China signals: Proya’s US push, Shanghai’s sports boom, Chinese brands rise globally

China’s consumer brands are testing how far domestic strength travels. Proya arrives in 400 Ulta Beauty doors in November, a scale of US physical distribution no Chinese skincare brand has held before. Sports labels have become the most active source of demand in Shanghai’s retail market, per CBRE, taking more than 30% of new apparel store openings. Brand Finance’s Apparel 50 now carries five Chinese brands worth a combined $15.2 billion, up 27% year-on-year — a recovery to their 2022 level rather than a debut. Proya’s Ulta Beauty deal marks the biggest US retail push by a China skincare label Market intel: Proya Cosmetics will take its flagship Proya brand to the US in November through a partnership with Ulta Beauty, the country’s largest specialty beauty retailer. The brand will sell in 400 Ulta stores nationwide and on Ulta.com, roughly a quarter of a fleet of more than 1,500 doors. First-wave products come from two ranges. The Advanced Firming collection is a peptide-retinol anti-aging line, sold at home as the Ruby series; the Original Repair collection, known in China as Source, is built on recombinant type XVII collagen and positioned for barrier repair. No Chinese skincare brand has previously held distribution at this scale in the US market. Ulta, which saw its first market share decline in 2024, has been diversifying its portfolio with Chinese brands including Florasis and Flower Knows. Market indicator: Scale is the point. Ulta’s rewards program reached nearly 47 million members in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, up 4% YoY, and no Chinese beauty brand has had access to a US customer base of that size on shelf. Proya needs it. Company revenue fell 1.68% to 10.597 billion RMB ($1.49 billion) in 2025, the first annual decline since its 2017 listing, with the main Proya brand down 10.39% to 7.689 billion RMB. Hong Kong and overseas sales came to 297.6 million RMB, or 2.8% of main business revenue — small, but more than double the prior year’s figure. Management filed for a Hong Kong listing in October 2025 to fund international expansion, and has tested the retail-partner model before, placing products in more than 200 Guardian stores in Malaysia under an April agreement. The obstacles are concrete. Tariffs on Chinese cosmetics entering the US run as high as 30%, a cost Flower Knows has said it chose to absorb rather than pass on. Shelf space also puts Proya against established science-led competitors including The Ordinary, and a peptide-retinol range priced for the Chinese premium tier has to justify itself to a shopper who already has options. Sports brands now drive Shanghai retail leasing as outdoor and running labels expand Market intel: Sports brands have become the most active source of demand in Shanghai’s retail property market, according to CBRE. Their share of new apparel store openings reached more than 30% in 2025, up from 18% in 2023. Four patterns sit underneath that number. Flagship clustering is one: 58% of sports stores opened between 2023 and 2025 were China debuts. Specialist labels have also broken up the outdoor category, where the top six players’ combined share fell from 70% to 40%. Event-driven demand has pushed brands toward two-level formats that pair retail with services and testing. And core districts have absorbed a rising share of the activity, from 25% in 2023 to 46% in 2025. Market indicator: Demand has moved past fitness. Buyers are treating sport as health management, performance and social activity at once, which is why floor plans have grown and why testing, fitting and repair services now occupy space that used to hold stock. That shift favors the city’s position as a China entry point. With 58% of new sports stores opening as country debuts, Shanghai continues to function as the market’s proving ground — brands land here first, and the ones that work expand outward from it. Municipal policy reinforces the pattern: the city recorded 82 new first stores in the first quarter of 2026 alone, 18 of them national debuts. For brands, the competitive question has shifted from product to what happens inside the store — and to whether a label can hold a community of runners, climbers or cyclists once the opening traffic fades. Five Chinese brands enter Brand Finance‘s Apparel 50 2026 with $15.2 billion in value Market intel: Chinese labels now hold five places in Brand Finance’s Apparel 50 2026, worth a combined $15.2 billion, up 27% YoY. Chow Tai Fook ranks highest at 19th, its brand value up 13% to $4.7 billion, followed by Anta at 26th (up 3% to $3.5 billion), new entrant Laopu Gold at 35th ($2.7 billion), Bosideng (up 21% to $2.5 billion) and Li-Ning ($1.7 billion). Two of those five are new to the ranking this year, and the group is not the same one that appeared in 2025. Jeweler Lao Feng Xiang, worth $2.3 billion last year, has dropped out. China’s total in the 2025 ranking was $12 billion across four brands, down 10% on the year before — so this year’s $15.2 billion reads as a recovery to the 2022 level of $15.3 billion rather than a breakthrough. Bosideng is the fastest-growing apparel brand in the world this year, on Brand Finance’s numbers, with value up nearly 170% since 2019. The company credits AI and data analytics across product development and supply chain, and has pushed beyond down jackets into premium outdoor — it staged its first Paris Fashion Week show in October 2025 and released the Areal collection with Kim Jones. Movement at the top ran the other way. Total value across the 50 brands fell 4% to $350.9 billion. Chanel holds first place despite a 9% decline to $34.3 billion, ahead of Louis Vuitton (down 12% to $28.8 billion) and Nike (down 7% to $27.3 billion). Market indicator: Five brands, five routes. Chow Tai Fook trades on jewelry heritage, Anta on a multi-brand sports portfolio assembled through acquisition, Laopu Gold on craft positioning in a premium segment, Bosideng on technical outerwear, Li-Ning on design carrying a Chinese identity. Little about the group suggests a single national playbook. Li-Ning is the one to watch on strength rather than size. At $1.7 billion it is the smallest of the five, but it ranks as the ninth strongest apparel brand in the world, with a Brand Strength Index score of 84.3 and an AAA- rating — putting it above much larger names in a measure built on familiarity, reputation and consideration rather than revenue. Brand Finance calls it a new entrant, though Li-Ning ranked 42nd in the Apparel 50 in 2023 and held the same ninth position on brand strength in 2022. The brand returned as official apparel partner to the Chinese Olympic Committee for the 2025-2028 cycle. Distance from the top remains large. Chanel’s $34.3 billion is more than seven times Chow Tai Fook’s $4.7 billion, and no Chinese brand sits in the top 15 by value. What the ranking shows is a group of brands that have converted domestic scale into measurable brand equity — and, in Li-Ning’s case, into strength scores that outrun its balance sheet.

China signals: Proya’s US push, Shanghai’s sports boom, Chinese brands rise globally

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

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China signals: Proya’s US push, Shanghai’s sports boom, Chinese brands rise globally

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag