Thank you.
And into Roundtable, I'm Steve Hatherly, today with Fei-Fei and Yushan.
Coming up, forget dusty storefronts.
China's oldest brands are crashing live streams and racking up billions of views.
The old-timers are suddenly cool again.
But behind the hype, a brutal scramble for digital talent, a battle with the algorithm itself and one big question when heritage chases trends.
Does the magic survive?
After that, we say it every day that we love to hear your voice.
And today we have a special heart-to-heart message that gets straight to the heart of relationships.
Stay tuned for that.
Our podcast listeners can find us at Roundtable China on Apple Podcasts.
And yes, if you would like to be a part of our Heart to Heart segment, then you can send your own voice note and tell us what's on your mind these days.
Here's how you do that.
Roundtablepodcast at QQ.com.
Once again, roundtablepodcast at QQ.com.
And now...
Centuries-old shop signs are lighting up not just old streets anymore, but smartphone screens.
Across the country, time-honored brands are stepping out of offline storefronts and into viral live streams, cracking up, racking up billions of views on social media platforms.
Now, as more of these brands open up their stores online, it seems like all of a sudden that the old-timers are trying to be cool again.
But behind the numbers is a bit of a tougher story.
There's a scramble for talent, the people that you put on those screens when people are scrolling to represent people, those legacy brands.
There's also a race to decode platform algorithms.
How do we get our brand image and message to as many people as possible?
That's a new challenge.
Also, there's a deeper question about identity.
You know, if your company is 100 years old and you have an established image and all of a sudden you're trying to break into you know, young people's reels or streams or whatever, then that raises the question of who are you as a company too?
You know there's a lot of questions here, but it's basically about older companies trying to stay relevant here in 2026.
And I like the story.
So let's find out exactly what's going on.
Yeah.
So in today's world, which is the digital world, the transformation has really become the key bridge connecting China's 老字号, or rather time-honored brands, with younger consumers as well as the modern society as well.
Because they are now really actively trying to navigate their way through online sales channels, rather than just sticking to just merely the offline stores like in old times.
So here's the big news.
More than 90% of Beijing's traditional brands have gone online.
They're setting up shops on major e-commerce platforms like JDcom, Taobao and Tmall, and also on social media platforms like Douyin.
And that's according to one new report from the Beijing Time Honor Brand Association called the Beijing Time Honor Brands Inheritance and Innovation Development Report.
That kind of put together the information from the past five years to come up with some data.
So, according to their data, over 80 of these Time Honor brands in Beijing now operates official WeChat accounts or WeChat service accounts.
And some of them even built their own WeChat mini program stores selling stuff and also creating this seamless, really people-to-people end-to-end kind of shopping experience for everybody who has WeChat.
So that's pretty cool.
What kind of products, what kind of companies are we talking about here?
All different kinds.
Yeah.
Back in, I think, in 2020.
There are surveys saying that these brands are mainly concentrated in traditional commerce and service sectors like food, traditional Chinese medicine, clothes or fabric selling.
And now they are also expanding on that.
They now cover 14 industries that some of them are reaching into finance, into education and training, into performances, into agriculture and tourism.
For example, I can think of a brand called Tongrentown, which is a renowned traditional Chinese medicine brand here in Beijing.
And of course, they're still known for their traditional medicine.
But now they're also opening up cafes and bakeries.
There's one in Wukong really close here.
The bakery is a really hot sought after online when it comes to their bread, their sourdough bread.
Sorry, do they add herbs into their bakery?
Yeah, yeah.
Did we talk about it on Roundtable before?
They have like goji berry toast or black sesame seed, I don't know, sourdough rolls.
Yep, TCM breads.
They're doing that with other things too, right?
Coffee, for example.
For example, tea, for example.
Well, I don't know if tea would be a new example.
Maybe they've been doing that for a while.
But coffee, I think, would be a modern day example.
Yeah, there are like, I can't really remember the name, but maybe goji berry lattes.
There are also teas like trying to implement, going into the direction of milk teas or bubble boba teas.
Yeah.
So there are definitely new innovation happening in, for example, in Torrentown.
And there is also another really famous tea shop in Beijing called Wu Yutai.
And back a few years ago, it is famous for its green tea and jasmine tea ice cream.
Yeah, my favorite.
Yeah, you need to line up in Wangfujing to get one.
Wait, is this the store?
They made like a museum kind of out of their tea shop in wang fujing?
I think they did, and i think i was there not long ago.
There was a lineup of people uh, outside it was really really um, kind of cool.
Uh, they used the digital and the physical, if you will, to bring the history of tea or chinese tea to life for the people.
Yeah, so you walk, you walk around in there instead of just going in and asking for tea kind of a cool idea, especially in an area like wang fujing.
It's um, it's kind of in the middle of the city and it's a popular tourist destination.
It's a shopping street, but i like that you're still mentioning the shopping street, which is physical store.
Now, these brands, they're moving their stuff online, as in, they're opening up online store, but that's not exciting enough, is it?
They're also kind of boosting and really navigating in new fields such as live stream.
The way they do live streams these days is really interesting as well.
Just yesterday, on march the 3rd, the lantern festival there's a special live stream called the third.
So this happens in tianjin municipality, right next to beijing the third tianjin e-commerce festival, where they went live and brought about Over 40 brands and nearly 200 different products over to that huge live stream festival.
So how they do it is that they are not only people sitting in front of a camera and telling you oh, this is what we have.
They kind of use the dual way kind of thing.
There are people, there's a live streamer outside.
And outside of each and every brand introducing.
You see how many people are queuing for their glutinous rice ball outside of this brand.
Because this brand is a well-known one in Tianjin.
Question.
Who's on camera?
Just live streamers from the brand and also from the host of this activity, but they also invite the brand owner, sometimes the inheritor of this 100-year-old brand.
They call it.
Like the certain generation of the inheritor.
They invite these people to well inside the live stream house and to sit down and introduce their brand.
The reason I asked is because sometimes that can work, I think, or sometimes it can't.
And the guy is on there and he's 75 years old and he's like.
In 1945 I created this toothpaste company.
It's delicious and it cleans your teeth.
Well, that doesn't really resonate with the younger crowd.
Right.
With the Gen Z or alpha crowd.
So that's why I asked who's on camera here, because if you're going to go with these live stream shows,
It's not just about doing the live stream.
You want them to be effective.
That's more important.
So here's one example.
There's one brand that showed up on the Tianjin e-commerce festival called Xianghe Bobopu, which is a 114-year-old pastry brand.
So they invite their fourth-generation inheritor, called Young Ming onto the live stream.
And this guy.
He said himself that this year's Tianjin e-commerce festival really boosted our overall sales.
Our online business has grown nearly 20% year on year compared to last year.
So it really means that these people, they vouch for their brand by showing up.
And we don't really see all the time like it's like 50 years old, 60 years old people showing up, but rather younger inheritors of their brand showing up and speaking up.
We are in that timeline, aren't we?
That was another discussion on Roundtable, the transition, the succession from the founders of the company to the new leaders.
And sometimes those are family members.
Yeah, I remember that conversation.
Just in the timeline, a lot of these companies are at that point in their chronology where it's time to hand the reins to someone else.
It's not just Beijing and Tianjin, though, right?
This is happening in many parts of the country.
Yeah well, here we need to mention another report that's lately released by Douyin's local live services.
So that one's titled the 2025 Douyin Live Services Time Honor Brand Business Report.
So that one puts the spotlight on four major cities.
Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou.
And it's really interesting and fascinating that each city is carving out its own distinct development path.
So across the four cities, the total number of time-honored merchants grew by 17% year on year.
But even more striking is the surge in transactions.
Total sales volume, it jumped by an impressive 90% according to the report.
So it's working.
It's working.
And it's not only working in Beijing.
And also, for example, in Guangzhou.
You can see it's working because over half of their time, owner brands in Guangzhou are now stepping into a live stream studio.
Yeah.
So they saw it's working.
So that's why they're also deciding to expand on this type of new services.
And that really shapes and reshape a lot of changes in how they operate it.
They become more sophisticated in when it comes to operating a platform ecosystem.
So rather than relying just on influencers, because that happened before.
Yeah, that still happens nowadays.
Yeah, it still happens now.
But it's not only relying on influencers, it's not enough for them anymore.
They are also trying to open up, build up their own traffic, their own fan base.
You can see, for example, in Guangzhou, I remember there is a one-time owner brand focusing on Yamcha.
They opened restaurants in Guangzhou, in many other cities, also in London as well.
And they are selling, for example, packaged frozen Yamcha food items.
What's Yamcha, by the way?
It's like shrimp, dumplings, shumais, you know, things like that.
A lot of pastries.
They're also selling coupons if you want to go out and experience their offline dining experiences.
So we can see that they are live streaming this morning.
I just checked on their TaoTaoJu Douyin official account.
Were you just checking or were you shopping for some delicious shrimp dumplings?
Yeah, I'm looking forward.
I really like their young champ.
I'm working.
In the name of working, check out their live stream.
See, I really love this idea that more local flavors, or rather brands, time-honored brands that's primarily known locally, is being introduced to a wider public just simply by going online.
Because previously, we know things locally too well.
And, for example, Yesterday after my gym session, I was looking for a good, sweet dumpling brand to buy from.
So I was walking in the supermarket and inside the frozen cabinet there are so many different brands.
I picked one flavor that I really like and it says on the cover, it's called Da Qiao Dao.
I was like, I've never heard of this brand.
What is it?
So I searched on my phone and it specifies that this is a time-honored brand that's very famous in Tianjin, right next to Beijing.
And by just searching, this is how people get to learn different brands.
But if you go online and just go like window shopping through different live streams, that's making things so much easier and connecting the country as a whole.
Regarding introducing their local culinary iconic dishes to the outside provinces and regions,
The advantage that these legacy brands would have is that everybody knows who they are.
So you're not a startup.
You're not getting your name out there.
Everybody already knows your name.
So there's an existing level of curiosity, perhaps.
But that being said though, one of the difficulties must be the talent gap in terms of How to run a successful online campaign.
Because these companies have been running offline campaigns successfully for 100 years.
But it's a different animal when you're trying to do a fight with the algorithms, if you will.
And also when it comes to these time-honored brands with century-old histories, I think one of their focuses have always been on the craftsman itself how to make my product better and better.
So there is a status like in Beijing, for example, about 87 of their employees are traditional craftsmen, but only 1 are really digital tech experts.
Yeah, that's my point.
Yeah, but that's natural, because for a time-honored brand, it's natural for them to think, you know, my craft is more important than how I do marketing.
But in this day and age, when algorithms basically decide how you sell and your customers, It's also very important to have a team of experts in the digital world, to know the channels and to know how to get to your customers.
That's why a lot of the experts are telling these brands to change your mindset a little bit and hire those whom you're trying to target your customer base on.
So that's one way to find out if it's going to work for these brands.
And also operation is important too how to manage brands, your online stores scientifically, so that you get to develop and also maintain your good original customer basis.
Yeah, like in China, when we were talking about online shopping platforms, there are dozens of them.
There are Tmall's, there are Taobao's Tmall is different from Taobao and there are JD, there are Douyin, there are WeChat, and many brands open up different stores on different platforms and some of them sort of stay in their own silo.
I can only get the data from my WeChat store.
But my WeChat store isn't, you know, necessarily connected to the Douyin store.
So they are not getting a full picture of their customer base.
Yes, online.
So that is a problem as well.
And another thing is when they are trying to appeal to a younger base of customers.
They need to launch new products and how to make sure that these new launches really matches your time-honored images.
There will be sometimes failed launches because that launches just don't feel like you.
They don't resonate.
Yeah, it's a challenge, but it is what it is, I think, because it's 2026.
Everybody shops online here in China.
Of course, there are brick and mortar stores that still exist, of course.
Shopping malls are everywhere, but it seems like if you really want to make it, you've got to keep up with what the young kids are doing business-wise too.
You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Steve with Feifei and Yushan.
And coming up, is there such thing as falling in love too late?
Heart to Heart is on the way.
Heart to Heart, a moment just for you.
Your questions, your stories, your voice.
Our shared conversation.
It is time for us to pass the microphone over to you.
And for today's Heart to Heart, we have a message from Jenny.
Dear every host in Roundtable China.
I'm Jenny and I'm so glad to have this chance to talk with you, if my mail is selected.
Actually, i am 25 years old now and i still haven't gone into a love relationship.
Haven't dated with any boys before in china, we call it mudan solo in the last years.
I'm not that worried because all my best friends, closest friends they face the same situation like me.
But i just keep asking myself Is that normal, like at this stage of us?
I know it may sound a little bit cheesy to say like we are too old or something, because after all, we are just 25 years old now and in such a modern city a lot of girls just not married or married at a very late age.
But I do want to experience the love because I have been working now and My biggest interest is to dance.
I would spend my spare time to go to dance classes after work.
I just want to ask about you guys, what do you think about it?
And I really need your advice or guidance about it.
How to expand my friend circle or how to adjust to my own mood.
Yeah, that is important to me.
Thank you guys.
And I would still appreciate it If you could read my mail and just give me some feedback.
Thank you.
Love you guys.
Thanks for sharing, Jenny.
So Jenny's 25 years old.
She's never been in a romantic relationship with a guy.
She's never had a boyfriend.
Didn't bother her before, but now she's thinking, I kind of want to get my feet wet here.
I kind of want to get into the game here. what advice would you give to Jenny Yushan?
I'll start with 25 years old is really not too late, and it's never really too late to get to experience something as sweet and nice as a love and intimate relationship.
So Jenny, from my personal point of view, I'll recommend you downloading some dating apps.
Really, that's how I met my boyfriend.
That's how everybody's meeting these days.
That's how young people meet.
It's quite common these days.
Okay.
So if your advice to Jenny is to get an app, then what advice would you give for navigating the app?
Don't recommend any specific app location, but just on the app, how do you know?
How do you know what... person you want?
What are you looking for?
That's where I'm going to get to next, because online there, you will meet people who are as serious as you are, but then there are also people who are just playing around.
So it's really important if you tell that they're using genuine pictures instead of AI generations and then they're giving very detailed personal information instead of just saying oh, I'm here to chill.
I'm looking for somebody to chat, something like that.
So have hope and stay passionate about it, but don't get overly excited and believe in whatever you see up on those apps, because there are people who are not as serious as you are.
Well, for me, first of all, Jenny, I'm with you.
25, never dating before.
That was me before.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So you can see it's really not a big deal.
I'm long past my 25 years old.
I'm doing fine.
It's really not that horrible that you haven't really been in a relationship or dated in your whole life.
So that's my first advice to you is just to think about it.
Is it really something that you really need is a boyfriend?
Can having a boyfriend really help with your anxiety or feeling loneliness?
I'm not sure about the reason that you feel this pressure that I need to get into a relationship.
Is it because everybody else in your life is coupled up?
That's a lot.
I mean, that pressure makes sense, though.
Yeah.
But it's not, you know, having a boyfriend is not really going to solve that anxiety and pressure.
It's only a shortcut, but it's not a true, you know, resolution to that.
Jenny, men will only add more stress to your life. not less.
That's true.
Speaking from being a man.
Speaking as one of the stress givers.
Jenny, this is what I would say.
Look, at 25 years old, it's not a big deal.
You said it yourself.
Who cares, right?
It's not a weird thing.
It's not an uncomfortable thing.
But I would say this, and this is 1000% honesty.
If you get to 30 years old and you've never dated before, then you might think like okay, maybe this is getting a little bit uncomfortable.
So here's my advice sure, go to the dating apps, but don't expect much, because You need to find out through dating who you like, who you don't like.
You need to set your own boundaries.
But now you don't know what those boundaries are.
What kind of guy are you into?
You don't really know yet.
So don't date with the purpose of falling in love immediately.
I would say start to date with the purpose of enjoying dating and nothing more.
That's very important.
See how that goes for you.
And then send us another voice note.
Keep us updated.
Maybe in a few months' time, after the summer's over, tell us how your summer of love went Jenny, and good luck to you.
All right, that'll do it for today's roundtable.
Thank you very much for being a part of our program today.
For Yushan and Feifei, I'm Steve.
Have a great one and join us again next time.
