China’s fashion industry is undergoing a profound transformation. The growth rate of the domestic market has slowed, and brands as well as distributors are generally facing greater operating pressures — not least because of President Trump’s latest round of tariffs, ramping up China’s total to 54 per cent.
In this evolving climate, the showroom model must transcend its traditional role of merely connecting brands with buyers, as Chinese showrooms slowly think outside the box, rather than solely eyeing Western retailers for future development. By moving the focus beyond sales, showrooms could help brands secure collaborations and create new business opportunities.
In the process of this industry reshuffle, how can China’s showrooms break through the current difficulties to drive sustainable growth?
Expanding the scope of a showroom
Founded in 2010, Alter Showroom has launched various projects to deepen its industry presence and help brands gain a foothold in the Chinese and global market. One of the projects by Alter Showroom, titled ‘X-Dream Project’, now in its third edition, not only assists brands in completing their retail strategies and business layouts, but offers 360-degree mentorship, helping brands develop their visual identities, establish robust supply chains, and connect with international brands and potential investors.
In a highly competitive retail environment, brands should look to interact with target consumers in more unique ways. In tune with this, Alter has also launched the Designer Apartment programme in its eponymous store, collaborating with a select designer brand every month to provide an independent space as an extension of its brand culture and creative spirit; externally, Alter has planned the Xapsule single-brand pop-up store project in core business districts around the world. Looking ahead, the showroom plans to open a boutique outlet series to further assist partner brands in clearing inventory.
“We need to truly understand the needs and shortcomings of the designer brands we are both coaches and ‘all-round stewards’ for,” says Alter Showroom founder Sonja Long Xiao. Facing the changes in the industry, Long Xiao says: “The Chinese fashion industry is undergoing a transformation from scale expansion to value cultivation. The mission of the showroom is no longer just to simply match supply and demand, but to become an accelerator of industry upgrading.”
In the current market environment, competition between showrooms is no longer limited to the aggregation of brand resources, but a comprehensive test of the strength of brand incubation capabilities, market strategies and operational retail support.
Strengthening categories and services
Showrooms with certain leading advantages are evolving into ecosystem builders, refreshing the menu by optimising their brand portfolios in response to market trends.
Streetwear brands have witnessed high repurchase rates in Chinese showrooms over the last decade. But as streetwear growth slows, showrooms are favouring urban lifestyle or gorpcore brands over traditional streetwear. Tube Showroom added outdoor labels Ankorau, Tsubo and Uppervoid in 2022 in response to shifts in the market, and the brands are selling well, says Tube founder Zemira Xu.
Tube is one of the first Shanghai showrooms to include lifestyle categories such as fragrance and home furnishings in its product offering, in addition to lifestyle label Happy Life, as Chinese consumers increasingly invest in the categories post-pandemic, Xu shares. “From the perspective of a buyer’s store, we should not only analyse consumers as data, but also have a real insight into their psychology,” she says. “Consumers do not buy single products, but a lifestyle. Only by constantly updating the brand portfolio and category portfolio can we achieve longer term business vitality.” Likewise, Lab Showroom, run by Shanghai retailer Labelhood, is investing in jewellery and lifestyle brands alongside luxury and contemporary fashion.
Deepening local ties vs breaking through overseas
Chinese sizing tends to skew smaller than Western labels, and while some expand their ranges to cater to customers in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) or the US, traditional brand sizing in China aligns better with that of neighbouring countries like Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand, thus attracting buyers from those countries to Shanghai’s showrooms. At leading showroom Tube, which features some of the region’s most prominent labels — Shushu/Tong, Markgong, Jacques Wei — there’s been an uptick in buyers from neighbouring countries for Autumn/Winter 2025, says Xu. While at trade show Onetimeshow, which attracts around 8,000 buyers from 300 Chinese cities annually, there was a dedicated section for Thai brands this season, with around 20 on display, ranging from contemporary eveningwear to accessories. This engagement with neighbouring markets could serve Chinese showrooms well, as Western trade challenges mount.
One of the factors converting the curiosity of international buyers into loyalty is the strong storytelling credentials of Chinese labels. Despite the challenging economic climate, brands like Shushu/Tong and Markgong are still growing, as they continue to invest in high-impact shows to establish clear identities and attract media attention.
To help boost his brand awareness in South Korea, Mark Gong held a pop-up in Korean boutique Boon the Shop in August 2024, Xu says, and in the seasons that followed, he was able to pick up even more Korean store opportunities. But nothing is guaranteed, explains Xu. “Brand popularity in overseas markets is unpredictable,” she says, “but with Shushu/Tong and Markgong, it’s been a natural [evolution].”
Some brands are looking further afield to Western retailers. For the first time, ICI Showroom created an exhibition and street pop-up in Paris for AW25. While these types of activations can be costly, the brand took a “down-to-earth approach”, says ICI manager Sam Wan. Wan and his team directly selected passers-by, inviting them into the pop-up store and offering carefully prepared gifts in exchange for photos and Instagram posts. In the end, they not only attracted dozens of fashion bloggers, including some with more than 100,000 followers, but also triggered a chain reaction on the buyer side, with buyers from the likes of Dover Street Market inquiring about the brand.
“There is an information gap between China and foreign countries. Take, for example, Yiwu, a city in Zhejiang Province, known for its robust international trade and business. They can effectively drive people to come in groups to pick them up,” Wan explains. “The offline popularity is combined with the spread of online social media, and one person tells 10 people, and 10 people tell a hundred people. This has leveraged international influence at a low cost, and is a very cost-effective way to create a communication hotspot.”
Mons Showroom, which has been in operation for six seasons, also displayed brands in the form of a see-now, buy-now ‘street store’ during Shanghai Fashion Week. It was important to ensure that buyers could access inventory quickly, so the Mons Showroom made sure to beef up its inventory ready for buyer demand. “In order to achieve see-now, buy-now, this season we [encouraged] participating brands to have instant inventory to ensure that buyers can get the goods directly for wholesale or customers can get the goods directly,” shares Mons Showroom manager Jing Chao. “We will display the location as a pop-up store for one month after the fashion week to help brands capture the long tail of traffic.”
With this, brands can obtain more sufficient display space and time, acquire customers and collect feedback from a comprehensive perspective, which facilitates the timely optimisation of product and marketing strategies.
Incorporating consumer retail into the showroom space could be a smart move, as it allows brands to receive feedback on product and buyers to observe what consumers are gravitating towards in real time. “Brands can only truly understand the current market situation by going to stores in person,” Chao says. “Overly idealistic sales expectations may really need to be digested by designer brands themselves. In the past, brands inevitably criticised showrooms or buyers’ stores for poor sales.”
Many of Shanghai’s more established labels are hitting the 10-year mark — but in an increasingly challenging domestic climate, Chinese consumer needs are changing.
Inside trade show Onetimeshow’s RedNote section, brands displayed see-now, buy-now current season collections (with a lot of inventory), ready for KOLs to purchase or borrow and post on the social platform, often prompting very high sell-through.
When touching on the growth of Chinese boutiques, Chao remains optimistic: “We can see that boutiques in Tier 2 and 3 cities are rising rapidly. Thanks to the advantages of operating costs such as manpower and rent, their operations are more stable. Especially in Northeast China, Central China and other regions where the richness of brands can be further explored, it may become a new opportunity for brands and showrooms to continue to refine and deepen their cultivation.”
Transforming trade hubs: Risks and rewards
Although there is a growing crop of showrooms during Shanghai Fashion Week, it remains challenging to exist solely as a sales platform. To thrive in the long term, showrooms must transform into trade hubs that can help brands and stockists achieve common prosperity.
Lexi Zhang, a senior showroom manager who is also a media consultant, says many showrooms are currently out of balance when it comes to differentiating their positioning. Some showrooms focus on style or geographical relevance to gain recognition — for example, those that focus on quiet luxury, Nordic brands or Japanese brands — but there may be a paradox here. “It is inevitable that there will be internal competition for buyer resources among homogeneous brands. Therefore, when positioning themselves, showrooms should be vertical to the deep portrait of their existing core customer base, rather than simply metaphysical style and geographical relevance,” says Zhang.
Sometimes, how a brand is perceived in terms of its consumer identity is more influential than its aesthetic or stylistic choices alone. “For instance, when you clearly know that your core customer base is highly intelligent women aged 30 to 45, don’t blindly define them as lovers of minimalist style, but deeply understand their clothing needs for [different occasions],” he adds.
At the same time, Zhang says: “Whether from the brand side or the buyer side, showrooms should never think about making quick money, otherwise every penny of quick money earned is actually overdrawing their own future reputation and market potential.”
Chao of Mons Showroom agrees. “The prosperity during the [pandemic] was a variable, and the current ‘calmness’ is the norm in the market. Retailers and designers need to learn to accept the small and beautiful survival philosophy, and the same goes for showrooms,” says Chao. “This year may be a watershed, and the industry concentration is rapidly increasing. ‘Survivors’ must establish irreplaceable core capabilities, with healthy cash flow and a unique brand portfolio as far more vital than blind expansion.”
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