From Hermès to Laopu Gold, the value of luxury is being redefined

Laopu Gold’s value continues to climb. For anyone who still sees Laopu Gold as a jewelry brand, its ongoing exhibition at Shanghai IFC, “The Art of Enduring Luxury: Laopu Gold Classic Works Exhibition,” may offer a different reading of the company. Shanghai IFC is not only one of the city’s most important luxury retail landmarks, but also a key battleground where global luxury houses compete for China’s high-value consumers. At the exhibition, Laopu Gold presents a series of objects of Eastern refinement, including gold-based mother-of-pearl lacquerware, gold-based enamel works and gold teapots crafted using the “single-sheet hammering” technique. Through sophisticated intangible cultural heritage craftsmanship, the brand is extending gold beyond jewelry and into the realm of high-end lifestyle. This is not simply a presentation of new works. It is Laopu Gold making its ambitions plain: the brand is no longer just in the jewelry business, but is building a luxury proposition rooted in classical culture, intangible craftsmanship and Eastern aesthetics. As a Chinese luxury brand steps onto a stage long dominated by international houses, the signal is clear: Chinese brands are beginning to shape the cultural narrative of luxury consumption. Laopu Gold’s next growth curve: Heirloom goldware For a long time, Chinese consumers’ aspirations for a “luxury lifestyle” were largely defined by Western brands. From Hermès’ leather goods, equestrian heritage and home objects, to Louis Vuitton’s culture of travel and the jewellery narratives of Cartier and Bvlgari, these houses collectively built a Western language of luxury around status, taste, class and lifestyle. But the rise of Laopu Gold has given that aspiration a new point of reference. Following last year’s launch of its gold-based mother-of-pearl lacquerware “Twelve Floral Deities” gold cups, the brand is now presenting a new series of gold-based mother-of-pearl lacquerware pieces. Mother-of-pearl lacquerware is itself a treasured form of Chinese intangible cultural heritage. It requires artisans to precisely inlay shell fragments less than 0.5 millimeters thick into floral patterns, apply layers of lacquer, and polish the surface repeatedly until the motifs appear to emerge through the lacquer itself. The exhibition also spotlights Laopu Gold’s “one piece hammered” craft, which traces its lineage to the hand-hammering traditions of Tang dynasty gold and silverware. The One Piece Hammered Siting Gold Teapot takes its form from the Siting teapot created by Lu Siting, a renowned Qing dynasty master of purple clay teapots. Using purely manual techniques, artisans repeatedly hammer a gold ingot into a single sheet, before shaping it through tens of thousands — even hundreds of thousands — of hammer strikes to create a seamless gold object. Ma Yanru, a noted gold and silverware conservation expert and research fellow at the National Museum of China, said: “Since ancient times, goldware has been an exclusive object of daily life for royalty and nobility, a symbol of luxury culture, and, because of its enduring value, one of the best carriers of aristocratic culture and classical aesthetics. Techniques such as one piece hammered, gold-based enamel and gold-based mother-of-pearl lacquerware are not only rooted in deep traditional culture, but also aligned with contemporary aesthetics. This kind of craft innovation allows classics embedded in cultural memory to become part of today’s lifestyle aesthetics.” Laopu Gold is not replicating the playbook of global luxury houses. Instead, it is building a luxury lifestyle system from within Chinese culture itself: using gold as a value carrier, and classical culture, intangible craftsmanship and Eastern aesthetics as cultural carriers. Through gold teapots, gold cups and refined objects for the study, it is retelling the rituals of tea, the scholar’s studio, hosting and collecting through a distinctly Eastern lens. This is what makes Laopu Gold especially worth watching: it proves that Chinese luxury brands can build luxury lifestyle systems of their own. This shift did not happen overnight. Over the past few years, Laopu Gold has been steadily liberating gold from its more conventional associations. In many consumers’ minds, gold is still tied to weddings, wealth preservation and displays of prosperity, with a relatively narrow aesthetic vocabulary. Laopu Gold, by contrast, has been expanding what gold can mean. In 2019, it introduced a pure-gold diamond-setting technique, allowing 24K gold to be combined with diamonds. In 2022, it launched pure-gold enamel craftsmanship, giving gold richer colour and pattern possibilities. In 2025, it introduced the “Twelve Floral Deities” lacquerware and mother-of-pearl gold cups, pushing gold beyond adornment and into tea rituals, collecting and lifestyle aesthetics. When discussing China’s high-end consumption trends, Hurun Report chairman and chief researcher Rupert Hoogewerf has repeatedly pointed to Laopu Gold as a key example. In his view, what makes Laopu Gold distinctive is that it is “not imitating the path of Western luxury brands, but truly turning Chinese culture into part of its product value and brand premium.” He believes Chinese high-net-worth consumers’ demand for “cultural belonging” and “authentic value” is reshaping the logic of consumption decisions — and that Laopu Gold has helped drive this pivotal shift. According to Hurun Research Institute, China’s luxury market is entering a new phase after three decades of development: consumers once bought luxury goods to signal who they were to others. Today, they buy Laopu Gold to affirm who they are to themselves — and what kind of value they want from consumption. For high-net-worth consumers, a gold teapot, a gold cup or an object of literati refinement offers more than the intrinsic value of its material. It carries cultural identity, aesthetic order, a sense of ritual and emotional value. The real disruption: Rewriting luxury’s value code But that raises a more difficult question: refined lifestyle objects for the home are not new. Global luxury houses have long built lifestyle universes through home lines, fragrance collections and art projects, while traditional gold brands have also offered decorative objects, tea vessels and scholar’s studio pieces. So why does this category appear to be a growth engine Laopu Gold can actually scale? The answer lies in a step that remains extremely difficult for Chinese high-end brands to achieve: Laopu Gold has combined classical culture, intangible craftsmanship, elevated aesthetics and gold’s intrinsic monetary value to redefine the standards of luxury. Before Laopu Gold’s rise, luxury’s value system, aesthetic authority and identity symbols were largely dominated by Western brands. Over the past three decades, China has contributed significant growth to global luxury groups, but few domestic brands have truly entered this high-end discourse. Chinese brands were more often discussed through the lens of “value for money,” “supply chain” or “domestic substitution,” rather than as luxury reference points recognised by high-net-worth consumers and international capital alike. Laopu Gold has changed that. According to Frost & Sullivan, in 2025, Laopu Gold’s sales at a single mall approached 1 billion RMB ($140 million), ranking first among global luxury brands in both single-mall sales efficiency and sales per square metre. From January to June this year, Laopu Gold continued to hold the top position. More telling is the consumer-side validation: Laopu Gold’s customers have an average overlap of more than 80 percent with consumers of the world’s top five luxury brands, including Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Cartier and Bulgari. This suggests that Laopu Gold has not created a “parallel market” outside luxury, but has entered directly into the consideration set of China’s top-spending luxury consumers. For Luca Solca, Managing Director and Global Head of Luxury Goods at Bernstein, Laopu Gold’s recognition did not come out of nowhere. Its success is built on China’s long tradition of 24-karat gold jewellery, but what the brand has done particularly well is elevate that tradition into a more contemporary and compelling high-end value proposition. In other words, Laopu Gold proves that when Chinese brands can offer a persuasive enough value proposition, they too can occupy an important position in the high-end market. What sets Laopu Gold apart is precisely this value proposition. For decades, Western luxury brands have built a mature value system around heritage narratives, brand logos, celebrity endorsement, major runway shows, scarcity management and symbolic codes of status and class. Laopu Gold has taken a different route. Rather than relying on logo premium, it combines classical culture, classical aesthetics, intangible craftsmanship and gold’s monetary attributes to create a luxury value standard more rooted in the Chinese context. Mario Ortelli, a senior luxury industry executive with more than 25 years of experience across consulting, investment banking and direct investments, told Jing Daily that Laopu Gold’s positioning provides a strong foundation for its expansion into home décor and decorative art objects, where craftsmanship, artistry and collectability are equally important purchase drivers. When consumers buy Laopu Gold’s crafted goldware, they are not simply buying an object. They are buying into the aesthetic standards, value assurance and cultural identity of a high-end brand. That is Laopu Gold’s real disruption: it is not just redefining what gold jewellery can be, but rewriting how Chinese brands compete in luxury. When gold moves beyond jewellery to become an elegant vessel for refined tea rituals, a treasured object in the scholar’s studio, or a cherished part of daily life, Laopu Gold is no longer just a gold brand. It is redefining an Eastern luxury lifestyle for China’s luxury consumers.

From Hermès to Laopu Gold, the value of luxury is being redefined

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From Hermès to Laopu Gold, the value of luxury is being redefined

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag