Influencer Beauty Brands Are Trending in China | China Decoded, BoF Professional

The labels stocked in the beauty hall at Lane Crawford Shanghai are a proxy barometer for the hottest beauty brands among the city’s well-heeled and high-spending clientele. One of its newest additions is likely unfamiliar, even to many of these dedicated buyers.

Heir Cosmetics is the brainchild of luxury Key Opinion Leader (or KOL, as influencers are known in China), Yvonne Ching. It was snapped up to join the roster of big-name beauty brands typically found on the shelves of Lane Crawford last month, a major win for a brand that only launched last June.

The brand’s appearance in Lane Crawford, as the first from a KOL-led brand, marks a new era for influencer beauty brands in China. While beauty influencers who found fame on Western social media platforms, like Huda Kattan (Huda Beauty) and Michelle Phan (Em Cosmetics), launched their own successful brands in 2010 and 2013 respectively, China’s KOL’s have only recently started to flex their online clout to market their own beauty products.

The Heir Cosmetics display at Lane Crawford Shanghai. Heir Cosmetics.

In part, that’s because China’s beauty market has been so dominated by major international brands from Europe, the US, Japan and Korea. But China’s new generation of consumers, the so-called post-90s and post-00s generations (roughly analogous to Gen-Z in the West) is shaking up this dynamic and fuelling a boom in niche and homegrown beauty brands.

The country’s hugely powerful online personalities are leaning into the opportunity, spurring the rise of a new genre of Chinese influencer-led beauty brands.

KOL Power

The gold standard of successful KOL beauty brands to date is Croxx, a make-up brand launched by Dong Zichu — also known by the English name Benny Dong — on Tmall in 2018. The 23-year-old Beijinger, who often refers to himself as “Benny Bitch,” shot to fame for sassy and high-energy product review and make-up tutorial videos posted on video platform Bilibili and the Twitter-like Weibo. He now has more than five million fans across the two platforms.

By the end of its first year in existence, Croxx had racked up over 100 million yuan ($15.2 million) in sales. In the years since it’s consistently rated among the top makeup brands on Tmall.

Ching is hoping to leverage her already well-established personal brand to similar effect, leaning on storytelling to amplify Heir’s reach. She says things are off to a “strong start.” Beauty editors have embraced the products, giving the brand’s foundation, in particular, glowing reviews.

In the future I definitely want this brand to grow huge.

The brand’s narrative draws on Ching’s own reputation for impeccable style — the source of her social media following — and fashion heritage. Ching’s mother, Charlotte Kwock was a major presence on China’s luxury scene as a long-time executive at Dior in China. Ching says the pair dreamed of one day starting their own brand, but it was Kwock’s death from cancer in 2019 that pushed her to finally launch Heir.

Its performance has exceeded her expectations and opened up new possibilities.

“My ambition has grown [with my] confidence,” Ching said. “In the future I definitely want this brand to grow huge,” she said.

She’s not the only KOL in China with such lofty ambitions. The last few years have seen a flurry of influencers bring their own brands to market.

Zhou Yangqing (also known in English as Grace Chow), who famously dated singer Luo Zhixiang, and even more famously broke up with him online in spectacular fashion, founded clean beauty label Code Mint in January of this year. Beauty influencer Zhang Mofan, who counts more than 20 million fans across her social media accounts, also has her own essential oils beauty brand, Mo Amour. And livestreaming queen, Viya, real name Huang Wei, is now in on the act, with her own Season Diary brand.

These new contenders “pose a threat when it comes to market share and growth,” said Kim Leitzes, APAC managing director of influencer marketing platform Launchmetrics. Even if they are unlikely to dent major brands’ revenue in the near-term, they represent an important new trend to watch, she added.

Testing the Waters

How large a threat these new influencer-led brands ultimately present may come down to the trade-off between lucrative partnership deals with established labels and the uncertainty of developing anything under a KOL’s own name.

China’s beauty market is currently valued at 407.8 billion yuan ($62.5 billion) and could be worth 60 trillion ($9.2 trillion) by 2025, according to data firm Research and Markets. But many KOLs remain hesitant to dive in for fear they could end up cannibalising already-rich revenue streams available in China from working with other brands, according to Elle China beauty director, Lettie Tsang.

While monetising influence in the West has been limited to ads and brand collaborations, in China, monetisation has been more organically built into the KOL ecosystem, with a multitude of income streams available to influencers.

In China, many KOLs have opened their own creative agencies. They also take a cut of massive live-streaming sales (and for super-influencers like Viya or “lipstick king” Li Jiaqi those sales amount to billions of yuan per month), and many also operate their own curated e-commerce stores on Taobao or WeChat.

According to Tsang, it makes little sense for most successful influencers to start their own brand given their existing income streams. “[They] would lose lots of money investing in [their] own brand when [they] could be making so much more from other brands,” she said.

Ching Xie, Shanghai-based client partner at digital agency Ret Ant Asia explains that Chinese beauty consumers are extremely pragmatic, more concerned with efficacy and suitability of a product than it coming from a KOL they admire, meaning KOL brands aren’t guaranteed success, no matter how large a following they have.

“It’s not like the KOL’s name on it will make people skip the step of evaluating the quality of the product,” she said.

Finding a Niche

Of course, KOLs that do want to test the waters enjoy certain advantages: they are well placed to build distinctive brand equity through storytelling, and they are well connected to their army of followers, helping them spot emerging trends or market opportunities.

Exploiting niche areas of interest in China’s beauty sphere has been a long-term pursuit for make-up artist and beauty KOL, Melilim Fu. Since launching a label under her own name in 2017, she’s displayed a similar knack for spotting esoteric gaps in the market for beauty tech and tools.

Melilim Fu is one of a cohort of Chinese KOLs launching their own beauty brands. Melilim Fu.

One of her most popular products is a magnetic storage case for false eyelashes. Going forward, she’s looking to develop products like solar-powered LED face decorations and virtual makeup, none of which would compete or interfere with existing partnerships with more traditional makeup brands.

“My products are new products, they are technology products,” Fu said.

If this first generation of KOL-led beauty brands proves successful, expect more to follow and the space to keep evolving. The influencers at the vanguard are already thinking of new ways to monetise their beauty ventures.

“Maybe in the future I can also help other KOLs launch their own brands,” said Ching. “Who knows? I’m really into this entrepreneurship idea now.”

时尚与美容

FASHION & BEAUTY

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科技与创新

TECH & INNOVATION

Alibaba. Shutterstock.

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消费与零售

CONSUMER & RETAIL

An image from Xiao Zhan’s first Li Ning campaign. Li Ning.

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政治,经济与社会

POLITICS, ECONOMY, SOCIETY

Inside a China garment factory. Shutterstock.

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