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Chinese label Shushu/Tong presented its Spring/Summer 2025 collection last night in Shanghai to an audience of domestic and international press and buyers, plus local talent and the brand’s community. While the spectacle was fresh — with an upbeat electronic soundtrack, hair fashioned into voluminous updos and doll-like, girly makeup — this wasn’t the first time international press and buyers have seen Shushu/Tong’s SS25 collection.
The brand — known for its cute, coquettish fashion with an edge — held a SS25 showroom in Paris during Paris Fashion Week that included all 190 SKUs, spanning eveningwear, bridal, knitwear, basics, footwear and jewellery. The vast space, on the first floor of a grand former residence in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, more readily resembled the showroom of a leading luxury house than an independent label. But with a rapidly scaling international business, as well as an impressive Chinese wholesale network, Shushu/Tong has achieved what many Chinese emerging designers struggle to: balancing domestic growth with international success.
It’s atypical to sell a collection before the show, but it makes for a more efficient process, says co-founder Yutong Jiang. “The clothes are finished before, so we can prepare the show even better.”
After an initial Paris meeting, Vogue Business sat down on Zoom with Jiang (her co-founder Liushu Lei was in his native Chengdu for personal reasons) to discuss how the duo have built an international Chinese brand that is beating the odds and scaling amid a luxury downturn and an increasingly challenging economic environment for independent brands.
“It’s not the best time for the economy, of course, so we have to keep our eye on the data,” Jiang says. “But for us, the most important thing is that we focus on every detail for new products. So make sure that every season we like it. I think that’s what keeps us going.”
Building a foundation in China
While its star has certainly risen globally in recent years, after hiring PR agencies in the UK and more recently the US, Shushu/Tong hasn’t been an overnight success.
Lei and Jiang, known among friends as ‘Shushu’ and ‘Tongtong’ (hence the brand name), met at Donghua University in Shanghai in 2014. They then both enrolled in the womenswear design masters at London College of Fashion. The duo launched Shushu/Tong upon graduating and — after their applications to remain in the UK on entrepreneur visas failed — they moved back to Shanghai to set up their label. Upon their arrival in Shanghai, they applied for retailer Lane Crawford’s emerging brand competition and were later selected.
“Lane Crawford bought our AW15 collection and put it in the store,” Jiang says. “But at that time, just after graduation, we didn’t have a proper company. We didn’t know how to navigate customers, we had no certifications or a supply chain. They put in quite a big order so we had to learn very quickly with their help.” The brand’s first collection was “quite successful”, Jiang adds, so Lane Crawford continued to order (it remains a stockist today). The next season, Shushu/Tong set up a showroom in Paris and secured key stockists like Dover Street Market, H Lorenzo and Opening Ceremony.
While business was steady before, the brand really took off in China after AW19, when it launched on Chinese direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform Tmall. “From then we had a better track of the product data, we knew which styles sold well and which didn’t. So after that, we decided to do carry-over styles. It built loyalty with our customers. From that moment we started our business.” Now, Shushu/Tong creates more commercial carry-over styles that maybe aren’t in the show but retail on Tmall, such as basic separates and knits. “It was an important step for us.” The brand declined to share revenues but noted that its US business grew 60 per cent in 2023, while sales soared 247 per cent in South Korea between AW24 and SS25.
Today, Shushu/Tong has over 30 international stockists, plus 20 in China. It also has a Shanghai flagship, which opened in 2022 — during the pandemic e-commerce boom. “Everyone said that it wasn’t the best moment,” Jiang says. “But we wanted to have a space for our customers to really feel the aesthetic of Shushu/Tong.” Having this direct channel of communication helps them connect with local shoppers and also allows them to offer enhanced services like alterations and repairs, Jiang adds. “We don’t want our audience to only see the pictures from a campaign, but to have a space with music, decoration that represents us and our aesthetic,” she says.
From the store, Shushu/Tong discovered the brand appealed to a much wider age range than the millennial audience they had aimed for, from Gen Z to women in their 40s. On the flipside, having their own store, as well as offline wholesale partners, does place heavier pressure on design and production, as they require more frequent product renewal. “Some stores want new products every month,” Jiang laments, “we have to say it’s impossible but we do try and add more.”
Adapting to the Western consumer
Jiang admits that the Western business is more heavily reliant on wholesale, so she knows less about that customer’s consumer behaviour. That said, marketing manager Ziniu Yu notes that Western consumers prefer more colourful dresses than the APAC consumer. In response, the brand added a broader colour palette to its more recent collections, with knits and dresses in a range of colours.
In 2017, Shushu/Tong hired the UK arm of Purple PR to build brand awareness in the market, which has helped put the brand on press and buyers’ radars. After a deluge of requests from American VIPs, the brand hired Purple in the US earlier this year with the same aim. “We know we can grow more there, and hopefully the PR will help like it did with the UK,” Jiang says.
It seems 190-plus SKUS is simply not enough. Looking ahead, Shushu/Tong is developing handbags, launching new styles in the coming seasons. “As an established label, it’s very important to develop a bag line,” says Jiang. Beyond this, “one day if we have licensing, we can also just build up our, you know, like perfume or anything. But we’d need a new supply chain. It’s all about the right timing.”
As for the show last night, with the bulk of sales done, the goal was to create more buzz. “All we want is for the audience to feel the pure Shushu/Tong vibe. The hair, the makeup, the music. For those 15 minutes, if the audience feels that, it’s a good show.”
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