I’ve written before about IP licensing mechanics in China — the contracts, the registration steps, the boring-but-necessary parts. This one is different. This is the story of how a single pop-up store, opened in the middle of COVID on Shanghai’s busiest street, ended up putting a Korean character IP brand in front of roughly twenty Chinese conglomerates in a matter of weeks, and why that moment still shapes how I think about entering China with an IP today.
Why We Even Considered China
The decision wasn’t a grand strategic bet. It came from data we already had. Our Korean headquarters ran an online store, and a meaningful chunk of orders were already coming from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China — direct purchases, no local presence, no marketing spend aimed at those buyers. That organic demand told us something a market research report never could: there was already an audience in China before we ever set foot there.
So we started selling online through Taobao and pushing content on Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese counterpart), watching how the brand performed before committing to anything physical.
Two Stores, Two Completely Different Doors In
We ended up opening two offline locations, and they came from opposite directions. The second store happened almost by accident — when Universal Studios Beijing was being built, their team reached out and invited us to open there. That one was inbound, low-risk, low-effort.
The first store was the one that mattered. We chose Nanjing Road in Shanghai — a street with roughly 800,000 people walking past every single day — and partnered with a department mall near the entrance to build a large-scale pop-up in the plaza on the first floor. This wasn’t a modest kiosk. We built a stage. Costumed characters performed and danced. Merchandise was sold on-site. It was expensive, and during COVID, expensive felt reckless.
The Real Goal Was Never the Register
Here’s the part I try to get across to anyone launching an IP in a new country: the pop-up’s job was never to maximize first-week sales. It was to make the brand impossible to miss. On the highest-foot-traffic street in one of China’s biggest cities, with a stage and performers, we weren’t running a store — we were running a billboard that happened to also sell things. We prepared a Chinese-language site and brand materials specifically so anyone who noticed us could immediately understand who we were and what we represented.
The Starbucks Meeting That Changed Everything
We didn’t have a proper office set up yet, so our team was using a Starbucks on the second floor of the same mall as a makeshift command post during the promotional period. That detail matters, because it’s where the real story happened.
Word about the pop-up spread faster than we expected — not among consumers first, but among corporate marketing departments. Almost every major Chinese conglomerate keeps an internal team dedicated to scouting foreign trends, and several of them already knew our IP before we ever opened in China. Once they realized we had physically landed in Shanghai, they came looking for us. Over the course of the promotion, close to twenty large companies — dairy, sportswear, confectionery, apparel, cosmetics, industries with nothing in common except scale — sent people to that Starbucks to talk licensing. Licensing agents and resale/distribution agencies showed up right alongside them.
Nobody in that room cared that we were meeting in a coffee shop instead of a boardroom. What they cared about was that a brand with real traction in Korea, riding the broader wave of K-pop and K-culture interest across Asia, had now made a visible, committed move into China.
What the Numbers Looked Like
By the end of that first year, we’d signed more than 50 licensing agreements and generated close to 10 billion KRW in revenue. What surprises people when I tell this story is that we deliberately didn’t push license fees as high as we could have. In year one, the priority wasn’t extracting maximum revenue from each deal — it was building geographic and category coverage with brands that actually had national reach across China. We were betting that broad retail presence would matter more over the following years than squeezing extra margin out of the earliest contracts. That decision paid off: it opened the door to co-branded products with other companies and eventually got us onto convenience store and supermarket shelves nationwide.
What I’d Tell Anyone Taking an IP Into China
1. Assume Chinese conglomerates are already watching you
Large Chinese companies maintain dedicated teams that track foreign IP and consumer trends as a matter of course. If your brand has any traction at home or in the region, there’s a real chance someone in China already has a file on you before you arrive.
2. Prove it at home first, and run direct-to-global sales before you decide where to expand
Don’t guess which country to enter. Run a direct-purchase channel that reaches international buyers first and read the data it gives you. That’s what pointed us toward China rather than somewhere else — real orders, not a hunch.
3. Go big enough to cross the threshold, or don’t bother
A small, quiet launch won’t generate the kind of attention that leads to conglomerate-level partnerships. Whether it’s online or offline, your first move in China needs enough scale to actually get noticed — because that’s what turns into multi-year expansion with tier-two and tier-three brand partners down the road.
Looking Back
Nearly five years later, what still strikes me is the timing. COVID should have made an expensive, oversized pop-up look like the worst possible decision. Instead, because so few other brands were making bold physical moves at that moment, ours stood out even more. Sometimes the environment that looks the most hostile to a big bet is exactly when a big bet gets noticed.