Sample collection stores leave shopping malls: former capital favorites face bottlenecks

Ask AI · How can a beauty retail collective store transform into an aesthetic curation officer and break the deadlock?

Once-common beauty mini-sample collective stores are becoming increasingly rare. Recently, a reporter from Beijing Business Daily visited and found that within popular commercial complexes such as Chaoyang Joy City, Changying Tiandi, and Wudaokou Shopping Center, some mini-sample cosmetics stores have quietly shut down. As a former “traffic driver” for malls, this type of format rose rapidly thanks to labels like “low-price try-before-you-buy” and “internet-famous check-in.” Now, however, it has fallen into an operating expansion dilemma. With low gross margins, insufficient average transaction value, and inability to withstand high mall rents—along with shifts in consumer habits and stricter industry regulation—the survival space for mini-sample collective stores continues to shrink. With the mini-sample economy that was once highly sought after, how will it break through this transformation impasse and find a place to stand in China’s multi-trillion-yuan beauty market?

Mini-sample collective stores are “receding”

As the core market where mini-sample collective stores were first rolled out in Beijing, changes in the industry format have become a bellwether for the nationwide sector, with retreat signs especially evident. A Beijing Business Daily reporter’s statistics show that JIEMO Jiemo, which once had stores in landmark malls such as Chaoyang Joy City, Changying Tiandi, and Chaoyang Super Joy City, now has only one store left—the Joyaone Joy City in the west of Beijing; Suning Jiwupin’s Beijing beauty collective store has also already closed, leaving only two stores in Nanjing and Hangzhou; at Wudaokou Shopping Center, the internet-famous brand ONLY WRITE (独写) that once occupied a core location rode into popularity with its 99-yuan blind box, but the good times didn’t last—it’s already withdrawn.

At the same time, within chain brands like WOW COLOUR and HARMAY, which focuses on mini-sample collections, the proportion of mini-sample products has dropped significantly compared with the early stage when stores first opened, with the share of full-size, packaged cosmetics increasing.

Not only in Beijing—across the country, mini-sample collective stores are all going through “painful contraction.” Taking HARMAY as an example, during its expansion peak it consecutively closed the stores in Hangzhou Tianmuli and Xi’an Xiaizhai. From 2017 to today, HARMAY has never exceeded 20 stores. Wuhan Chuhe Han Street, the global flagship location of HAYDON Black Hole, has also long since closed.

Looking at the overall format of beauty collective stores, THE COLORIST (调色师) and WOW COLOUR—once red-hot—have both seen their nationwide store counts shrink by more than half. By contrast, the general shop format has begun expanding into the categories of cosmetics and mini-samples, enriching its SKU assortment.

Pan Jun, Director of Product Strategy Advisory at Bain Company, points out that core business district rents and operating costs continue to rise, making the “rent spread” logic that traditional shelf-based models relied on unsustainable. At the same time, the fragmentation of online channels further siphons off customers who would otherwise visit in person. Moreover, mini-sample formats were originally meant to fill market gaps as a supplementary offering, but now they have fallen into a trust quagmire over the authenticity of their inventory. On top of that, live-streaming e-commerce has strongly disrupted pricing systems, wiping out the mini-samples’ once-weak price advantage.

Under capital’s pursuit, rapid growth without restraint

Mini-sample collective stores, which had been losing ground and yet once sparked an industry boom between 2019 and 2021, became a sweet target for capital chasing and also a “tenant favorite” for shopping centers. HARMAY opened its first store on Shanghai’s Anfu Road in 2017, pioneering a warehouse-style beauty collective model. In 2019, its Sanlitun store in Beijing went viral quickly on social media thanks to an industrial-style renovation and a combination of big-brand mini-samples. Public information shows that in December 2019, Huamei’s A-round financing saw Gaoling Capital come on board; with only three stores, the valuation reached 500 million yuan. After the B round, the valuation of a single store even reached 1 billion yuan. Later, HARMAY completed a combined nearly $200 million in financing across its C and D rounds.

HARMAY’s breakout ignited the mini-sample collective store track, and various brands rushed in, forming a landscape of “many champions vying for dominance.” The HAYDON Black Hole flagship store opened in Wuhan in December 2020. Since then, the brand expanded rapidly and completed two rounds of financing in 2021: the angel round received investments from Tencent and Gaoling Capital; the A+ round financing amount was $100 million, with a post-investment valuation of $1 billion. THE COLORIST (调色师) and WOW COLOUR expanded quickly with a “internet-famous renovation + budget mini-samples” model. The former opened more than 300 stores in two years, while the latter opened 300 stores in just 9 months—both entering first-floor core locations in mainstream malls nationwide to rapidly capture market share.

At that time, on one hand, mini-sample collective stores met Generation Z’s demand for “big-brand freedom” through low-price mini-samples; on the other, internet-famous renovation and design became a social check-in destination, bringing large amounts of young foot traffic to malls—thus making them a “favorite” of shopping centers.

After the traffic dividend peaked, under the dual effects of capital withdrawing and brand competition squeezing, these kinds of cosmetics collective stores had no choice but to retreat from the centers of first-tier cities. Yuan Shuai, Deputy Director of the Investment Department at the China Institute for Urban Development Research, noted that traditional or emerging collective stores such as Tiaose Shi, Sasa, Mannings, and WOW COLOUR cut store numbers in half or even withdrew from the Mainland market, reflecting a collective loss of direction among traditional retail channels amid the impacts of digital transformation and the reshaping of consumer preferences. In early expansion, these stores overemphasized the social attributes of visual merchandising and the scale-effect, but overlooked deep supply-chain integration and the building of in-house R&D capabilities.

“As online live-streaming e-commerce and brand-owned live-streaming rooms have risen, price transparency has been pushed to the extreme. The channel premium space that collective stores used to have has been greatly compressed, and their in-store service experience often cannot differentiate itself in the way premium counters or the convenience of online channels can,” Yuan Shuai said. For longtime retailers like Sasa and Mannings, he added, their product portfolios have aged and they cannot iterate quickly to adapt to Generation Z’s diversified aesthetics, causing brand assets to keep shrinking. Against a backdrop of continuously rising operating costs and foot traffic being strongly diverted online, offline collective stores lacking unique product power and data-driven capabilities inevitably enter a defensive stage where they shrink scale to protect themselves.

Transforming into an “aesthetic curation officer”

From a capital “favorite” to a collective withdrawal, the reshuffling of mini-sample collective stores—or beauty cosmetics collective stores—is not accidental. Its core contradiction lies in the imbalance between a positioning of “low-cost trying” and the reality of “high-cost operations.” Yuan Shuai said that in the future, the development of mini-sample collective stores or beauty cosmetics collective stores must complete the identity shift from being a “shelf carrier” to becoming an “aesthetic curation officer,” moving core competitiveness away from low-price arbitrage toward professional, scenario-based services and differentiated curation capabilities.

A collective store should no longer try to cover every product category; instead, it should go deep into specific niche segments, and by building an irreplaceable offline interaction space, it should counter online low-price pressure. Yuan Shuai said that collective stores must establish a strong in-house brand matrix to improve profitability and supply-chain autonomy. They should use digital tools to accurately capture member personas, and achieve integrated online-offline private-domain operations. In the future, successful players will no longer be just sales venues for moving goods, but comprehensive social spaces that provide emotional value, professional skincare solutions, and immersive aesthetic experiences—by building a vertical and professional community ecosystem to lock in high-sticky users, rather than relying solely on easily replicated mini-samples as traffic drivers.

In 2025, China’s all-channel cosmetics market transaction value exceeded 1.1 trillion yuan, reaching 11k yuan, up 2.83% year over year. The competitiveness of domestic brands continues to lead, with market share rising to 57.37%. The channel landscape has undergone deep adjustments: online channels recorded transaction value of 721.77 billion yuan, up 4.45%, accounting for 65.36%; offline channels recorded 382.47 billion yuan. “The era of a single-pole expansion led by online” has ended, and a new pattern of symbiotic online-offline integration is accelerating.

For mini-sample collective stores, the future’s core competitiveness will no longer be “low-price mini-samples” and “internet-famous renovation,” but instead product authenticity assurance, supply-chain control capability, curation capability, and a sense of experience. Bai Wenxi, Vice Chairman of the China Enterprise Capital Alliance, believes that the development focus of mini-sample collective stores has shifted from simply “selling mini-samples” toward “selling services.” Brands can upgrade from single-product transactions to long-term emotional connections and value services by introducing skin testing, customized skincare plans, and more refined member deep-operations. Meanwhile, scenario integration becomes the key to breaking the deadlock: cross-industry mixes of beauty and coffee, and beauty with art exhibitions, can effectively strengthen the stores’ social attributes and increase how long customers stay. The goal is to capture mindshare in fragmented consumption scenarios.

Bai Wenxi said that on the operations side, brands should focus on private-domain traffic, using a closed-loop model that drives traffic from offline experiences to repeat purchases via mini-programs, so as to counter the high customer-acquisition costs of e-commerce platforms. On the curation side, they should focus on niche overseas brands and “pure” cosmetics and other segments that are weakly covered online, building competitive barriers through differentiated supply. In addition, lower-tier markets have been activated as a new growth engine: some brands that exited first-tier cities have started shifting to second- and third-tier cities, using lower rent costs to match local consumption capacity, and adjusting SKU structures to seek new survival space.

Beijing Business Daily reporter Liu Zhuolan