Chinese brands

I first encountered To Summer through a Swedish friend — a lover of considered design and subtle scent — who had found the Chinese fragrance brand before most people in her country knew it existed. 

Songmont came to my attention via a YouTuber who cuts open luxury bags to test whether they're worth the money. He gave it higher praise than several global luxury powerhouses.

Both discoveries arrived the same way: not through my connections in China, but global audiences who are discovering a new breed of Chinese brands for themselves. 

The Made in China label is quietly acquiring new meaning — not only in manufacturing, but in fragrance, leather goods, and design. Yet, it isn't happening with much fanfare. No K-pop choreography colonising the internet. No single cultural moment where the world simultaneously falls into the same reference.

This is a stealth rise, almost cultish in its momentum, making it easy to misread from the outside.

Part of the reason is that a generation of local bred founders are building brands not by chasing global trends, but reaching into a cultural heritage most legible to their own people. 

The key differentiator isn’t marketing- it is depth. 

To Summer- currently one of China’s most popular high-end perfume brands- created their beloved scents around the likes of tea and osmantus- a flower whose annual bloom carries the weight of nostalgia, autumn and reunion in Chinese culture. 

Leathergoods maker Songmont's Chinese name reads like a line of classical poetry. Its bags draw from cultural symbols that have been accumulating meaning for centuries: paper kites, the lunar calendar's hold on Chinese aesthetics, the curve of a roof eave, the camel saddle of the Silk Road.

Guochao — 国潮, China Chic — is the term strategists now reach for to describe the rise of these brands. Nationalism and pride are the explanations usually offered.

That reading isn't wrong, but it stops too early.

The Chinese (and indeed, Western) consumer reaching for Songmont over Coach isn't making an ideological or political statement. They're choosing something that reflects a culture that has been producing beautiful objects — porcelain, silk, lacquerware, garden design, classical poetry — for millennia. Those traditions didn't disappear during the decades when Western luxury dominated Chinese aspiration. They lacked a commercial vehicle. 

Now they have one- and it is gaining momentum.

In a market where luxury has been aggressively homogenised, cultural richness is the new currency. These brands may achieve what decades of formal cultural diplomacy never managed: genuine recognition, earned quietly, one well-made object at a time. A Western consumer who has never heard of osmanthus still encounters something that communicates depth. The affinity doesn't require explanation. It simply arrives.

Field Briefing: Beijing 

Go beyond the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. The most interesting cultural storytelling in this city is happening at street level — in restored courtyard houses, underground concept stores, and hutong flagships that don't announce themselves from the outside.

What follows is where to find it.

• Songmont 山下有松 — leathergoods that carry centuries of Chinese visual grammar

WF Central flagship store. B1-131a, WF Central, 269 Wangfujing Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing

The Beijing concept store — Inner Sky Gazing （内观天象）— is built around an ancient Chinese cosmological principle. The floor plan is square — Earth, in classical Chinese cosmology. The ceiling curves into an inverted dome — Heaven. Light moves across it slowly, tracing the arc of celestial observation. The materials are travertine and rough limestone, surfaces that suggest time accumulated rather than surfaces fabricated. The bags are not immediately visible. You must walk deeper into the space — past the architecture, past the philosophy — before the products reveal themselves.

Steps from the old Imperial City. Worth the detour.

For a list of Songmont's other locations, click here.

• To Summer 观夏 — perfumery rooted in Chinese botanical memory

Guozijian Flagship 23 Guozijian Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing

A 280-year-old Qing dynasty courtyard house, quietly restored over the course of a year. No mall. No atrium. No signage visible from the street. You find it by looking for an unassuming door on one of Beijing's oldest academic thoroughfares (Guozijian)— the street that once led to the imperial examination halls, where dynasties selected their best minds.

Inside, original timber pillars stand exposed — structure as aesthetic, not concealed behind finish. Where walls once separated courtyard from interior, glass now holds the boundary without closing it. The design follows an old Chinese principle: that a building should mediate between what is outside and what is within, between what is ancient and what is present, without forcing a resolution between the two. Light does the rest — moving across off-white surfaces through the day, marking time without announcing it.

Try scents built from Chinese cultural traditions rather than the aspirational vocabulary of French and European perfumery. 

• Fnji 梵几 — furniture that ages with its owner 
• Founded by designer Gu Qigao, FNJI makes furniture intended to disappear into daily life. Each piece is solid wood, built using the classical Chinese mortise and tenon joint — timber interlocking with timber, no nails, no adhesive — and designed to age alongside its owner. Edges soften. Surfaces develop patina. The object accumulates the stories of the life lived around it.