The Top5 Chinese Fragrance Brands to Know in 2022

China QiXi Festival has just passed, perfume has also entered the peak season of sales, international perfume brands have been a big hit in China, the GUERLAIN’s new “floral water language” perfume in the T-mall monthly turnover of more than 700 items, light comments also up to 2500. However, the domestic perfume market is also very lively. China has always been a dynamic market with a strong interest in domestic brands in addition to the pursuit of Western brands, especially the Gen Z who like to experiment new scents. The time has come for Chinese fragrance brands to thrive.

As a result, Chinese perfume players are getting a lot of attention, so here are 5 brands to know about.

Scent Library – Creating perfumes from the various scents of everyday life

Scent Library can be considered as the spokesperson of Chinese scent, the “LiangbaiKai” series of fragrance care products are a big hit in social media, during the Double 11 period, the LiangbaiKai series of fragrance products sold 400,000 pieces, and the Big White Rabbit series of fragrance products sold 25,000 pieces within 20 minutes of opening.

Less than 4 years after the establishment of its own brand, Scent Library has been valued at up to 300 million RMB and has been the number one domestic perfume on T-mall for 3 consecutive years, breaking the fragrance market in China which has long been dominated by foreign big brand perfumes.

Scent Library was founded in 2009 by Lou Xiaozhi. Most of the perfumes produced by the brand are the simple smell of a thing or scene in life, just like the simplest flowers, fruits and vegetables, sunshine, rain and snow, etc. in agriculture. The simple scents can so clearly evoke their own precious memories associated with a certain smell, and more and more people have fallen in love with this library.

Scent Library has been finding the taste of Chinese people’s own memories – the brand focuses on “the smell of the Orient”. And then continue to try all kinds of cross-border co-branding, such as: and“ Luzhou Laojiao white wine “perfume, “Texaco smoked fried chicken ”perfume!

Their perfume not only smells but also works and is a big hit in the Chinese market.

Boitown – From Niche to Mass

In 2008, the perfumer’s 冰一姐 founded Boitown in France. After 3 years of exploring the Chinese perfume market, she decided to start online and opened the flagship store of Boitown on T-mall in 2011. At first, Boitown was only a “niche brand”, and it was not well known in the eyes of the public. As the Chinese perfume market became more active, with the help of new media social platforms such as Jitterbug, Xiaohongshu and Weibo, Quicksand perfume became “famous” online.

One of the very classic products is the “quicksand perfume” by Boitown. Visually you can shake the bottle and the quicksand that was sitting at the bottom of the bottle will fill the bottle with the shaking of the bottle, making the perfume look glowing. It has been selling up to 700+ per month on the T-mall flagship store and has received high praise from many Chinese people.

The emergence of quicksand perfumes and the rise of new media platforms have together pushed Boitown from the niche to the masses.

GuanXia（ to summer） – The High Sense of Oriental Fragrance

As of 2022, the domestic perfume brand Guanxia has 20,000 + notes related to Little Red Book.

In 2017, Guanxia was founded in Suzhou, his name is because “summer” is the favorite season of the founders, everything flourishes, so named ‘Guanxia’.

2019, Guanxia received angel round investment from Zenge Fund and IDG Capital. In December 2020, it will be in Lane Crawford, Beijing Financial Street Shopping Plaza, and try to go from online to offline; in 2021, it will be awarded “Best Brand Founder” by Little Red Book Will Future Brand Award; in 2022, Guanxia’s WeChat subscriptions will reach one million, loyal users will reach 100,000+, and the repurchase rate will reach 60%. If you know the Chinese market, you know how loyalty is hard to get from Chinese consumers. Guanxia managed to get high repurchase rate and consumers’ loyalty.

Guanxia is an original Chinese oriental fragrance brand, with plant-based notes, the idea is to tap into the emotional knot in Chinese people’s memory, to recall the confidence and interest of Chinese people in oriental culture.

Both from the application of fragrances, fragrance creation, as well as product branding packaging design and content marketing communication, are deeply involved in the essence of traditional Chinese culture, showing the aesthetic and lifestyle of the new Chinese oriental culture. Guanxia is good at storytelling and pays great attention to content creation, with a story behind every product. From the product name, product story, brand story can move consumers. There is no spokesperson, no mass casting and advertising, but every issue will release quite moody and textured tweets, which makes people feel like they are in an oriental poetic scene and have infinite desire for fragrance.

DOCUMENTS – Understated Trendy Fragrances

Founded in 2020, DOCUMENTS has created its own style, “Zen Cool CHANKU”, positioning itself in the young, high-end market, dedicated to creating novel and luxurious fragrances and peripheral products. The first brick-and-mortar store is in Shanghai, and sales data show that about 80% of the post-95s who visit the store are designers, artists, or bloggers.

The “Zen Cool CHANKU” style has been created. “Zen” is Wen Hian’s interpretation of “high-end” and is a deeper expression of thought. As the brand name “WEN HIAN DOCUMENTS” indicates, their products are inspired by ancient literature from the East and West. “Cool” means innovative and different from the past.

The brand mainly sells perfumes, flameless aromatherapy, incense, and candles, and focuses on highly concentrated perfumes with 15%-25% fragrance content.

WEN Hian insists on perfume as the core category, with a sales proportion of 60%-70%. In terms of fragrance selection, instead of following the traditional binary division of herbal and woody fragrances belonging to men and floral and fruity fragrances belonging to women, they try to lighten the sweetness of the products and remove the greasiness. As a Chinese perfume fragrance brand, they have also broken through the classic fragrances established in the West by using six unique Chinese fragrances such as anise, Chinese cedar and mugwort in the series of perfumes.

Such a high-end Chinese perfume fragrance brand for the Z generation, 2021, successfully received ten-million-yuan angel round of financing from Zonglin Capital.

Scentooze 三兔子 – Clinging to the “girl fragrance”

Established in 2019, Scentooze is dedicated to designing fragrance products that young consumers like and have a local Chinese fragrance culture. “The world is beautiful when you are beautiful” is a basic value.

Western perfume brands promote perfume, mainly emphasizing the three levels of perfume – emphasizing the top note, middle note and bottom note, but Scentooze believes that for newcomers, such communication is less efficient, directly using the fragrance associated with the scene is more in line with the expression of the post-95 context, so choose to use “scene” as a medium to convey different messages, each perfume will correspond to a scene, for example Each perfume will correspond to a scene, such as “seven minutes of sweet pearl milk tea”, “orange soda”, etc., so as to better communicate with consumers and attract their memories of the perfume. In terms of design, Three Rabbits has created a “small egg” shape, which is like a movie egg, signifying the surprise in life.

Online, the three rabbits continue to develop T-mall, and other platforms to inject new momentum into the brand, giving a deeper spiritual connotation to the grasp of the “girl fragrance”.

Our Perfume Case Study: GMA & Gisada

The Chinese seem to have ushered in their own era of national products, and the perfume economy is being nurtured and developed in the land of China. If you want to know more about the Chinese perfume market, you can look at our GMA marketing plan for the promotion of perfume brand Gisada in China.

If you are also interested in opening the Chinese market, why not contact us?