SHANGHAI — During Shanghai Fashion Week, three local fashion multibrand designer stores opened their doors in downtown Shanghai, all with ambitious plans to cater to a fashion-savvy community in China‘s fashion capital.
All three local players — XC273, Looknow Aflow and R130, along with the U.K.’s Machine-A — boast differentiated retail concepts and business propositions.
XC273, which soft-opened a year ago, officially launched its expansive shop and event space with a floor dedicated to SND, Chongqing’s coolest multibrand retailer.
Looknow Aflow, the venture capital-backed multibrand chain store, is edging into menswear and collectibles with a streetwear bent.
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R130, an incubator project backed by the Chinese apparel company Ribo Fashion Group, is taking on high fashion with a focus on Antwerp designer brands.
Post-lockdown, the appetite for new retail experiences is palpable.
“We realized that shoppers are gradually moving away from the traditional shopping mall retail experience and we are all taking part in this movement,” said Ming Yan, cofounder and chief executive officer of Looknow.
“For the new generation of multibrand shops, their advantage is the grasp on Gen Z shoppers,” said Ying Zhang, founder of XC273.
“A curbside store with character and personality will always be a draw for a curious audience,” said Yvonne Shi, cofounder at R130. “It will always be a niche market, but if we do it well, we will attract the right kind of people.”
As the market finds renewed interest in niche brands and local designer labels come of age, these multibrand retailers have emerged concurrently to seek out a new crop of fashion lovers and deepen ties with the brands they carry.
Case in point: Labelhood recently created a joint venture with local designer brand Shushu/Tong to launch a store at the newly opened JC Plaza shopping mall, while Looknow has hosted long-term pop-up stores for Ganni before the brand officially launched in China.
According to the McKinsey 2022 Fashion Industry Whitepaper released during Shanghai Fashion Week, “niche is making its way to the main street.”
“Buyer shops will become an influential platform to reach a specific set of customers, provide support for independent brand’s marketing, sales operations and help with commercial real estate negotiations, which will create more opportunities for independent brands,” the report said.
XC273
XC273, the expansive 14,000-square-foot, three-story store, is one of the biggest retail projects in recent Shanghai multibrand retail history. XC273 is backed by textile manufacturer Chenfeng Group, which has helped finance local womenswear brand Comme Moi.
Equipped with a theatrical ice blue water pond at the center of the space, the shop quickly gained popularity on Chinese social media.
XC273 celebrated the launch with a host of events and projects for local designers Yue Qiqi, Penultimate and Untitlab, and launched an art show with neighboring gallery Fibre.
Located in a former state-owned towel factory, XC273 is hidden at one end of a newly established mixed-used retail project. But fashion insiders have no problem locating the venue since it has previously housed the Not Showroom, also owned by XC273’s parent company XCommons, and hosted Windowsen‘s inaugural fashion show.
“We know people want experimental brands, but also garments that are more wearable for people who are less in the know,” said Zhang of XC273’s position as a fashion department store. The store decided to work with SND to reach that goal, with the second floor dedicated to SND-selected brands.
“I was initially drawn in by XC273 for its sense of storytelling in the space,” said Will Zhang, founder of SND. “But most importantly, we decided to work together to focus on presenting new and exciting brands to our customers.”
The store’s first floor highlights mostly emerging menswear brands, such as Kiko Kostadinov, EgonLab and Kusikohc, while the third floor will evolve around artist furniture and lifestyle offerings.
Using XC273 as a testing ground, the store also hosts shop-in-shops to support brands that came of age with Not Showroom, such as 8on8 and Samuel Guì Yang. She hopes that XC273 will serve as a testing ground for local brands before paving the way to expand into monobrand stores.
“There’s a tricky part about the Chinese market,” said Ying Zhang. “Multibrand stores want to support brands like how Tmall does it by selling a lot of popular products, but not many shops maintain a depth of the inventory on these brands so people won’t be able to see a well-rounded picture of the brand story.
“So we want to go deep with individual brands, our end goal is to make the brands stronger. This will in turn make the store more appealing,” she added.
Looknow Aflow
Cofounded by Ming Yan, a serial entrepreneur and former media company executive, Looknow started as an e-commerce retailer and ventured into brick-and-mortar in 2019. It completed a $22 million Series-A funding led by GGV Capital in 2018.
Looknow Aflow is the franchise’s 14th door in China, on Shanghai’s popular Anfu Road.
“We want to break free of the impression that we are a womenswear store. We want the identity of Looknow to flow, that’s why we called it Aflow, and it also rhymes with Anfu Road,” Yan said. “We identified a retail lifestyle called ‘new urbanism’ in Shanghai. It’s more unisex, hip, streetwear-driven, but not so literally.”
The two-story curbside store currently features an outdoor cafe, an expansive amphitheater first floor covered in paint-splashed carpeted walls and dotted with Chinese plants and artworks. It also includes a graffiti bathtub painted by Yan’s 5-year-old son. The second floor is currently hosting a pop-up of local ceramics brand Xixingle.
The store features popular brands like We11done, Sunnei and Helmut Lang.
“We realized that young professionals no longer want to be identified by their work. They want to more outwardly display their lifestyle and hobbies post-lockdown, such as group street cycling, surf skating and playing Frisbee,” Yan explained.
For Yan, tapping into interest groups is essential for managing customer relationships. “It’s not enough to chat with our customer base over Wechat,” Yan said. “The multibrand retail experience has to be about having fun with the customers, and that’s how you capture the user’s limited attention span.”
Later this year, Looknow will launch a parkside retail outpost across the street from IAPM, a popular luxury shopping mall in downtown Shanghai. The VC-backed retailer is also hoping to secure its next round of funding next year.
R130
Backed by Ribo Fashion Group, a Shanghai-based apparel company, R130 purchased the 5,380-square-foot, four-story building in downtown Shanghai, neighboring Labelhood Men’s store.
The retailer spent more than a year designing and renovating the building. The result was a tower-like structure fully equipped with an elevator.
R130 is managed by Yvonne Shi, a former art world veteran who plans to bring more avant-garde Antwerp brands to the Shanghai market.
For the first two weeks of opening the space is being dedicated to an exhibition spotlighting recent Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp graduates, including Di Du, Sensen Lii, Victor Wang, Giorgia Galfre, Igor Dieryck, Jasmin Bandomer and Marc Pengel.
“I think these designers, whom I prefer to call artists, are not only making great clothes but at the same time they have a knack for discussing social issues via their designs,” Shi said.
The first floor of R130 is dedicated to “easy basics” by brands such as Maison Margiela and Craig Green, which is curated by Chengdu designer boutique Clap. The second floor is dedicated to emerging designers such as Botter and Y-Project. The third floor features well-known avant-garde brands such as Ann Demeulemeester and Rick Owens, while the fourth floor is a fashion gallery curated by Cofi, a local fashion archive store and research center.
Shi said even though these brands have an established presence in the Shanghai market, how the store buys them will help R130 differentiate. “I spent some time observing how natural light would hit each rack of clothes at different times of day, so how the clothes are presented, how different brands interact with each other is important,” Shi said.
“We just want to curate a store that’s laser-focused on serious fashion, especially after the lockdown. Our mentality has been shifting, simply doing one thing right is enough,” Shi said.
As for the future, R130 is in talks with Dover Street Little Market to launch a pop-up store at R130.