Transforming Retail with Art: The Gentle Monster Experience

Amy Weng • August 6, 2024

Hi! Welcome back to our series on marketing in China. Today, we’re exploring a fascinating trend that's reshaping the retail landscape: art installations in shops.


Have you ever wondered why stores like Gentle Monster in Shanghai draw massive crowds? It’s thanks to their focus on art installations. Art and commerce have become deeply intertwined in China, creating unique retail experiences that attract and engage consumers. This growing trend of incorporating art installations into retail spaces resonates with Chinese consumers, making shopping not just an activity but an experience.


Why Art Installations Work

Gentle Monster, a South Korean eyewear brand, has taken retail to the next level with its Shanghai store called Haus Nowhere. The ground floor greets visitors with a pair of robot statues, leading them upstairs to even larger installations of two gigantic heads facing each other. These captivating displays not only showcase their products but also create an immersive experience for visitors.


This spring, the lines were 2 hours long just to get inside. Once in, visitors were greeted with visually stunning displays that had to be photographed and shared on social media, particularly on Xiaohongshu (RED). The installation of 2 very realistic human faces went viral, resulting in an explosion of user-generated content that boosted the brand's visibility and appeal.


In addition to eyewear, the store features Gentle Monster’s own café brand NUDAKE, presenting a “croissant gym” concept space. The ground floor also hosts the South Korean fragrance brand Tamburins, with a hyperreal statue of an elderly couple adding to the artistic atmosphere.


Gentle Monster dedicates the majority of square meter space to art and only around 20% to merchandising, it is clear that the brand prioritizes creating an experiential and art space. This approach aligns with the rapid post-pandemic development of social commerce, as brands become more creative in utilizing their physical retail spaces.


By creating an art experience within the shop, Gentle Monster has not only created a check-in place for visitors but also an on-brand display of the eyewear label’s arty image. The retail space provides high “emotional value” for young visitors with a need for experience and fashion.


Wrapping up, Art installations in retail spaces are not just a trend; they’re a powerful marketing tool that can transform the shopping experience and boost brand visibility. 


At Think East, we specialize in helping brands develop innovative retail strategies that resonate with Chinese consumers. Whether it's creating engaging art installations or leveraging social media for maximum impact, our team can guide you in transforming your retail space into an unforgettable experience.


As you think about your own retail strategy, consider how you can incorporate art to create engaging, shareable moments for your customers. How would you consider building art into your retail experience? Would your customers be willing to stand in line for 2 hours to see an art installation in your store?


Stay tuned for our next post, and connect with us on LinkedIn or via email—we’d love to hear your thoughts and questions.


See you next time!


Banner Image Credit: Gentle Monster (gentlemonster.com);

All photos in the gallery by Amy Weng

Kunst trifft auf Retail: Gentle Monsters Erfolgsrezept


Hi! Willkommen zurück zu unserer Serie über Marketing in China. Heute erkunden wir einen faszinierenden Trend, der den Retail neu gestaltet: Kunstinstallationen in Geschäften.


Warum sind Läden wie Gentle Monster in Shanghai so erfolgreich und können Menschenmengen anziehen? Das liegt an ihrem Marketing Fokus mit Kunstinstallationen. Kunst und Retail sind in China eng miteinander verflochten und schaffen einzigartige Einkaufserlebnisse, die Konsumenten anziehen und begeistern. Dieser wachsende Trend, Kunstinstallationen in Verkaufsräume zu integrieren, spricht die chinesischen Konsumenten an und macht das Einkaufen zu einem Erlebnis.


Warum sind Kunstinstallationen so beliebt?

Gentle Monster, eine südkoreanische Brillenmarke, hat mit ihrem Laden im Haus Nowhere in Shanghai den Retail auf die nächste Stufe gehoben. Das Erdgeschoss begrüsst die Besucher mit zwei Roboterstatuen und führt sie nach oben zu noch grösseren Installationen von zwei riesigen Köpfen, die einander gegenüberstehen. Diese faszinierenden Displays präsentieren nicht nur ihre Produkte, sondern schaffen auch ein immersives Erlebnis für die Besucher.


Diesen Frühling waren die Warteschlangen 2 Stunden lang, nur um hineinzukommen. Einmal drin, wurden die Besucher mit visuell beeindruckenden Displays begrüsst, die fotografiert und in sozialen Medien, besonders auf Xiaohongshu (RED), geteilt werden mussten. Die Installation von zwei sehr realistischen menschlichen Gesichtern ging viral und führte zu einer Explosion von nutzergenerierten Inhalten, die die Sichtbarkeit und Attraktivität der Marke steigerten.


Neben Brillen präsentiert der Laden auch Gentle Monsters eigene Café-Marke NUDAKE und ein „Croissant-Gym“-Konzept. Das Erdgeschoss präsentiert auch die südkoreanische Duftmarke Tamburins mit einer hyperrealistischen Statue eines älteren Paares, die zur künstlerischen Atmosphäre beiträgt.


Gentle Monster widmet den Grossteil der Ladenfläche der Kunst und nur etwa 20% dem Verkauf! Das zeigt, dass die Marke auf die Schaffung eines Erlebnisraums setzt. Dieser Ansatz entspricht der schnellen post-pandemischen Entwicklung des Social Commerce, da Marken kreativer werden, ihre stationären Geschäfte zu nutzen.


Durch die Schaffung eines Kunsterlebnisses im Laden hat Gentle Monster nicht nur einen Ort geschaffen, an dem Besucher einchecken, sondern auch eine markengerechte Darstellung des künstlerischen Images der Brillenmarke. Der Verkaufsraum bietet einen hohen „emotionalen Wert“ für junge Besucher, die Erlebnisse suchen.


Zusammengefasst sind Kunstinstallationen in Verkaufsräumen nicht nur ein Trend, sondern ein starkes Marketing-Tool, das das Einkaufserlebnis verwandeln und die Sichtbarkeit der Marke steigern kann.


Bei Think East helfen wir Marken, innovative Retailstrategien zu entwickeln, die bei chinesischen Konsumenten Anklang finden. Ob es darum geht, fesselnde Kunstinstallationen zu schaffen oder soziale Medien für maximale Wirkung zu nutzen, unser Team kann Sie dabei unterstützen, Ihren Verkaufsraum in ein unvergessliches Erlebnis zu verwandeln.


Wie können Sie Kunst in Ihrer eigenen Retailstrategie integrieren, um ansprechende, teilbare Momente für Ihre Kunden zu schaffen? Würden Ihre Kunden bereit sein, zwei Stunden in der Schlange zu stehen, um eine Kunstinstallation in Ihrem Geschäft zu sehen?


Bleiben Sie dran für unseren nächsten Beitrag und verbinden Sie sich mit uns auf LinkedIn oder per E-Mail – wir würden gerne Ihre Gedanken und Fragen hören.


Bis zum nächsten Mal!

Formula 1 at Full Speed in China

By Amy Weng • March 16, 2026
Formula 1 returned to Shanghai this weekend to a sold-out circuit and 221 million Chinese fans. Luxury brands have been paying close attention. The sport's China moment has arrived. On Sunday afternoon, Kimi Antonelli crossed the finish line at the Shanghai International Circuit to claim his first Formula 1 victory. The youngest Grand Prix polesitter in the sport's history converted pole position into a commanding win before a capacity crowd. Lewis Hamilton took his first podium in Ferrari red at the circuit where, twelve months earlier, he had claimed a sprint victory before a disqualification ended his Grand Prix weekend. The racing was close, unpredictable and genuinely dramatic. In the stands, 220,000 spectators watched a sport that, in China, has become one of the most significant luxury marketing opportunities of the decade. The spectacle on track was compelling. The story in the grandstands is arguably more so. 221 Million Fans and Counting The scale of Chinese F1 fandom is not widely understood outside the industry. According to Formula 1's own 2025 season review, China now has 221 million self-identified fans, second only to Europe as a market, and representing a 39% increase in a single year. This weekend's Grand Prix sold out entirely. Formula 1's Chinese social media platforms, including Weibo, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and WeChat, grew 35% in 2025 alone. The profile of the Chinese F1 fan matters as much as the scale. According to Formula 1's 2025 Global Fan Survey, 46% of Chinese fans are female and 40% are aged between 16 and 34. Over half came to the sport within the last five years, most through social media and streaming rather than broadcast television. This is a young, digitally fluent, predominantly urban consumer base that discovered Formula 1 as a cultural phenomenon: something to follow, attend, discuss, and wear. The parallels with China's luxury consumer are not coincidental. They are, to a remarkable degree, the same person: young, urban, educated, spending on experience and identity as much as objects. The F1 fan in China and the luxury consumer in China overlap in ways that the most attentive brands have already begun to act on. What Luxury Brands Understood First In October 2024, LVMH announced a 10-year global partnership with Formula 1, reportedly valued at more than $100 million per year, making it one of the largest sponsorship agreements in the history of sport. Louis Vuitton, TAG Heuer, and Moët Hennessy are the three Maisons leading the activation. TAG Heuer replaced Rolex as the sport's official timekeeper. Moët & Chandon returned to podium celebrations. Louis Vuitton now crafts the bespoke trophy trunk handed to each race winner, including the one presented to Antonelli in Shanghai on Sunday. The partnership, as framed by Bernard Arnault, was premised on Formula 1 having become one of the most desirable sports in the world. The China dimension is central to that logic. Louis Vuitton's recent Shanghai activations, including The Louis concept space at HKRI Taikoo Hui and its maritime heritage exhibitions, have already demonstrated the brand's understanding that Chinese luxury consumers want cultural experience as much as product. An annual Grand Prix in Shanghai gives LVMH a moment of live, shared spectacle in the market that matters most. The trophy trunk is a piece of brand communication as much as it is a piece of luggage. Other brands are moving with equal purpose. Ahead of this weekend's race, Tumi brought Lando Norris, the reigning world champion, onto a Douyin livestream to engage Chinese fans directly. It is a precise articulation of the opportunity: a global sports star, a platform built for the Chinese digital consumer, and a brand repositioning itself for a younger audience through the cultural equity Formula 1 now carries in China. The activation required no translation. The audience already knew who Norris was.

The New Rules of Desirability: Inside China’s She Economy

By Amy Weng • March 13, 2026
China accounts for about 62% of the world’s self-made women billionaires, according to the Hurun Global Rich List. At the same time, data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor's 2023/2024 report shows that China is among the rare economies worldwide where women's startup rates match or exceed those of men, and it has a generation of university graduates that is now majority female. It is also a country where the government actively encourages women to marry earlier, have more children, and return to domestic life. The she economy lives in the tension between those two realities. China's female consumer base controls an estimated $1.4 trillion in annual spending, according to Accenture research. They influence 70% of all household purchases and, in a shift that would have been culturally unimaginable a generation ago, now direct a majority of their personal spending toward their own needs rather than those of their families, according to JD.com research. Who They Are The she economy did not emerge from a single city or a single demographic. Its most visible architects sit at the very top of global wealth rankings. Zhong Huijuan left a job as a chemistry teacher to found Hansoh Pharmaceutical in Jiangsu, building it into one of China's leading oncology and psychotropic drug companies; by mid-2025 she ranked first in Asia and third globally on Forbes' list of self-made women billionaires, with a fortune of approximately $19.7 billion. Wu Yajun arrived at entrepreneurship from a different direction: factory floor technician earning $16 a month, then property journalist, before co-founding Longfor Properties in Chongqing in 1993, a company that grew into one of China's largest real estate developers. Wang Laichun, chairwoman of Luxshare Precision Industry, spent years on Foxconn's assembly lines before building the company that now manufactures Apple's AirPods and rivals Foxconn across Apple's supply chain; the 2024 Fortune list ranked her the most powerful woman in business in Asia. The geographic picture is equally important. A significant share of Chinese female internet users now live outside the traditional tier-one cities. Hangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, Xi'an, Nanjing: these are not secondary markets. They are where consumption habits are being formed, where new platforms find their earliest adopters, and where brand loyalty, or its absence, is decided. A 32-year-old finance professional in Hangzhou and a 28-year-old designer in Chengdu may have similar purchasing power and entirely different ideas of what makes a product worth owning. Spending on the Self The founders described above illustrate the female economic power at the top. The same shift is also visible in how women are spending. One of the most structurally significant shift in the she economy is the direction of spending. In 2023, Chinese women purchased 8.23 million vehicles, up 10.6% year-on-year, according to Yiche Research Institute, a category that was almost exclusively male-dominated a decade ago. Women are also increasingly central in homebuying decisions. Surveys suggest that more than 80% of property purchases now involve female decision-makers. Wellness, travel, and self-education have become the fastest-growing spending categories among urban women under 40. This is not consumption for its own sake. These spending patterns reflect a generation of women who came of age in a different educational and economic environment. Women now account for 63% of all higher education enrolment, outnumbering men at undergraduate level and in several postgraduate disciplines, according to China's Ministry of Education. They are applying the same rigour to purchases as to careers. The luxury resale market is part of this logic: platforms like Plum, which specialises in pre-owned luxury goods, are overwhelmingly female-driven, combining value-consciousness with the kind of careful curation that defines this cohort's relationship with objects.

How Adidas Turned the Tang Jacket into a Cultural and Commercial Success

By Eini Kärkkäinen • February 10, 2026
When Adidas released its Tang jacket ahead of Lunar New Year 2024, it was intended as a limited regional drop for Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Instead, it became one of the most recognizable fashion phenomena in China’s modern streetwear scene. Queues formed outside flagship stores, social media buzzed with styling posts, and resale prices surged. By 2026, the jacket had evolved from a seasonal item into a cultural symbol. Its resonance, however, came from more than design alone. It captured a pivotal moment in China’s emotional landscape. Post-COVID Reconnection with Cultural Identity The pandemic reshaped how many Chinese consumers view identity, heritage, and consumption. Lockdowns, limited travel, and global tension prompted renewed appreciation for domestic craftsmanship and cultural symbolism. Young consumers began favoring products that reflected confidence and continuity rather than globalized trends. This mindset drove movements such as Guochao (国潮) and Neo-Chinese (新中式) fashion. The Tang jacket fit naturally within this shift, offering a modern, wearable link to tradition. Reimagining Tradition for Everyday Wear The Tang jacket draws from Tangzhuang (唐装), garments whose roots trace back to styles popularized during the Tang dynasty, a period celebrated for cultural openness and artistry. Adidas incorporated traditional details such as Mandarin collars, frog-button closures (盘扣), and symbolic knot fastenings into its signature three-stripe silhouette. The collaboration with Chinese designer Samuel Guiyang further grounded the project in local aesthetics, combining his contemporary tailoring approach with Adidas’ streetwear identity. These features, traditionally associated with harmony and fortune, were reimagined with modern proportions and materials, creating a garment that felt both authentic and current. This balance made it appealing to fashion-forward youth and culturally mindful consumers alike. Overseas Chinese and Global Amplification A major factor behind the jacket’s rise was its enthusiastic reception among overseas Chinese communities. For diaspora consumers, cultural symbols hold heightened emotional weight. Living abroad often deepens one’s sense of heritage, and the Tang jacket became a stylish conduit for connection. On Xiaohongshu, Instagram, and TikTok, users abroad showcased it as both fashion and pride. That content flowed back into China’s digital sphere, fueling a cross-border feedback loop that transformed a regional launch into a global cultural trend. Platform-Driven Storytelling and Scarcity The product’s spread reflected the dynamics of China’s integrated social platforms. Users posted unboxings, Lunar New Year family photos, and reunion clips featuring the jacket, telling stories grounded in emotion rather than advertising. Algorithms amplified these personal narratives, while limited inventory created natural scarcity. The result was a self-perpetuating cycle of desirability and visibility. Adidas did not need aggressive promotion, as community storytelling and peer validation drove success organically. From Sportswear Brand to Cultural Participant Adidas’ emerging cultural role became clear in October 2025, when it closed Shanghai Fashion Week SS26 with its “Power of Three” showcase. Merging traditional motifs with innovative performance fabrics, the event signaled the brand’s transformation from an international sportswear supplier to a meaningful participant in China’s fashion ecosystem. Adidas was no longer adapting to cultural trends; it was helping shape them.