Can Chinese Fast-Fashion Brand Peacebird Replace H&M in China?

The recent Xinjiang cotton scandal has badly hurt H&M’s reputation in China. In our article last week we shared how Chinese sportswear brands LiNing and ANTA are benefitting from the negative press around Nike and Adidas. Could the same happen for Peacebird in response to the boycott of H&M? 

Peacebird Overview

Peacebird is a Chinese fashion group founded in 2001. The company did 9.05 billion RMB in sales in 2020, achieving 14.24% growth YoY. Profit was 711 million RMB last year, which was a 28.89% growth YoY. 

The fashion group includes 8 brands, including Peacebird Women, Peacebird Men, Mini Peacebird and LEDIN (乐町). Peacebird Women is by far its most popular brand, breaking 5 billion RMB in sales in 2020, 28% YoY growth.

In this article, we will mainly focus on the Peacebird Women sub-brand (we will refer to it as Peacebird). We share how it has been growing in popularity among young Chinese GenZ consumers by tapping into the country’s rise in feminism. 

The brand’s strong GenZ consumer base is what could allow it to compete with H&M. Young GenZ consumers are more likely to purchase Chinese brands than any other age group. They don’t consider products from Chinese brands to be of lesser quality than those from foreign brands – especially when it comes to fast fashion. 

Tapping Into Feminism

According to Accenture Statistics, there are 400 million women between the ages of 20 to 60 years old in China and they are contributing nearly 10 trillion RMB in spending every year. The number is large enough to form a third largest consumption market in the world. 10 trillion RMB is equal to the sum of Germany, France and UK’s total consumption.

Early on, Peacebird recognized the importance of the Chinese female consumer. It began tapping into the rise of feminism and the appeal of the independent modern women. 

Campaigns:

In 2016, it held a show called Duality of Worlds, which showed the fantasy that women had for their ideal life. In 2018, Peacebird featured super models Ju Xiaowen (雎晓雯) and Natalie Westling to show the variety of PB GIRLS (Peacebird girls).

At the beginning of 2020, Peacebird worked with Disney to launch a Hua Mulan collection. Disney had announced top Chinese celebrity Liu Yifei (刘亦菲) would play Mulan which generated a lot of buzz. Mulan is a brave girl that chases after things she loves and believes in. By working with this IP, Peacebird was also telling its customers to be brave and not be confined by traditional rules. Although the movie ended up being a flop in Mainland China, the Peacebird collection did very well. 

Recently, noticing female consumers’ changing mindset from “pleasing others” to “pleasing yourself”, Peacebird adjusted its focus. For Women’s Day this year’s, the brand launched a new slogan telling girls to be themselves and follow their hearts. Posters for the campaign featured popular entertainment KOL Lamu Yangzi (辣目洋子) and the brand’s ambassador Nana Ouyang (欧阳娜娜).

One of the company’s other sub-brands, LEDIN, which also targets the young consumer group, announced top idol Yu Shuxin (虞书欣) as its ambassador on March 1. Yu showed various possibilities of LEDIN’s products, such as sweet girls, cool girls, career girls etc. The brand was telling its customers it’s okay to be themselves and be different.

Targeting Young Consumer Group

Respecting Chinese female consumers and encouraging them to be who they want to be is not the only reason for Peacebird Women’s success among young GenZ females. In fact, it has been targeting this group for a long time and continually adjusts itself to meet the group’s needs.

Back in 2008, when many international fast fashion brands such as ZARA, H&M and Uniqlo were entering the Chinese market, Peacebird knew if it wanted to stand out among those competitors, it needed to improve its designs and launch frequency. The brand keeps launching more than 9,000 new products for consumers every year.

To build closer relationships with its customers, Peacebird gives its customers the nickname “PB Girls”. This identity targets youth culture and somehow gives its customers a sense of belonging.

To become younger, Peacebird is also working with IPs frequently to grab young people’s attention. In 2020, it had over 60 cross industry collaborations to satisfy the young generation’s appetite, such as Tom & Jerry (2020 was a mouse year in Chinese lunar calender and Jerry was a popular IP in the year), Pokemon and M&M’s.

The brand also keeps up with the changing times. Post-95s are already 25+, so it changed its focus from the post-95s to post-00s. To do this, it appointed super popular celebrity Nana Ouyang, who is also a post-00s to become its ambassador. I bought one of its sweaters because I saw Nana wearing it!

Our Take

According to Tencent’s report about post-00s (00后研究报告), this generation grows together with the Internet. They tend to have better life quality and they are not easily influenced by trendy fashion. What they value are brands with great or cool culture. Chinese GenZ has strong love and confidence in domestic brands. I think Peacebird Women has great potential in the future as it performs very well tapping into these two tough things: feminism and the young generation.

Back to our topic at the beginning. H&M has been criticized as having poor quality for a long time and I think more and more Chinese consumers are changing their choices to other fast fashion brands such as Urban Revivo and Peacebird. The Xinjiang cotton scandal is a catalyst and it speeds up H&M’s decline in the China market.

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