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Zhao Ziwen

On a recent Sunday afternoon in lower Manhattan, a small shop inside the Oculus, a soaring curvilinear mall at the World Trade Center, stands out for the bustling crowd thronging its space.
“We’re out of stock,” more than one employee can be heard telling customers.
This is not one of New York’s many top-brand boutiques but Pop Mart, a Chinese designer toy brand that has become a sensation in the United States.
Its signature “blind box”, containing collectable figurines revealed only when the box is opened, runs for a mere US$20.
In a sign of the buzz around Pop Mart, Xie Feng, Beijing’s ambassador to Washington, recently cited one of its offerings, Labubu, as an example of a Chinese brand touching American consumers’ hearts.
During remarks at a US-China Business Council event in Washington in June, Xie mentioned the toy in the same breath as DeepSeek, the Chinese AI firm that took its burgeoning industry by surprise earlier this year.

Pop Mart is not the only Chinese offline consumer brand making waves in New York. Miniso, another retail and lifestyle brand, has opened four Manhattan stores.
HeyTea, one of China’s leading tea chains, is also flourishing, drawing a steady stream of customers to its 15 locations across America’s most populous city.
These brands and more are placing big bets on the American market despite Sino-US tensions that have driven down Chinese investment that surged before Washington’s regulators and policymakers began scrutinising and blocking it.
Motivated by long-held ambitions of global expansion and headwinds at home, many of these brands see the US as the ultimate prize, surpassing other commercial hotspots like Southeast Asia, Europe and the Middle East, according to observers.
“Some leading companies have chosen to advance into Southeast Asia first, while others have chosen to go to the United States first. But in terms of market size and growth potential, they will almost all ultimately focus on the US market,” said Ivan Liu of WeFood, a New York-based consulting firm focused on China F&B expansion.
For instance, Haidilao, one of China’s largest hotpot chains, signalled it would focus on expanding with the US market providing the “biggest potential”, Bloomberg reported last year.
Pop Mart is charting a similar trajectory. The toy company first gained international traction and most of its overseas revenue in Southeast Asia. Multiple times this year, its billionaire CEO, Wang Ning, has called North America an important market.
HeyTea now operates more stores in New York City than in any other city outside China. Chagee, a rival to HeyTea in China, recently opened its first store in Los Angeles.

Luckin Coffee, China’s competitor to Starbucks, just opened its first two stores in New York. And fast-fashion brand Urban Revivo has launched a flagship store in the city’s trendy SoHo neighbourhood.
“When you ask what kind of advantages the US market holds … it’s [market] size,” said Jiang Yaling of Aperture China, a consultancy in consumer and lifestyle goods.
“For us as Chinese brands from a big country ourselves … we tend to correlate ourselves to other big markets,” Jiang added.
“That is something that smaller countries in Southeast Asia and Europe don’t necessarily have.”
America’s appeal is clear. Post-coronavirus pandemic, the US is arguably the fastest recovering retail market in the world, a title many once expected China to claim.
According to Capital One, a bank, US bricks-and-mortar retail sales last year increased to US$5.93 trillion, despite inflation risks largely easing, accounting for nearly 25 per cent of the global figure, citing US Census Bureau numbers.
It suggested that, in 2030, stateside retail sales would climb to US$6.61 trillion.
China’s weak consumption power is another reason brands have sought greener pastures. The country’s consumer price index has hovered near zero since 2023, heightening concerns about a potential deflationary future.

Its consumer outlook in 2025 remains sluggish, with food and beverage, automobiles and clothing being the hardest-hit sectors, according to a report by S&P Global Ratings.
“The US market has a huge consumer base and strong growth potential,” said Lu Chaoyang of Fish With You, a Chinese F&B brand with more than 2,500 stores.
Lu’s company chose the US as its first overseas expansion destination, running stores in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
“With fierce domestic price competition in China, expanding overseas has become a path to profitability,” said Gary Ng of Natixis, an investment banking company.
Robust performances by leading Chinese retail brands in recent years have proved that the American consumer is worth targeting.
In 2024, for instance, Haidilao’s North America stores recorded the highest per-capita spending across its global operations. Although they accounted for merely 16 per cent of overseas stores, they generated 21.2 per cent of the company’s overseas revenue.
Pop Mart’s revenue from the Americas in the first quarter of 2025 skyrocketed by an astonishing 895 to 900 per cent year-on-year, with its growth rate outpacing that of its overseas Asia-Pacific market.
Miniso posted its own breakthrough: in the first quarter of 2025, its North American revenues surpassed those of all of its Asian markets combined, excluding China.

“The mainstream American population is not as keen on saving money as the Chinese are,” said Liu of WeFood. “They place greater emphasis on enjoying life and prefer to eat and drink out.”
“Although the current domestic and international situation is quite complex … we believe that these fluctuations will not have a fundamental impact on the American food and drink market,” she added.
Yet the other reality in America is that hostility towards Chinese companies has risen, coupled with Chinese investors’ greater reluctance in the market, often because of economic and geopolitical uncertainty.
Indeed, US investor sentiment regarding China has declined sharply.
According to a survey in May by the China General Chamber of Commerce-USA, nearly half of the more than 100 Chinese companies that responded said they planned to reduce their investment in America.
Chinese direct investment in the country stood at US$28 billion in 2023, down 6.2 per cent year-on-year, according to the latest data from the US State Department’s diplomatic missions in China.
Against that backdrop, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in February restricting Chinese investment in technology, critical infrastructure, healthcare, agriculture, energy, raw materials and other strategic sectors.
In addition, throughout America, Chinese-backed manufacturing ventures have been shelved, delayed or scaled back.


Gotion, a Chinese EV battery maker, saw its US$2.6 billion project in Michigan stall.
Similarly, Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd, or CATL, the world’s largest manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries, now only licenses its technology at a Michigan plant after facing a Pentagon blacklist in January.
The experience of China’s DJI, the world’s dominant drone maker, is revealing. The company has maintained a heavy retail presence in the US.
But it was put on several US government blacklists such that it could effectively face a mass ban in America.
Another corporate giant, BYD, the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles, has also been turned away from the US market through high tariffs, EV tax credit exclusions and restrictions on connected vehicles.
Even China’s online shopping stalwarts, Shein and Temu, have encountered more difficulty, largely due to US tariffs, with congressional and House committees accusing them of evading forced-labour reviews.
On balance, Chinese retail companies that have expanded offline without relying intensely on technology seem to face fewer business hazards in the US, said Xu Tianchen of the Economist Intelligence Unit.
“These investments won’t be a problem in the foreseeable future. They are too innocuous to pose a national security threat,” Xu explained.
“Nowhere in the US do you see these stores as prevalent as McDonald’s and Chipotle, so they are unlikely to catch politicians’ attention.”

For retail companies, especially those in F&B, supply chains and localising a brand’s culture and management loom as significant hurdles, said Li Yu, the co-founder of MenuSifu, a North American software solution company for the F&B industry.
“Top brands’ supply chains remain a critical issue. Most are seeking to reduce their reliance on international supply networks,” he added.
Li noted many Chinese brands were now eager to work with domestic supply chain firms that were likewise expanding abroad to be closer to overseas clients.
Challenges aside, many companies are drawn to the US market because of the country’s global brand power, according to Jiang of Aperture China.
“When consumer brands look at which overseas markets they’re going to explore … [they look at] whether it will be ideal for brand building,” Jiang said.
The leading Chinese consumer companies are advancing their American ambitions by stepping beyond traditional Chinatowns and into the centres of major shopping districts.
The decision appears to be timely, coinciding with more favourable views of China held by a notable portion of America’s younger generation.
According to Pew Research, in 2025, only 19 per cent of Americans aged 18 to 29 would call China an enemy. For those above age 65, the number is 47 per cent, and for those aged 50 to 64, it is 40 per cent.
The survey was conducted after a wave of American users flocked to RedNote, a Chinese social media app, amid a threatened US ban of TikTok, whose parent company is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese tech firm.


Nick, a 33-year-old from New York who declined to share his surname, described public perceptions of Chinese brands as “not as bad as they once were”.
“People are starting to understand that China has been wrongly stigmatised [for] being cheap quality, and that’s slowly changing with people seeing how many brands in the US … get supplies from China,” he said.
That said, Nick identified product quality rather than a brand’s Chinese affiliation as the determining factor for his consumer choices.
Kevin Li, a 24-year-old New Yorker, echoed that assessment. “I want to visit these Chinese shops like HeyTea and others that focus on quality ingredients and are known for fun flavours,” he said.
Nevertheless, Jiang of Aperture China cautioned Chinese brands against expressing their identity as many Americans remain watchful of Chinese-made products.
Chinese brand Anker, a global leader in power banks and charging accessories, garnered attention after Trump was seen using one of its products last year, igniting a debate on his support for American manufacturing.
Meanwhile, offline retail brands are still too small to shift the overall dip in Chinese investment in the US.
“The scale is nowhere near those in the capital-intensive manufacturing and property sectors,” said Xu of the Economist Intelligence Unit. “They won’t help much in changing the broader direction of travel of US-China ties.
“But their success shows good things are borderless, and geopolitics can’t stop everything.”


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The Pop Mart store located in the Oculus in lower Manhattan. The Chinese brand has found success among American consumers. Photo: Pop Mart

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More offline mainland brands are placing big bets on American consumers despite bilateral tensions and weak investor sentiment


More offline mainland brands are placing big bets on American consumers despite bilateral tensions and weak investor sentiment.


For some China retailers, US still offers path to profit, one toy or tea order at a time

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}More offline mainland brands are placing big bets on American consumers despite bilateral tensions and weak investor sentiment

More offline mainland brands are placing big bets on American consumers despite bilateral tensions and weak investor sentiment