Did China’s Luxury Market Really Weaken?

A few weeks ago, a global luxury fashion executive I met in London shared over coffee that his house was “pulling back on China.” Revenue had been soft for a couple of years, new client numbers had dropped, and even existing clients weren’t returning as often. The plan was to shift attention to markets that were “still growing.”

As we talked about what’s really going on in luxury in China, I asked him two questions: “How much do you actually know about your top Chinese clients,  and where did your best client make her last three purchases?”

He paused. “In truth, I haven’t seen her in a while. She usually shops in Shanghai, Tokyo and Paris – in the summer, with her family.”

So I asked one more question: “Has your team ever reached out to their counterparts in Tokyo and Paris to make sure she’s looked after there?”

There was a long silence. And that silence is the opportunity most luxury businesses are missing.

For years, most brands have read China through a single lens: mainland traffic, mainland revenue, growth driven mostly by new store openings. It was the easy way to operate, and for a long time it worked – the market was so abundant that a luxury brand could deliver double-digit growth on aspirational clients alone.

That era is over. After a decade of double-digit growth, China’s personal luxury market declined in 2024 and contracted again in 2025.* The headline reading is that China has weakened. My understanding is that China has matured – not because Chinese clients stopped wanting luxury, but because credible domestic brands now compete on the very dimensions luxury is defined by: quality, aesthetics, relevance, experience.

The Chinese client has become one of the most informed and discerning in the world, and has simply stopped accepting luxury offered without relationship.

China rewards the relationship more than any market I know, for reasons that are cultural and structural at once. Guanxi is not a lubricant for the transaction; it is the precondition for trust. Mianzi – face – means that how a client is honoured and recognised is part of the value they are buying. Done properly, relationship also makes the business predictable.

When I ran the Private-Client function at Burberry Asia, we could forecast an event or a monthly target with confidence, because a meaningful share of revenue came from appointments with clients we already knew.

The next level is caring for Chinese clients beyond China. During my Burberry Private-Client era, we leveraged the global network to look after travelling clients – from securing a store appointment, to a hard-to-book restaurant, to a private museum visit- and it was one of the most well-received gestures.

The Chinese client is more than a geography to be managed from a regional office. They may buy in Shanghai this month, Tokyo the next, Paris or London after – and they expect to be recognised as one person in all of them. Even in 2025, a year when Chinese spending repatriated back into the mainland, Bain estimated around 35% of Chinese luxury purchases still happened outside China.

A brand that measures its China business by mainland revenue alone is missing the opportunity. What matters is the client’s share of resonance with the house and share of wallet globally, wherever the purchase is finally made.

You cannot win the China market back with a better campaign or an extravagant event. Instead, invest in the market the way sophisticated clients now demand: by building genuine relationship capability in your client-facing teams – capability that is tuned to the person in front of them, and that leverages your global network to take care of them across every market they travel to.

So before you decide to “pull back on China,” I’d invite you to answer the same question: Where did your best Chinese client make her last three purchases – and did they feel equally valued in all of them?

If you’re ready to build a client-centric strategy in China – let’s start a conversation.

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