By purchasing French brands Pier Augé and EviDenS de Beauté and recently opening the S’Young City campus around its Changsha headquarters, in the province of Hunan, Chinese group S’Young International (水羊股份) made its objectives clear. Its excellent 2022 results helped the group enter the Top 100 of Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) Beauty Inc. for the first time, directly at the 49th rank.
“In the past, S’Young Group was more driven by the dual business of operating self-owned brands and helping foreign.
It may be because it has been around for almost 20 years, an age considered mature, compared to many young Chinese brands born after 2015: cosmetics brand Proya (珀莱雅) seems to find it easy to progress on a Chinese market undergoing deep changes.
Initially specialized in skincare essentials, the brand based in Hangzhou, near Shanghai, took a strategic turn in 2019 when it launched the Black Sea Salt Bubble Mask, now a bestseller with monthly sales above a million units on the Tmall platform..
Self-service selling of small-size cosmetics in an arty environment: this is the initial concept of Chinese company Harmay (話梅), which has just fundraised 200 million dollars thanks to investors, including American development capital company General Atlantic.
Since opening a first store in 2017, Harmay has sold small-sized products of Chinese and global brands for less than 100 yuans (14 euros). Thanks to an in-house architecture design team, it now owns nine stores in China and counts over.