How Yvmin became Chinese Gen Z’s favorite jewelry brand

A brand collaboration hashtag rarely reaches more than a million impressions on Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote). But Beijing-based brand Yvmin joining forces with Molly Tea this month has resulted in a hashtag currently at 6.9 million, despite only launching three weeks ago. From futuristic Y3K eyewear and charms made of grapes, to “kawaii” teddy bear pendants and ceramic bowknots, everything that the premium jewelry label offers lands with Gen Zers on Xiaohongshu — the Yvmin account on the platform feels like a visual regurgitation of all the core trends that young people obsess over in China. The recent Molly Tea drinks and accessories line captures exactly that, featuring a Yvmin bear fridge magnet made of orange peels with crystal jewelry, referencing the viral trend of fruit peel charms, along with matching teddy hair clips. Put that 6.9 million figure next to the brand’s cumulative “yvmin” hashtag total of 12.3 million, and the scale of the moment becomes clearer: a three-week bubble tea collaboration has generated more than half the lifetime conversation volume attached to the brand’s own name. Laura Darmon, founder of Envision and buying director at ENG explains that the mix of novelty and style approach has crafted a distinct identity for the brand. “[Yvmin] is recognizable and consistent, and it is clear that the designers are growing the brand in an intentional, steady and intelligent way,” she said. Yvmin’s physical footprint is small at present, with only its Beijing flagship at B1 NLG-38a, North Taikoo Li, Sanlitun, and a counter at B1 SC10, Phase II, MixC Mall in Hangzhou and select international stockists carrying seasonal pieces. That's because the brand reputation has been fully built online. The community came first; the physical stores exist to feed it. What’s Yvmin’s story? Yvmin’s founders, Xiaoyu Zhang and Min Li (李忞), graduated from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2012 and launched the brand’s first collection in 2013. The founders are known to describe their output as a “body accessory laboratory” — jewelry conceived as an intervention on the body rather than a decoration hung off it. The breakout object was a piece of eyewear: eyeglass frames reimagined as jewelry, which remains its most recognizable silhouette more than a decade on. That single design reads as art-adjacent rather than trend-chasing; although, since 2013, artistic frames have been propelled by South Korea’s Gentle Monster, making Yvmin more recognizable for teddy bears and fruit-adorned, playfully fresh jewelry and body accessories. But it definitely gave Yvmin an entry into the visual internet years before Xiaohongshu became the arbiter of Chinese youth taste. The Shushu/Tong effect Yvmin’s cult status was not built on Xiaohongshu alone. Its first collaboration with Shanghai label Shuhu/Tong arrived for Spring/Summer 2019, debuting in late 2018, with the blood-themed, girlish-gothic pieces and lookbooks rolling out across 2018 and 2019. In 2026, the pair are still joining forces on collections, with the latest being a limited-edition Chinese Valentine’s Day (Qixi) ceramic goblets collection released in August 2026. The partnership has since become close to synonymous with both brands. For Yvmin, the runway association converted an art-school practice into a fashion-week fixture, embedding it in the Labelhood-adjacent designer scene that international editors were arriving in Shanghai specifically to see. It also handed the brand a durable aesthetic identity that predates the current trend cycle. Much of what Chinese Gen Z now consumes under labels like coquette, office siren, and Y3K was already present in Yvmin’s back catalog. Fluency in the trend cycle, not dependence on it The cat series, the fruit-peel charms, the ceramic bowknots, the Y3K eyewear: each maps onto a discrete Xiaohongshu micro-trend, but each is also executed in a way that is unmistakably Yvmin. The brand’s platform account has 105,200 followers and 819,700 likes, which is high for a company account on Chinese social media, where user-generated content is king; it succeeds for functioning as an aesthetic mood feed, but also reflects the stylish reputation that Yvmin has cultivated, which is why individual products travel further than the account itself. Users follow to be associated with the cult world it has built. This is also where the kidult economy argument sits. Yvmin’s pricing runs roughly $60 to $500, which places the entry tier squarely in the impulse-collectible band that has powered blind-box and plush-charm spending in China. Artistic prosthetics Starting in an authentically artistic way, Yvmin designed a prosthetic leg for influencer Xiao Yang in 2021, producing a beautiful metal limb with a heart shaped knee-cap, demonstrating a celebration of self-expression and inclusivity. The brand has also produced a series of prosthetic bras for Xuan Zai, a woman with Poland syndrome — including a transparent, crystal-like “Jewelry Bra Pad” with a hidden inlay for LEDs, so the prosthesis can be lit from within. Each of these projects sit alongside references to philosophy and questions about how women look at their own bodies. Commercially they are not selling but reputationally they do a great deal: they are the reason Yvmin’s teddy bear hair clips read as a knowing choice by a serious studio rather than as another “kawaii” SKU. For a Gen Z consumer who is highly alert to brands cynically renting youth culture, that distinction is the whole ballgame. Collaborations as distribution, not decoration Yvmin’s collaboration list (Shushu/Tong, Charles & Keith, Ashley Williams, Didu, Molly Tea) reads like distinct strategic functions rather than a scattergun approach to co-branding. Shushu/Tong, Didu, and Ashley Williams have delivered fashion legitimacy. Charles & Keith delivered regional accessibility and volume. Molly Tea delivers something else again: soccer-scale exposure at the price of a cup of tea, roughly 20 RMB ($2.80). A bubble tea chain puts a Yvmin object into the hands of consumers who would never have walked into the brand's boutique, and the orange-peel bear magnet is designed to be photographed on a desk rather than worn on a body, which is precisely why it moved. “The brand campaigns are always strong, featuring the right talents, and bringing different perspectives to the brand. That, combined with a solid PR and seeding strategy ensures that Yvmin is visible in the right places and presented the right way,” said Darmon. Yvmin’s rise is often read as trend fluency, but the more useful reading is layering. As Darmon said, “Yvmin is succeeding because it takes a genuine 360-degree approach.” The brand runs a legible visual signature, a price ladder that lets anyone buy in, a collaboration strategy where each partner does a different job, and a non-commercial art practice that underwrites the credibility of everything else.

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How Yvmin became Chinese Gen Z’s favorite jewelry brand

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