density instead. Two details matter more than the store count. Goodbai opened a Taobao outlet channel last year, which industry figures read as evidence the brand now carries enough stock to need a clearance mechanism — an unglamorous problem, and one only a working apparel company has. The 30C launch followed a clean category migration: Bai became Salomon’s first outdoor style ambassador in late 2024, Goodbai produced a trail-running collaboration with the brand, and the group then launched its own outdoor label in May. That sequence — endorsement, collaboration, own-brand — is how apparel groups enter categories, not how celebrities license their names. Both China’s top and niche D2C womenswear brands are rushing to open physical stores Market intel: China’s online-born womenswear labels are moving into premium malls, and the landlords are making room for them. Chicjoc, one of the Taobao brands the trade calls the big four alongside Unica, Kaijian and C’est M, had 38 mainland stores as of 2025 and has since opened in the United States and France. Meiyang now operates 55 stores and reported group GMV above 6 billion RMB ($894 million) in 2025. Landlords need the tenants as much as the tenants need the space. Traditional apparel is vacating malls at scale: Peacebird closed a net 2,216 stores over four years to end-2025, a 43% reduction, while Dazzle shed a net 87 in the first half of 2025 and Lancy 46 across the year. Nanjing Deji is the clearest case of what replaced them, admitting Unica, Chicjoc and Marius among 83 city-level debut stores in 2025, where they now form a cluster sitting alongside the mall's international luxury tenants. Motivations differ by size. Larger brands are buying proximity to luxury names and the legitimacy that comes with it. Smaller ones are solving a commercial problem: Meiyang’s founder said return rates were below the industry average but customers still wanted to see fabrics, try garments and check fits in person, which is what the stores were built to fix. Meiyang has run its offline network at overall profitability since opening its first store in 2024. Newer labels are taking space outside conventional malls. AAAD has opened pop-ups at Luxelakes CPI in Chengdu, The Box in Beijing and on Shanghai's Huaihai Middle Road, and runs a concept store at 1382 Yuyuan Road. Market indicator: Physical stores are doing something online channels cannot: they make trust cheap to establish. For a decade the assumption was that online would hollow out offline retail. What has actually happened is that the digital brands with the strongest products have found the limits of selling clothes through photographs, and are buying back the tactile confirmation that a website removed. Scale determines the motive. Giants like Chicjoc and Meiyang are purchasing legitimacy, positioning themselves next to luxury tenants in malls that would not have taken them five years ago. Smaller labels are solving unit economics, since a customer who tries a garment on returns it far less often than one who orders three sizes and keeps one. Both motives converge on the same conclusion: in a market this crowded, online performance sets a floor rather than a ceiling. Taobao’s response tells you where the platform thinks this goes. Its new Ifashion black label admitted 17 brands from a pool of roughly 30 candidates, screening on design, fabric and reputation, with originality now a hard requirement — merchandise must be designed in-house rather than sourced or copied. The platform removed several thousand merchants in the first half of this year on those grounds. Sellers that reached significant scale without building brand capability were rejected. The price war has largely run its course. What follows is a contest over trust, and trust is easier to demonstrate in a room than on a product page.

China signals: Pop Mart courts LVMH, Aesop rejigs, Goodbai expands, D2C goes offline

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China signals: Pop Mart courts LVMH, Aesop rejigs, Goodbai expands, D2C goes offline

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag