Beijing Sanlitun North Village - New heart of luxury brands in Beijing

Timothee Semelin, account manager at JCDecaux Airport China, tells a tale of two cities

Beijing or Shanghai? Where is the luxury demand of China?

Following a study done by MSN China; Liu Shu, chief editor and executive producer of MSN China Portal, said 38 percent of Beijingers are regular customers of luxury products, higher than 37.3 percent in Shanghai and 33 percent in Guangzhou.

She revealed that almost 63 percent of Beijing white-collar workers buy luxury cosmetics, 48 percent purchase luxury bags, 45 percent wear luxury watches, and 40 percent have premium-brand clothing. This may sound surprising as internationally most of the medias, newspapers and TV always focus on Shanghai as the heart of luxury in China.

Indeed after personally sharing this information with some of my luxury clients; they all confirmed that the real heart of consumption for luxury brand in Mainland is not only Beijing but North China. Except some niche products (like Rolls Royce in Ningbo), most brands have the best sales in cities like Dalian, Beijing and Tianjin. So it’s not a surprise that we can see new luxury shops opening in Beijing every month and one of the big luxury area ready to open fully end of this year is located (again…) in Sanlitun North Village (Swire properties).

Of course Shanghai is still where the trends might raise, where the marketing campaigns are decided and will remain a great place for Fashionistas but the middle class hungry for luxury products seem more dynamic in North China indeed.

Sanlitun North Village will soon heat up

We can already see that some shops are already open like Rolex and waiting for clients there (for now, it’s really empty), but we can expect the area to heat up when the large shops will open.

1st Beijing flagship store of Balmain and Versace are looking huge. I wanted to share this article with you also to show you the amazing job done by Comme Des Garçons and especially by Armani with those giant building wraps that are quite impressive and at a level of production which is quite neat.

The Armani wrapping has been here for many months now and still looking great Definitely the most prominent brand in the whole area for this future luxury center; let’s go back there in a few months to see how the shops are doing as many worry how all those shops all around town can survive with this fierce competition.

Timothee Semelin, account manager at JCDecaux Airport China