Luxury brand building in China: Eight case studies and eight lessons learned

Although there has been a global growth of luxury business start-ups for about 100 years, which accelerated especially since the 1990s along with the upswing of the global luxury market, it is barely acknowledged that the luxury segment today is highly entrepreneurial. This is even more the case in China, where a variety of Western and Chinese market players are setting up China-specific luxury brands. Although surprising for most experts and consumers, the luxury business community in China is emerging in leaps and bounds. The main objective of this article is to analyse the major challenges and strategies for the development of luxury brands in China. For this purpose, the article discusses the concept of Chinese luxury brands and the major players and luxury start-up models. On the basis of that, success factors of Chinese luxury brands, with reference to their stage in the brand lifecycle, are analysed with eight instructive case studies including Charles Philip Shanghai, Gieves & Hawkes, NE Tiger, Seagull, Shanghai Vive, Shang xia, She Ji-Sorgere, and Sheme. Each of them represents a major luxury market entrance strategy and highlights typical success factors for luxury brand building in China, which are summarized by some major lessons learned.