Written by: Saving the Workers, Editor: SCityTeam, First Released:Sensual city SCity
All content points to links and communication between people, people and the world, and people and countless selves.
During the National Day holiday in 2026, Aranya’s longest queue was not at POP MART, but at the gate of TWOI.
TWOI Aranya store’s first-day and weekly performance exceeded that of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, ranking first in square footage with more than 100 square meters, and its monthly turnover is expected to exceed 20 million.
On the same beach, POP MART’s POP BAKERY has more than 60,000 passengers.
One sells blind boxes and the other sells “milk-flavored fast fashion”. Are they grabbing the emotional budget of the same group of people?
In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about emotional consumption and interest-based purchasing.Some brands are becoming more and more like a person, and some brands are becoming more and more like a shelf.
Today let’s talk about what exactly are these brands doing?
1. Emotional brands that seem to be a trend
Who is making money and who is beginning to ebb?
We give a label,“Personality-driven” brands are still exploding.
Four samples: RDD, TWOI, GOODEES, and Xiaoyuyuytheir common features:What consumers buy is based on human judgment, not the parameters of the product.
RDD relies on Zhao Lusi.
An old brand that sells products for women in a drama has also become popular in Korean clothing born in the 1980s. The IP brand of its own pet image has exceeded 100 million in omni-channel GMV in three months, and has more than 600,000 fans on Tmall. A hair tie costs RMB 64 and a water bottle costs RMB 200. No one complains about the price because of the fans.What I bought was a ticket to Zhao Lusi’s lifestyle.
TWOI relies on Xiong Xiaoying.
He is not a celebrity, but he made his fortune by relying on the details of live broadcasts. New live broadcasts are released every Thursday, and fans call him “Crazy Thursday”. She wears her own clothes and talks about design slowly.What the consumer buys is her aesthetic judgment itselfthe overall space of diffraction home and coffee is a complete set of milking dimensions.
GOODEES relies on Bai Jingting.
Yanqing Road was turned into a “painful street”.The five-bay small bungalow along the street is the first store of GOOD BAI, and on the corner is GOODEES WORLD. Over 7,000 plush pendants priced at 129 yuan were sold.When consumers go in, they don’t just visit the store, they go to Lao Bai’s house as a guest.
Xiaoyu Yuy relies on an “imperfect girl”.
Freckles, red nose, dog-gnawed bangs. Post-2000 creators update their hand-drawn content daily and respond to every comment. The number of fans exceeded 50,000 in about three months, and exceeded 300,000 in less than a year. The shopping mall in Shanghai had 110,000 customers on the first day, the average daily pop-up in Hangzhou exceeded 200,000, and the Beijing store exceeded 10 million in a single month. It has co-branded with Huawei, CASETiFY, Naixue, and McDonald’s.The core competitiveness is role personality and low-threshold participation.
RDD, TWOI, GOODEES, Xiaoyuyuy, picture source Xiaohongshu
It is also a brand with young consumer groups. On the other hand,The “style label type” is on the decline.
Tagi., WM, they have a common problem: they sell labels, not personalities.
Tagi.’s “dopamine aesthetics” were once traffic passwords.In 2023, Taotian’s GMV will increase by nearly 300%, and in 2025, 618 will reach the top of Tmall cosmetics peripheral TOP1. The 139 yuan passport holder is a hot item. However, the category is too light and the barriers are too low. The brand no longer accepts single store authorization, and the contraction signal is obvious.
W． Management has opened about 50 stores in more than 30 cities, mainly warehouse-style stores.，Refer to Brandy Melville’s “white and thin” style, but the price is flexible, and it has taken off by taking advantage of the fast fashion trend of hot girls. However, there are too many stores in the past two years.There is no iteration of products and space, and consumer fatigue has begun to lead to a sharp decline in sales after half a year of opening.
Picture source Xiaohongshu Maomaopai, I’m really greedy every day
Not only that, with frequent market iterations and similar competition among young stratosphere, some values-driven brands will also face tests after over-expansion and copying.
For example AAAD (a action a day).
The brand starts from women’s issues, uses plus-size models and women-friendly values, and has accumulated a group of “spiritual partners” in Xiaohongshu. In 2024, online sales will exceed 300 million and orders will exceed 1.32 million.In less than a year, four stores were opened in Shanghai and Hangzhou alone.
So, the problem also arises,Values can be copied, products cannot.
The core price range is 200 to 700 yuan, and the highest sales volume is a pair of trousers for 429 yuan. A Xiaohongshu plus-size blogger pointed out that the brand is “far from perfect” in terms of actual inclusivity.
Picture source related brands
When a brand’s core selling point is its values rather than its products, consumers will become sensitive.The “spiritual partnership” relationship accumulated online has been diluted by the density of offline expansion.
When consumers walk into the Nth store, the feeling of “this is a brand that speaks for me” begins to change into “oh, there is one here too”. The greater the commitment, the greater the scrutiny.
Yes, to sum it up,Brands that sell style labels will expire, while brands that sell personality connections can be renewed.
So what is a personality type?
How to build such a brand gene?
2. A brief analysis of the evolution theory of popular products
Why are TWOI playing?
TWOI’s customer base cannot be summarized as “18-28-year-old women”. Under its soft and cute appearance, it actually covers several groups of people who cannot find “suitable personal expression” elsewhere.
Walking into any store, you will instantly feel like you have entered a “cream style” world.Here, the style and aesthetics are narrowed, but the product range is infinitely expanded.
From casual clothing, pajamas, and hairpins to water bottles, storage bags, and sofas, all high-concentration symbolic products focus on extremely daily expressions, plusMarketing details of per capita purchase limit for the same productoriginally a product supply strategy, has instead led to sellers carefully selecting and matching them for daily consumption pleasure.
TWOI Aranya store, photo source Xiaohongshu Bieber’s Xiaojiaojiao
When we take a closer look, the consumers here can be roughly divided into three types:
The first group is the exquisite mother.
These urban moms with a certain amount of spending power may have been loyal users of MUJI, but they always get a little boring after being correct for a long time.
MUJI’s cotton and linen are restrained, TWOI’s cream color is allowed, but their commonality isQuality and comfort，This requires a certain amount of spending power, but TWOI provides an additional layer of relaxation and the freedom to be yourself without size constraints.
The second group, girls with big tits.
Girls with the same purchasing power can learn how to dress in ZARA and WM, butNo matching expression found.
Behind the trend of modern fashion, some people like “sens”, and some girls prefer “breasts”: they don’t want to be spicy or cool, they like soft and cute but don’t like to be flashy.
This option is not available on ZARA and WM shelves. TWOI gave. Loose fit, bear print.It’s not that special, it’s that “this dress doesn’t require me to become another person.”
The third wave is not to show off aesthetics.
look carefullyTWOI store partitionsthere is a linen area that focuses on materials, a cloud area and a blue and white grid series that focus on design symbols, and I’s little carnival is placed in the bear and colorful comfort cream area.
Aranya’s limited edition is a wonderful touch. The seaside scene and cream style are a natural fit. Limited models make consumers feel“This brand understands where I am at the moment.”
Picture source Xiaohongshu 11 classmates
What TWOI really steals are consumers who want to be “wrapped in an aesthetic”.It did not directly steal the homogeneous share from Tagi. Instead, it stole consumers’ time from the attention economy.
Tagi. only provides “good-looking little things”, while TWOI is more like a place of harmonious aesthetics.The essence of a lifestyle brand is to build time and space, touch points, and consensus.
The pop-up in Shanghai sold 3.5 million on the first day and 8 million in half a month. Almost every store can reach an average of 3.5 million per month during the stable period. The TWOI brand’s 1,000 square meters is not a store, but a “personality container” that is large enough to hold the complete narrative of the “milk world”.
Obviously, TWOI, founded around the founder, is still an online-focused brand.
Online is the basic market, offline is the big billboard.You can buy clothes anywhere, but you have to go to the store to drink that “healing afternoon tea”.
It is not the same track as WM, BF, and OM.What TWOI does is exquisite trend positioning, commonsense, and outdoor leisure.
3. From buying goods to buying life
How to position the emotions of emotional consumption
We clearly see that the emotional consumption market still has great potential, but how to tap it and how to accurately position it is still unclear.
We can only summarize some common features among these recently popular brands.Behind the samples of TWOI, RDD, D+dd, and Xiaoyuyuy is a clear set of consumption cognitive migration.
Picture source Xiaohongshu NO DIRECTION+, Ajiji, Nantong Little Aunt
Taking these cases apart, we can see that currently popular experiential consumption content generally takes four paths:
First, the fan economy has changed.
Consumers have gone from chasing brands to chasing people.This means that the evaluation system has become more focused. In the past, for celebrity endorsements and self-created brands, people still focused on the product. However, RDD fans follow Zhao Lusi because the brand is an extension of her personality.
Similarly, fans of TWOI Bing Xiong Xiaoying pursue her aesthetic judgment;
Dong Jie’s D+dd, what consumers buy is the sense of trust in her quiet work.
Brand becomes the carrier of personalityrather than the other way around.
Second, interest in consumption has deepened.
iiMedia Consulting data shows that China’s emotional economy market value has reached 2.7 trillion yuan in 2025, and is expected to exceed 4.5 trillion yuan in 2029.Consumers no longer just ask “what does it do?” but instead ask “how does it make me feel?”
Araya Dong Jie’s D+dd, picture source related brands
Third, the aesthetic upgrade has moved from “unification” to “understanding”.
Consumers don’t lack clothes, hairpins, or mobile phone cases. What they lack is “this thing understands me.”
The more consumers have seen and thought about it, the more they no longer stick to what is high-end, what is mediocre, and what is beautiful and ugly instilled by consumerism. This group of people began to pursue complex aesthetics that were understood,A complete aesthetic of “disunity from the inside out”.
TWOI’s “milk money style” taps into the psychological need to be “softer” under workplace pressure. Xiaoyu’s “imperfection” responds to young people’s rebellion against “perfection anxiety” and can poke fun at this group of people.
Fourth, female consciousness is reshaping consumption decisions.
AAAD’s rapid rise is based on women’s issues. It is very similar to the original MAIA ACTIVE, which started from Asian women’s yoga figures. However, it relies on the gene of sports and awakens the spirit of the brand. It is destined to follow a different path.
The consumers of TWOI completely include the two generations of mothers and daughters. Female consumers use purchases to express “who I am”, whileThe female consciousness of this “I” is destined to become more and more complex, rich, conflicting, and three-dimensional.
Picture source Xiaohongshu
We suddenly discovered thatBrands that sell well are not selling the product itself.
TWOI girls know that they are buying a sense of security wrapped in cream;
Fans of RDD know that they are buying into Zhao Lusi’s status as “electronic bestie”.
Visitors to GOODESS know they are buying an afternoon of “guest experience”;
Consumers of Xiaoyuyuy know that they are buying permission to be liked even if they are not perfect.
D+dd customers know they are buying a space where they can be seen without speaking loudly.
postscript
This new generation of consumers has more content to inherit, more desires to be eliminated, and more rhythms to be reshaped.，In fact, what they need is not the products on the shelves. What they need is the interface that provides links.
Social media, clothing accessories, IP fashion, all contentall point toLinks and communication between people, between people and the world, and between people and countless selves.
There will be more brands emerging, and there will be more aesthetics and expressions that are incomprehensible yet familiar. All the answers are written in the queue for next season.
Image source visual artist Anton Repponen
Author’s public account: Sensual City Scity (ID: zoffwalker)
