Its latest launch, the Fibre Fruit Tea series, is about just that shift in proposition. Not fruit tea as a treat, but as routine. Not occasional consumption, but something embedded into daily life. The question is whether habitual hydration can be redefined as a branded experience. 

From fruit tea to functional hydration 

Consumers increasingly want beverages that are both functional and enjoyable, but the category is full of trade-offs. Health often comes at the expense of taste. Convenience can dilute perceived efficacy. 

Otter TonTon’s approach is to collapse that tension. Ingredients like kale, aronia berry, and turmeric work on the functional element, while fruit blends and sweetness control technologies smooth out the flavour profile. What they’re calling their ‘fresh extraction’ process is positioned as the technical bridge between the two. 

The more strategic move, however, is how the product is framed. Rather than leaning into wellness – which can imply effort, discipline, and inconvenience – the brand positions the product as ease. A small upgrade to something consumers already do. Reported repurchase rates above 40% suggest Otter TonTon has already moved beyond trial into habit formation.  

The discipline behind five years of growth 

Otter TonTon’s growth story is notably unflashy. In a market that has rewarded speed and virality, the brand has taken a slower path, focusing on product and the moments at which consumers engage. 

Instead of chasing traffic spikes, it has focused on when and why consumers reach for a drink. That discipline has allowed it to navigate a highly competitive period for China’s consumer brands, where many struggled with rising costs and short product lifecycles. In this landscape many brands have chosen to amplify their voice. In comparison, Otter’s branding feels geared towards timelines, being a good fit and not about exposure.  

Otter TonTon: From e-commerce brand to retail presence 

Like many digitally native brands, Otter TonTon started in e-commerce, where consumption is planned and delayed. Moving into offline retail shifts the brand into moments of immediacy. 

Now present in more than 50,000 retail locations – including convenience stores and supermarkets – the brand is mapping products to specific consumption contexts. Convenience stores capture the afternoon slump, supermarkets support household stocking, and discount channels cater to price-sensitive consumers. In this context, offline isn’t just a distribution expansion. It’s become a shift in how and when the product is consumed. 

Otter TonTon: From internet-famous to infrastructure brand 

Five years ago, Otter TonTon helped define the freeze-dried fruit tea category. That was the easier part. Creating a product is one thing, but embedding it into daily behaviour is another. 

The Fibre Fruit Tea launch suggests the brand is now playing a longer game. It is no longer just competing within beverages, but for a role in routine. That shifts the basis of competition. The moat is no longer built on traffic spikes or one-off hits, but on frequency, familiarity, and fit. In China’s consumer market, moving from internet to infrastructure is a common ambition. Few brands manage it. Otter TonTon looks set to pull it off. 

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The campaign starts with behaviour, reconstructing the cyber overthinking loop in which users attempt to self-diagnose only to find themselves caught between possibilities: is it an allergy, a cold, or something else entirely?  

Instead of treating knowledge as something delivered top-down, the campaign acknowledges how users actually process information. Confusion becomes the insight for this campaign. The result is a nice reflection of a shared experience, and a chance for Meituan Pharmacy to push a full-stack solution.  

Meituan Pharmacy: From awareness to diagnostic infrastructure 

Alongside the film, Meituan Pharmacy introduced Xiaotuan Health Assistant, an in-app service that enables real-time symptom consultation and medication guidance. The assistant positions Meituan as the place where uncertainty is resolved. 

Symptom recognition, consultation, and purchase often happen across search engines, social feeds, healthcare sites, and e-commerce platforms. By integrating these steps, Meituan Pharmacy creates a closed loop: identify, consult, act. They then add 24-hour one-on-one rapid medicine delivery, ensuring that consultation leads directly to fulfilment. 

It’s not quite a feature update. More like redefinition of a role. Meituan Pharmacy is not just facilitating transactions. They’re inserting their AI into the decision-making layer of everyday health. Allergy season is just the entry point through which that broader function is demonstrated. 

How Meituan Pharmacy is extending the system into public space 

The campaign becomes more distinctive in how it moves beyond the interface. In March, Meituan Pharmacy launched its Health Index Public Welfare Programme, opening up aggregated data from search, consultation, and purchasing trends to public institutions such as disease control centres and parks. If the platform can detect patterns in user behaviour, those signals can be used to anticipate and respond to public health risks during peak pollen periods. 

Meituan has even begun cracking on with offline intervention. In Beijing’s Chaoyang Park, they covered up high-pollen cypress trees with netting to limit allergen spread. Elsewhere, a Pollen Reduction Programme deployed misting trucks and pollen-fixing agents across parks and residential areas, lowering airborne pollen concentrations. 

At the same time, Meituan Pharmacy activated around seasonal leisure spaces. In Wuhan, pop-ups at cherry blossom sites in Donghu and landmarks like the Yellow Crane Tower distributed masks and medical kits while raising awareness of allergy prevention. Interventions like these place the brand where exposure actually occurs, aligning messaging with lived experience. 

From seasonal marketing to behavioural design 

Since 2023, when Meituan Pharmacy released Allergy Social Etiquette to address misunderstandings around allergy sufferers, the brand has been building a narrative around everyday health realities. What has changed is the level of integration. The latest campaign connects content, product, data, and environment into a single system. 

That system operates on a simple premise: seasonal health issues are recurring behaviours. People will continue to misread symptoms, search for answers, and act under uncertainty. By designing around that behaviour – rather than attempting to correct it with information alone – Meituan Pharmacy positions itself as both interpreter and intermediary. 

The result is a campaign that pushes beyond the limits of seasonal marketing. Instead of reminding users to take care, it constructs a framework through which symptoms can be recognised, understood, and acted on in real time. In doing so, they’re tapping into one of the most powerful marketing messages out there: strong, reliable products and services. 

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The runway, the Folders project, a Xiaomi tie-in, all look in the same direction: Margiela is done being obscure by default. It’s moving on to translating its message for a market in which it wants to be understood.  

A slow burn: Maison Margiela in China 

For most of its time in China, Margiela has operated in the margins. Not invisible, but never loud enough to go head-to-head with logo-heavy luxury. Early access came through multi-brand stores and word-of-mouth, with the audience skewing toward stylists, editors, and people who already knew what they were looking at. 

While others pushed visibility, Margiela leaned into opacity. Anonymity, deconstruction, and anti-branding aren’t ideas that translate cleanly in a market built on recognition. Especially in China where bold statements about luxury have typically been the norm.  

Things loosened in the mid-2010s. Retail expanded into Shanghai and Beijing, still controlled, still selective. The arrival of John Galliano added drama without dilution. Basically, the ideas didn’t change, but they did become easier for the fashion-conscious consumer to see. 

Growth didn’t come through a big footprint or loud campaigning. Online, the brand showed up where it had to – WeChat, Tmall, Rednote – but never overexplained itself. Replica fragrances, being narrative-rich, easy to buy and distribute, did much of the work on the product side. Accessories filled the gaps. Split-toe Tabi shoes came into circulation next – another anti-mainstream look, but unmistakable in an IYKYK kind of way.  

Decoding Margiela: the Shanghai show and four-city exhibition 

Set inside a container yard in Baoshan, the Shanghai show leans hard into atmosphere. There’s raw steel, open space, and a refusal to polish things up. It’s on brand, but also strategic. Margiela isn’t just presenting a collection; it’s staging its logic.

Over 70 looks move between ready-to-wear and Artisanal couture, pulling apart and recombining references like Edwardian silhouettes, antique fragments, garments that look halfway between archive and experiment. 

The real shift sits around the runway. The Maison Margiela / Folders project breaks the brand into four parts and distributes them across cities. Shanghai gets Artisanal and the archive. Beijing takes on anonymity. Chengdu works with Tabi. Shenzhen turns Bianchetto – a hand-applied white paint coating that’s a signature of the maison’s style – into something you can try yourself.  

Then comes Xiaomi. VIP cars, co-branded devices, and – more interestingly – a kit: white paint and brushes for Bianchetto. Guests are invited to apply the paint themselves. Broken up, each piece is easier for audiences to grasp than the whole. And as a whole, it looks a lot like a reflection of Margiela’s entry point strategy.  

Luxury learning 

For years, Margiela’s distance filtered out anyone that didn’t love the brand. If you got it, you got it. If you didn’t, well, you just didn’t, and it wasn’t for you.  

The Folders project suggests that this might be about to change. It’s not necessarily louder, or even broader. More like clearer. The brand is still resistant to easy reads, but now it offers a way in for those on the outside.  

The Chinese luxury market is moving past surface-level recognition. Many consumers now want to know what they’re spending their money on – and are unwilling to spend it on anything that’s not providing something clear, be that utility or emotional connection. Understanding has started to carry its own weight.  

This change may have been the reason Margiela is upping its visibility. But it’s doing so in its own way. Nothing high-spectacle, but a lens to help consumers see what they’re offering.  

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What did 999 Ausnutria do? 

Instead of telling that story through facts and product claims, 999 Ausnutria went offline and hyper local, centring an exhibition around a few small streets in a residential district in Guangzhou.  

Parents donated clothes that no longer fit their children. The clothes were hung alongside family photos of children growing up. Photos celebrated children’s height milestones. There was bone density testing and product sampling, as well as DIY keepsakes made from clothing scraps and a growing taller tips board for parents. 

It wasn’t a high-spectacle push for those who attended, but of course it was social media ready. In many ways, that’s a very nice approach to take. It allows for word-of-mouth amplification around the neighbourhood in a genuine way, kind of how residents might comment that the kid from down the street is growing up big and strong.  

What goes unnoticed 

What’s really smart about this campaign is that the element of outgrown clothes ties into the very problem that 999 Ausnutria are trying to overcome: visibility. A child’s growth is visible but often goes unrecognised. Just as 999 Ausnutria products list supplement specifics, parents track height, nutrition, and development through charts and metrics. But the most immediate proof of growth tends to be clothes that no longer fit. 

And so, here’s the emotional element. Parents notice when clothes don’t fit. They even keep them. Sometimes they pass them on. By using this as their centrepiece, 999 Ausnutria has managed to enter into conversation in a way that’s deeply linked to the part of their branding that was missing.  

How 999 Ausnutria can leverage scalability 

It’s hard to miss the scalability of this type of push. While the Little Clothes Gathering only took over a few Guangzhou alleys, it’s teed up nicely for a rollout in other parts of the city, and nationwide.  

What it lacks in scale is really its strength. A few stands, some old clothes, engagement from the immediate community is all they need. Contrast this with the way Rednote’s Street Life Festival takes over entire cities, and you’ll see how nimble 999 Ausnutria have kept themselves.  

The Dao view  

What really works about the Little Clothes Gathering is its simplicity. 999 Ausnutria have found a way to solve a problem and deliver a message in a bundle so well put together, it looks deceptively simple.  

There’s no claims to be the best. They don’t push product with any real force. They’ve simply given visibility to something that goes overlooked and sat the product beside it. In a category crowded with claims and comparisons, the emotional message their product sits beside will surely hit home.  

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Students who flashed their timetables to prove they had 8am classes got coffee in return. A Real Reviews wall surfaced crowd-sourced takes the pits and peaks of life at work. Campus cats were fed from an interactive paw tool. An intern slacking guide ran coping mechanisms as light-hearted copy.  

This isn’t a new tactic – Rednote, Bilibili and other big players have been hot on offline activation. But what Xiao Mifeng is actually doing is trying to carve out a niche that the competition can’t touch.  

Carving out campus  

Xiao Mifeng sits in an awkward gap. It’s somewhere between Rednote’s chic lifestyle agenda and a Douban discussion thread. What they get users with is structure. Verified users offer real-world advice for parts of life that are difficult enough for anyone to navigate, let alone young people. Where most social media has a look at my life vibe, Xiao Mifeng’s selling point is: Life? Here’s how to survive it.  

Looking at the difference in function like that, the Campus Reality Exhibition is a bit more like a product made physical than a marketing push.  

Why did Xiao Mifeng go offline? 

Growth is slowing across China’s platforms. New users are hard to come by. So the game must change. The spread of platforms using offline events to increase engagement points to the fact they’re going for depth over scale. They want to offer something that will cement their platforms in the daily lives of their userbase.  

Offline gives platforms a bit of texture – a literal third dimension. It turns users into participants and generates engagement that’s fed back online through content posted. We’ve seen it from Xiaohongshu and Bilibili already. Xiao Mifeng’s take is narrower. It’s not about aspiration. It’s just everyday student life, packaged as experience. 

Why Xiao Mifeng Keeping it real  

That’s So Real comes across as a bit of an odd way to name an event. Of course it’s real, it’s happening, isn’t it? Realness happens to be a core part of the niche Xiao Mifeng wants to carve out for itself.  

Again, think of this within the context of the competition: social media awash with images of lives we know all too well are fake. Xiao Mifeng’s angle is as the social media platform for the bits of life that you don’t want to photograph. Your long, boring meetings. The bad bosses. The endless, murderous overtime. They’re basically the anti-social media lifestyle app.   

The Dao view 

The exhibition pulled in more than 2,700 student participants. It offered something ‘real’ to each of them that stopped by. It was the kind of ‘real’ that translates very well to platform engagement.   

The ways they chose to engage were an owning of the low-value moments in life. Feeding a stray campus cat or writing a review of your workplace on a wall does not carry the same type of social clout as eating at one of Shanghai’s best restaurants or grabbing a drink from the city’s trendiest matcha shop. But the event pulled in the engagement anyway. Xiao Mifeng has pulled off an event that got the clicks, delivered something real, and aligned like two straight rails with its brand offering.  

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It’s that un-talked-about side of recovery. You get the organ you need, but when you’re back on your feet, you don’t feel capable of getting your teeth into life. As we’ve learnt from Alipay’s film, it’s a lesser seen psychological element to coming through alive. Patients in the film are overly cautious, limiting movement and social activity.  

Broader narratives 

Let’s wheel it back a bit. Ant Forest was originally designed to inspire low-carbon thinking in Alipay users. Essentially, you converted steps taken and user activities – like using greener forms of transport – into points that planted trees. Here, the platform is given a fresh spin as a recovery tool.  

But the connection between organ transplant recovery and Ant Forest is more conceptual than anything. The film presents the app’s user activities as incremental recovery. Tree growth as the rebuilding of life after surgery.  

Why does Alipay focus on organ transplant survivors, not donors?  

Can you think of a close demographic that gets plenty of attention in media? Organ donors? It’s an easier story to sell. There’s moral appeal and the promise of saving a life.

Alipay’s organ recipient focus is smart though. It ties in much better with how they want people to use Ant Forest. While organ donation narratives are full of one-off, dramatic interventions, transplant recovery is a slow, tentative process.  

It’s not a campaign that urges donations or grand gestures. It’s one that invites empathy through daily routine – the same daily routine that Alipay and Ant Forest run on.  

Dao’s wider view 

This is not Alipay’s first time engaging with the theme of organ transplants. Back in 2016, the platform partnered with the China Organ Transplant Development Foundation to integrate an organ donation registration portal into its app, simplifying what had been a fragmented offline process. 

That approach reflects a wider pattern across China’s digital ecosystem. Platforms like WeChat and Meituan have steadily folded public services into their core user journeys, from health tools to civic utilities. The result is a shift in how public interest initiatives are delivered: not as standalone campaigns users need to seek out, but as embedded features encountered through routine behaviour. 

What highlighing transplant survivors does for Alipay 

So, what does this latest push actually do? Not much in a clinical sense. It doesn’t improve access to transplants or change medical outcomes. This is about strengthening Alipay’s role in everyday life. By layering new meaning onto Ant Forest, the platform deepens engagement with a feature users already return to daily.  

It also reinforces Alipay’s positioning as a broader social utility, not just a payments tool. Tying into organ donation and recovery aligns with public interest priorities, while building emotional resonance around otherwise functional behaviour. In effect, Alipay isn’t changing what users do. It’s shaping how those actions are understood, binding the platform further into everyday life. 

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With it, they demonstrate a keen awareness of young Chinese peoples’ fatigue to endless marketing, and turn an early spring trend push into something more akin to experience than a report. 

Tmall and a new approach to trend marketing: A glitch that wasn’t 

The campaign opened with apparent media failure. In Shanghai and Guangzhou, huge TV billboards hung over busy shopping streets stuck on a loading symbol. Something had gone wrong. Passersby filmed the moment, then splashed it across Xiaohongshu, alarmed that the screens had bugged out. 

Only they hadn’t… The glitch was a deliberate hook. Once the glitch-out cleared, screens revealed frames of Tmall’s Early Spring Trend Awards (早春趋势大赏). No product drop (though products were a core part of the campaign). No ramming trends down the throats of consumers. It was more like an invitation to start afresh, step into something new.  

From abstract trends to everyday refreshes 

Too often, trends are packaged in industry language that feels distant from how people actually live. They’re seen but not internalised. Tmall sidesteps this by reframing its ‘early spring trends’ as ‘partial life refreshes (人生局部刷新).’ The idea is clearly aimed at younger consumers.  

In China, that demographic isn’t interested in big, sweeping transformations. They’ve been blasted to the point of deafness with that kind of marketing. Young people are now showing much more interest in small, undramatic changes.  

New trends, old spaces 

When it came to pushing products, they weren’t placed in your typical polished or aspirational settings. Tmall put them in almost eerily dissonant environments. A laptop in an old house, a mattress on the front lawn, shoes used as a flowerpot. As with the glitching screens, they’re grabbing attention with something that feels off.  

In a media environment of consumer fatigue, a move like that feels different. It invites a second look, and with it the possibility of a maybe-I’ll-give-that-a-try type attitude.  

Going offline 

Tmall extends its narrative beyond visuals into interaction, turning trends into something users can explore and enact. On Xiaohongshu, a digital ‘life first-experience’ (人生初体验) pop-up invites users into creaky old house in the virtual world. Each room maps to a trend, shifting audiences from passive viewing to active discovery. Influencers and user-generated content then grounded these ideas in everyday use.  

The campaign later pivots to Shanghai’s F1 buzz, positioning that spring refresh through racing logic: sleep as pit stops, AI as race control, wellness as fuel. Again, those small, repeatable upgrades, but amplified through a high-performance lens.  

Tmall trend marketing: Closing the loop with commerce 

For all its creativity, the campaign remains firmly linked to conversion. Each trend is connected to curated product selections within Tmall, allowing users to move directly from inspiration to purchase. The journey is frictionless: see it, experience it, buy it. And here’s where the strategy comes into focus. The campaign isn’t just about making trends visible. It’s about making them actionable.  

Rather than publishing exhaustive lists or flogging consumers with messaging, Tmall has built environments where trends are no longer explained. They are staged, explored and experienced. In a landscape where attention is fragmented and scepticism is high, it’s an approach that carries weight. 

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For this iteration, nine women from different professional backgrounds will serve as guest speakers, known as Reading Leaders (flashbacks to primary school anyone?). The lineup includes media professional Xue Jian (薛剑), film scholar Dai Jinhua (戴锦华), academic Teng Wei (滕威), writer Yao Emei (姚鄂梅), scholar Huang Xiaodan (黄晓丹), artist Xiang Jing (向京), scientist Liu Ying (刘颖), theatre director Yang Ting (杨婷) and landscape designer Tang Ziying (唐子颖). They’ll be discussing how women express themselves across fields ranging from academia to art. 

But it wouldn’t be a savvy China marketing move without a little localisation. And so, a new element is being introduced: an offline discussion series titled A Tea Room. Instead of traditional author talks, the Reading Leaders will reflect on the books that shaped their thinking and creative work. The idea is to move literary conversation out of traditional formats and into a place that can be engaged with on a more personal level.   

Aesop Women’s Library: Why books? 

For Aesop, literature has long been part of the brand’s identity. The company regularly references philosophy, poetry and essays across its packaging, stores and marketing. The Women’s Library project takes that connection a step further by transforming retail space into a temporary cultural venue, and one that reflects the literary side of the brand’s story.  

The idea dates back to 2008 – back when Aesop cleared the shelves of two Melbourne stores and replaced them with around 8,000 books that customers could take home for free. What began as an experiment and a gesture has since evolved into a travelling stunt gone global.   

In China it was a big hit. Those previous editions in Shanghai and Guangzhou drew in hordes. They didn’t fail to gain that much-needed online traction either. As Jing Daily has it, the Shanghai activation generated more than 2.45 million views on Xiaohongshu, turning the literary project into a widely shared cultural moment. 

That mix of offline intimacy and social media traction is exactly what makes the idea work in China’s retail landscape. A bookstore pop-up might sound niche, but it offers something brands increasingly struggle to create: a physical space people actually want to linger in. 

Retail without retail 

The activation flips the usual retail logic. Instead of pushing product, Aesop temporarily removes it. Visitors aren’t expected to buy anything – they might even leave with a free book. It’s restraint as strategy.  

While heaps of brands out there are turning to a coffee machine or a gait check to increase dwell time, Aesop is saying ‘to hell with it, just come and hang out.’ 

By briefly doing away with consumerism, the brand can be candid about its cultural positioning. There’s no feeling that the philosophy and literature message is just a PR stunt. Doing so builds real, meaningful engagement and gives people a reason to spend great lengths of time in the space. While there, they might even shop.  

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Sponsors have adjusted accordingly, swapping passive trackside logos for immersive experiences. In that shift, Heineken has been one of F1’s most enthusiastic players. Since partnering with the event in 2016, the Dutch brewer has been a big part of turning race weekends into social occasions.  

It’s done this through limited-edition packaging, special fan zones and city activations in a strategy that basically blends racing culture with nightlife and entertainment. For the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix, the brand has pushed that strategy to near its zenith, effectively turning Shanghai into a week-long F1 playground. 

Shanghai becomes an Formula 1 fan city 

Instead of keeping the excitement inside the Shanghai International Circuit, Heineken is spreading the race across the city. If you’re a commuter in the city, you’re probably already noticing it.  

Shanghai Metro Line 11, which connects the city to the circuit, has been wrapped in F1-themed visuals, while large promotional screens have popped up in high-traffic locations including Jiangsu Road, Xujiahui and People’s Square, as well as Hongqiao Airport Terminal 2 and Pudong Airport. 

And then there are the social events. The 2026 Chequered Flag Carnival is at the heart of that. Rather than staging one central event, Heineken has linked multiple districts into a network of racing-themed celebrations – a sort of rolling party where people can let loose, check in and splash the glamorous image F1 is chasing across their social media.  

It’s not all any-hour Heinekens though. At a venue on Shanghai’s West Bund, fans can explore a motorsport-themed playground complete with race broadcasts, interactive games and exhibition displays. You can even pose with an F1 trophy.  

Celebrity guests dial up the spectacle. Actors and racing enthusiasts Jimmy Lin (林志颖), Li Ruiyun (李瑞昀) and Daniel Wu (吴彦祖) have all appeared as F1 star friends, adding further chances for glamorous photo ops.  

And glamour is what this is all about. F1 is fast becoming the kind of sporting event you want to be seen at. It’s a vibe shift that’s taking the event much closer to that of Wimbledon or the Super Bowl: a high-status calendar spot for the international leisure class. 

Heineken F1: Why Shanghai matters to the grand strategy 

Shanghai has long been a strategic foothold for Formula 1 in Asia. The Shanghai International Circuit opened in 2004 and was designed as one of the sport’s earliest expansions into the region.  

Today the Chinese Grand Prix still functions as a gateway to the world’s largest automotive market – a major draw for carmakers, tech brands and lifestyle sponsors looking for a slice of the pie. But Shanghai offers something else: visibility. 

The city remains China’s most internationally oriented metropolis and a magnet for affluent consumers. Campaigns staged there tend to ripple across social platforms like Xiaohongshu, Douyin and Weibo, turning local events into national conversations. Add to that a city government keen to promote tourism and large-scale events, and the result is fertile ground for ambitious activations. For F1 and its sponsors, Shanghai is the ideal place for a race that wants to spill beyond the circuit and take over the city. 

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MUJI says the closure of its Huaihai Road flagship is part of an adjustment to its retail network rather than a pull-back from the China market. The company has been reshaping its store footprint, closing some older locations while planning to open dozens of new ones nationwide. But true to a brand synonymous with good taste, they’ve managed to make tis pull-out of a prime location into an artfully smooth exit.  

How did MUJI spin the closing of its Shanghai flagship? 

Rather than launching the typical closing sale spectacle, MUJI has chosen something far more in character with that vision of minimalism: a quiet goodbye. On the exterior wall of the store, the brand installed a large farewell poster, bold print stating: goodbye, see you again (再见，在见) employing a Chinese linguistic twist. While 再见 literally means ‘goodbye,’ it can also be read as ‘see you again.’ The dual meaning puts a softer spin on the departure. It’s not a forever goodbye.  

The visual language also follows that stylistic restraint. Sparse typography sits against areas of blank space, while the copy inserts everyday scenes between the characters ‘在’ (to exist) and ‘见’ (to meet).  

Mountains, lakes, fields and dining tables appear alongside moments such as solitude, gatherings, mornings and nights. The message reframes the brand’s relationship with customers not as a retail transaction, but as a series of small encounters woven through daily life. MUJI also released a short film to accompany the campaign. Set against shifting natural light and tree shadows, text slowly emerges on screen, creating a gentle, almost meditative rhythm. 

MUJI’s other great moments 

The approach echoes MUJI’s long-standing visual style. From the brand’s famous ‘Horizon’ poster series – which featured vast landscapes with barely any product visible – to lifestyle campaigns around MUJI Hotel and Found MUJI exhibitions, the company has consistently relied on minimalist imagery and reflective copy rather than overt advertising. 

The farewell campaign for the MUJI Shanghai flagship closure hits on the brand’s broader storytelling strategy in China too. Last year, during the renovation of its Chengdu Taikoo Li flagship, MUJI launched a poster series titled ‘川流有息’ (Lit. Flowing endlessly, with moments to breathe), using poetic copy grab attention, and touch on that sense of soothing the brand’s message pushes.  

Muji’s Shanghai flagship closure: not goodbye 

The closing of the Huaihai Road flagship says as much about China’s evolving retail landscape as it does about MUJI itself. Large flagship stores like the Huaihai site are expensive to operate, and shifting shopping habits – from the rise of e-commerce to changing foot traffic patterns in traditional shopping streets – are forcing brands to rethink how physical retail fits into the wider customer journey.  

Instead of treating the closure as a dry commercial announcement, MUJI turned it into another chapter of its storytelling and a reminder that the brand’s idea of good living was never confined to a single storefront. And so it’s got to be said: that was one smooth exit.   

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