To Summer co-founder Shen Li on the Chinese fragrance brand’s Hong Kong expansion

Since 2018, fragrance brand To Summer has gradually transcended its mainland Chinese origins to become one of the hottest up-and-coming names on the market globally. Rather than purporting to bridge East and West, its signature scents and gorgeous retail stores are proudly Asian, bearing an innate and distinctive cultural authenticity that has proven to be a strong formula for success. From WeChat to TikTok, the brand took off on social media and is now continuing that rapid expansion with its first overseas store in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay. We speak to co-founder Shen Li about To Summer’s astronomical rise to aromatic fame.

What’s the significance of your first store in Hong Kong and how are you approaching business here differently from the mainland?

The mainland Chinese market is actually quite different. Chinese culture and Eastern aesthetics were already prominent there maybe around five years ago, earlier than the Hong Kong market. And working in the media back then, we perhaps perceived that resurgence in Eastern culture even sooner than the commercial market.

In the mainland, we’ve insisted on not opening commercial stores in shopping malls, but instead hope our different locations offer local cultural experiences unique to their respective cities. We don’t want any of our stores to feel coldly indifferent [to the customer]. Passing through these classic old buildings and ancient-style street locations, we hope our stores convey our culture, becoming a space which tells our story, crafts our narrative.

Coming to Hong Kong, we hope to show respect to local culture and customs, unlocking the city’s unique characteristics. We’re not directly importing all we do in the mainland. For example, our Hong Kong store is located in a building on Yun Ping Road in the bustling heart of Causeway Bay which dates back to 1958. Based on historical records, we believe this used to be an old residential building where the first floor was later divided into a bathroom, living room and reading room. We hope to recreate scenes of what daily life was like here for a woman in the 1960s, this metaphorical woman being our tribute to the women of Hong Kong.

Your aromas are infused with a nostalgic, distinctly Chinese aura. What was important to you about bringing the brand’s Chinese heritage to global audiences through the world of fragrance?

Fifteen years ago during the golden age of Chinese fashion media, I was working at Harper’s Bazaar and on one hand, we helped some Western luxury groups with their storytelling and communications for the Chinese market. We also learned their strategies for brand building and reaching consumers, so our generation was actually the first or second wave of media professionals in mainland China to learn these concepts. At the same time, we were also constantly uncovering some aspects of our own Eastern identity and culture, exploring Eastern aesthetics with local photographers.

We don’t want to use old-fashioned Oriental aesthetics. For a long time people thought Eastern aesthetics were all about stereotypical dragons or phoenixes. Let’s look at what the rest of the world is exporting. Europe has luxury. The US produced Big Tech. Germany produces hi-tech cars. South Korea has K-pop. Brands from these countries have a global, international vision for exporting themselves to the world. We discussed how we needed to unleash a distinctly Eastern ‘New Modern’ aesthetic which would be universally understood by the world, just as it emerged from the Bauhaus style and school of design.