I met jewelry designer Yezi Zhou in her dedicated space within Shanghai’s Room Room showroom, during Shanghai Fashion Week (SHFW). She and her business partner, fellow designer Ke Li, are fresh from a trip to Georgia and Armenia. They love to travel, which is perhaps why, despite being raised in China’s Zhejiang and Heilongjiang province, respectively, their jewelry brands are named after Italian food: Olio e Aceto and Sale e Pepe.
Olio e Aceto — the first label, launched in 2019 — built a steady client base for its classic silver and pearl pieces, with 30 stockists across China and Europe. But last year, the founders noticed a shift in what local jewelry buyers and consumers were looking for. They decided to launch Sale e Pepe, which swapped Olio e Aceto’s chunky silhouettes for dainty, spiritual styles, with engravings to represent certain emotions, red stones, leather straps and charms. In its first year, Sale e Pepe is already outpacing their first born in terms of sales, with around 30 Chinese stockists for Spring/Summer 2026.
“I have to say, the trend is on that one now,” Zhou says, gesturing to the Sale e Pepe display, set up in an old armoire, with its spiritual pieces laid among the red fabric. Sale e Pepe’s SS26 collection is inspired by Armenian vineyards, with juicy red stones resembling tiny grapes. They will include postcards in the packaging when orders go out next year. “After the pandemic, people in China want jewelry that brings them emotion,” Zhou says. “It’s all about energy,” echoes the showroom’s managing director Roger Miao, “buyers care today about jewelry having a story to tell.”
As I tour various showrooms during SHFW, this design pivot to spiritual or traditional jewelry becomes a familiar tale. The Chinese luxury jewelry market has soared over the last five years, amid the guochao (or “China chic”) movement, which celebrates Chinese heritage and encourages locals to buy into domestic brands. China’s luxury jewelry market, which incorporates fine and costume offerings, grew 46% to $7 billion from 2020 to 2025, with a combined annual growth rate of 7.1%, despite rising costs in gold and silver following Trump’s tariffs. In response to market growth, showrooms across Shanghai, which underpin the city’s fashion week, are upping their jewelry games. Not Showroom displayed eight jewelry brands this season, up from five for FW25, while Tube Showroom dedicated an entire room to its growing cohort of jewelry labels, to make it easier for buyers.
In the big leagues, as brands from Cartier to Van Cleef Arpels meet regional headwinds, domestic jewelry labels are soaring. Key players include Chow Tai Fook ($11.6 billion), Lao Feng Xiang ($6.8 billion), Chow Tai Seng ($1.9 billion) and Luk Fook ($1.8 billion), with revenue figures based on data from Visible Alpha, shared with Vogue Business earlier this year. The majority of these labels favor more classic designs, but relative newcomer Laopu — launched in 2016 — has disrupted the market, blending 24-karat gold and diamonds with silhouettes and patterns inspired by Chinese tradition. The brand is projected by Morgan Stanley to reach $2.8 billion in sales by 2025. (For comparison, Cartier is expected to reach $1.5 billion in the same period.)
Traditional and nomadic
Laopu, like many newer Chinese labels launched in the last decade, has leaned into craft and traditional styles. And across brand showrooms during SHFW, it became clear that spiritual, traditional or playful jewelry is thriving, as it allows Chinese consumers to escape from the economic downturn of the last few years.
As I approached Japanese brand En Sage’s area in Tube Showroom, with beaded or string necklaces and silver animal pendants in the shape of leaves, horses or shark teeth, I imagined it was a modest business, based on artisanal craft. I was mistaken. En Sage has 150 stockists, with the vast majority in China, where there’s an appetite for the “nomadic style”, says the brand’s founder, who goes by Jello. Jello launched the brand in 2020. “[Customers] in China always like this style,” she says. “We like to explore philosophy, living according to the rhythm of nature.”
Pieces retail from RMB 800 to 2,000 (approximately $110 to £2,200), designed in Tokyo and then produced in Guangzhou, a local manufacturing hub that vastly reduces import and export costs for the brand’s vast Chinese store network. The challenge is, as brands get wise to the trends in nomadic, traditional jewelry, the space is becoming saturated, says Jello. “We’re overlapping with each other. There’s too many brands here right now,” she says, gesturing to the scores of jewelry players in Tube Showroom, many of whom are also riffing on traditional beading and silhouettes.
Another label, Hui Hui, creates pendants made with horse hair, which also ascribe to the nomadic trend, has secured 80 stockists in just two years, a testament to the popularity of the style. “Right now, everybody is going to brown jewelry,” says a translator for the Apt702 founder, “so maybe we are on trend, but it’s important that we stick to this style no matter what the trends are.”
While guochao is influencing the market, part of the shift to more traditional jewelry made from leather, string and beads is financial for designers. The price of silver has risen 38% in the last 12 months, according to Fortune. En Sage started out making the majority of its products in silver, but amid rising costs, the founder pivoted to alternative materials. Several brands I spoke with also employed this strategy to cope with climbing silver prices.
The story is similar for jewelry designer Niang Niang, who founded her label Empress 47 in 2014. She started out making jewelry inspired by Eastern and Western gothic architecture, with heavy silver and earth stones. But as trends changed and silver prices climbed, Niang is moving further toward traditional styles and silhouettes, with a greater focus on the East, the founder says, as that’s “what buyers are looking for”. For SS26, she added symbols that mean light, daintily engraved into necklaces, which were popular because of the story behind them. But as she looks to more traditional silhouettes, she has to balance her design ideals with the rising cost of silver, like her peers. “We use a lot of silver to create this texture,” she says. “It’s becoming a little hard.”
Fun and girly
While some designers riff on nature and Chinese culture, other labels are finding success in playful, lighthearted designs, to tap into the growing desire for childlike aesthetics that we’re seeing sweep China and the world (exemplified by the Labubu phenomenon).
Yvmin is one of China’s fastest-growing contemporary jewelry and accessories labels, with 40 domestic stockists and 30 across the world. Co-founded by Central Academy of Fine Arts graduates Xiaoyu Zhang and Min Li in 2013, the brand specializes in wearable art, describing itself as a “body decoration laboratory”. You may have seen Yvmin’s designs on the runway, from the layered, OTT pearls at Shanghai brand Shushu/Tong’s shows, to the much-talked-about toilet roll bracelets at London-based designer Ashley Williams’s SS26 show, which came to be after sharing a showroom with the designer in Paris. The latest collection features necklaces, headbands and earrings made of mini pastel-colored baseball caps, to bedazzled sunglasses. The brand is seeing an upswing post-pandemic, as these childish styles, long favored in Asia-Pacific countries like Japan and South Korea, become increasingly popular in China and the West.
Ty’s Grocery is another playful contemporary jewelry label that’s capitalizing on the trend. Collections feature gobstopper rings made from confetti and brightly colored resin, big heart necklaces in banana-skin print with vivid costume stones, and hairpins and bracelets that look fit to eat, in the shape of lemons or limes. The brand has 15 to 20 stockists, adding five or six each season, says founder Tianhao Wang, who ran a vintage store in Beijing before switching to jewelry. “We’re growing fast because of our fun and humorous style,” he says. “It’s really popular in China, Korea and Japan right now.” Like many others, Wang designs all samples himself, manufactures in Guangzhou and creates some special pieces by hand, which makes for healthier margins than those who import and export samples or products. Also, unlike many of China’s contemporary jewelry labels, Wang often works with plastic and resin, which helps protect the label from rising metal costs, he adds.
Label Toggler, founded by Royal College of Art graduate Zhou Xing at the end of 2017, has switched to copper for many of its pieces, to keep costs down as it scales. “Our brand is all about play, like dolls and girly things,” she says. Toggler has around 40 stockists, and continues to grow each season. The display is full of handmade mini-garments, fashioned into brooches and earrings, plus bows and hairpins, featuring diamanté charms of dresses, bows and bikinis. “Our bestseller is this pin,” Xing says, holding up an intricate white brooch of a dress.
Like En Sage, Toggler is becoming a victim of its popularity, while grappling with market saturation. It’s a warning for labels in China and the West that are becoming aware of these trends. “The difficulty is that in China, if an element is really popular, everyone wants to do the same thing,” Xing says.
As China’s jewelry market heats up for both major luxury labels and challenger brands, it may become harder for newcomers — and Western labels — to cut through. Xing’s solution is to simply carry on, on the belief that consumers will see through the brands that jump on the bandwagon to chase sales. “We try to stick to our personality and keep going.”
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