The other direction

The assumption

An Italian brand deciding to enter China usually arrives with a plan that is structurally an export plan: adapt the campaign, translate the assets, find a local agency, launch.

That plan is not wrong so much as incomplete. It treats China as a market with a different language. It is a market with a different infrastructure — different platforms, different contract norms, different legal constraints on what you may say, and a different commercial calendar. Each of those has a cost measured in weeks, and Western launch timelines almost never contain them.

We work in both directions, and this is the direction that surprises people more.

Xiaohongshu and WeChat are not Instagram and email

The instinct is to map: Xiaohongshu is the Chinese Instagram, WeChat is the Chinese WhatsApp. The mapping is close enough to be dangerous.

Xiaohongshu behaves less like a feed and more like a search engine with pictures. Users arrive with an intention — a product category, a comparison, a question — and content is discovered long after posting. A campaign built for a two-day Instagram spike underperforms there for reasons that have nothing to do with the creative.

WeChat is not a messaging channel with a brand account attached. It is where a customer relationship actually lives: the account, the mini-programme, the customer service, the reordering. Building it is an infrastructure project, not a communications one, and it does not happen in the three weeks before a launch.

Influencer work is a contract, not a gifting list

European brands are used to a gifting model: send the product, hope for a post, measure afterwards.

In China, working with KOLs is a commercial arrangement with a brief, a fee, deliverable specifications, posting windows and, frequently, performance terms. Rates are known, negotiated and seasonal. The right talent is booked out for major retail moments months ahead.

The practical consequence: there is no such thing as a cheap last-minute KOL campaign in China at the moments you most want one. Plan it as a media buy, in a budget line, with a lead time.

What you may not say

Chinese advertising law places real restrictions on marketing claims, and one in particular catches European copy repeatedly: absolute superlatives are prohibited. "The best." "Number one." "The finest in the world."

European luxury copy is built almost entirely out of that vocabulary. It has to be rewritten, not translated — and rewritten by someone who knows the constraint, not by a translator working from an Italian original.

Add to this: platform content review, brand account verification, and any filings your channels require. Each is measured in days or weeks, and each sits before your launch date rather than around it.

The calendar does not match

The Chinese retail year has its own peaks, and they do not align with the European one:

• Chinese New Year — the date moves, and commerce, logistics and staffing pause around it for weeks

• 618 — the mid-June shopping festival

• Golden Week, early October

• Double 11, 11 November — the single largest commercial moment of the year

• Double 12, December

A campaign that lands in the week before Double 11 is invisible; the entire attention economy is elsewhere. A campaign that lands in the two weeks around Chinese New Year has no one at the other end to execute it. Both mistakes are made every year by brands working from a European calendar.

Which city, and why not automatically Shanghai

Shanghai is the default, and often the right answer: international press, the highest concentration of luxury retail, the shortest distance to a European brand's existing partners.

But it is also the most expensive and the most crowded, and a brand with a limited first-year budget can sometimes buy far more attention elsewhere — Chengdu, Hangzhou, Shenzhen — where a well-produced foreign brand event is an event rather than one of six that week. The right answer depends on where your distribution actually is, which is a commercial question before it is a communications one.

What travels well from Italy, and what doesn't

Travels well: process. Workshop, hands, materials, the specific person who makes the thing. Chinese audiences engage with craft content at a depth European brands consistently underestimate.

Travels badly: heritage as abstraction. "Founded in 1897" is not a story. What happened in that workshop last Tuesday is.

Also travels badly: the assumption that a European brand's recognition transfers. In most categories it does not, and behaving as though it does reads as complacency in a market where the competition is working much harder.

Where we sit in this

We are a Milan studio. We do not pretend to be a Chinese agency, and a brand serious about China needs local partners.

What we do is the part that keeps failing at the join: making sure what leaves Italy is built so it can actually be used on the other side — the assets, the copy, the claims, the timeline — instead of arriving as a beautiful European campaign that has to be dismantled and rebuilt on landing.

— Patty Wong, N.7 Studio