How Do You Build a Successful Designer Brand on Taobao? What Ms MIN Got Right

Ms MIN's route to fame looks inventive, but few independent designers could copy it.

In April, the independent designer brand Ms MIN opened a store in Shanghai Centre. The shop runs a little over 80 square meters; Ms MIN brought in the Italian designer Vincenzo De Cotiis, who used brass and marble throughout it. The brand also stayed out of the big malls packed with dozens of labels, paying a good deal to land "good neighbors" instead. On either side sit Christian Louboutin, known for its red-soled shoes; Miu Miu, Prada's wildly popular younger line; and Salvatore Ferragamo, the 90-year-old Italian shoemaker.

This is Ms MIN's first physical store. Six years ago, when the designer Liu Min founded it on Taobao, it was just a Taobao brand selling vintage clothing. Most independent designers get into physical retail first and only then move cautiously into e-commerce. Ms MIN's route to fame looks inventive because it ran the opposite way: it started on Taobao, then got into Dong Liang, the multi-brand boutique known for pushing Chinese designer labels, and Lane Crawford, the high-end fashion boutique, and only after that opened a store of its own.

Gemma A. Williams, though, thinks few independent designers could copy the Ms MIN model. Williams is a British fashion curator who has studied Chinese independent fashion designers closely and wrote the book Fashion China. "If an American designer got started on eBay, they probably couldn't go on to open a store in Shanghai's luxury shopping district the way Ms MIN has," she said.

Liu Min's early career looked no different from any other independent fashion designer's. She studied womenswear design at the London College of Fashion, interned at the Dutch fashion house Viktor&Rolf after graduating, and in 2008 went home to China to work as an assistant designer in the womenswear department at Ports 1961. A year later she quit. Then, in 2009, she opened a small shop called Ms MIN on Taobao.

Bai Yu, a graphic designer at a magazine, was one of the Ms MIN shop's regulars. In September 2010 she paid 238 yuan for a mango-yellow polka-dot pocket shirt, British vintage from the 1980s. Bai Yu was deep into retro style then, and when a fashion influencer on Weibo posted screenshots of the shop and said its photography was fun, she went to have a look.

At first Liu Min wasn't selling her own designs on Ms MIN at all; the whole business ran on vintage she had hunted down abroad. And the shop really was known then for its strange pictures. She took the masks she had collected while studying overseas, paired them with different vintage pieces, and shot, directed and starred in the photos herself, firing off self-portraits in quick succession. In Liu Min's words: "It was fun, it made something, and a lot of people liked it."

Liu Min had thought her own interests through, and without quite realizing it she ran the vintage shop the way you would tell the history of fashion. "Most vintage shops care about Japanese vintage, American vintage, Victorian-era vintage. Nobody was touching vintage from the 1960s through the 1980s," she said. That went double for Chinese consumers, who from the 1950s through the 1980s had worn nothing but Mao suits, Liberation-style uniforms and Dacron; for them, "vintage" simply meant "old clothes." There were few vintage shops on Taobao at the time, and vintage was still a fresh subject.

That, plus a clear and bold take on fashion style, is what drew customers like Bai Yu to Ms MIN early on. "It looked like the styling in old Dior campaign shoots — models with their hips thrust forward to make their legs look extra long, wearing masks," Bai Yu said. In 2014 she spent another 350 yuan on a black high-waisted puffball skirt. In her words, "I liked Ms MIN's design; it looked like retro style, improved."

But the second time Bai Yu paid for a Ms MIN piece, it was not only for the skirt's retro high waist. It was also for the pockets sewn into the sides, as handy as trouser pockets.

That puffball skirt came from Ms MIN after its turn. In 2010 Liu Min sold her own designs in the shop for the first time, a first collection priced between 380 and 1,500 yuan. The Taobao shop shifted from there, and two years later she stopped selling vintage to work on original design alone. That first creative line still runs through Ms MIN's work today; the latest one, called "The Peach Banquet of the Bingshen Year," uses Sun Wukong imagery for the arrival of the Year of the Monkey.

As a rule, designer brands — luxury brands above all — have never been keen on e-commerce. They worry that shopping online strips away the value a brand adds through looks and experience, and that it wrecks the distance these brands work so hard to keep. Amazon has wanted a fashion business since 2009 and has never won the favor of luxury labels. Even multi-brand boutiques once hesitated over whether to take e-commerce in. H. Lorenzo, the famous Los Angeles boutique, didn't want to sell online either. When Farfetch, the world's largest boutique e-commerce platform, came to H. Lorenzo about working together, the owner, Lorenzo Hadar, said no; H. Lorenzo joined Farfetch in the end. "E-commerce is reality," Hadar said.

For Ms MIN, coming out of e-commerce was no handicap at all. The opposite, Liu Min says: Taobao let her understand the market from the day she started designing.

From 2010 to 2014 she read every customer comment left on the Taobao shop herself. Only after the Ms MIN team grew to 70 people did that job go to someone else to sort through. "I could gather first-hand data. Years of selling on Taobao let me build an understanding of sales feedback. Without that platform I wouldn't understand the market or my customers," Liu Min said.

Today someone else reads the data with her: her husband, Ian Hylton.

Before joining Ms MIN, Hylton worked at Ralph Lauren and spent nine years as menswear fashion director at the Canadian department store Holt Renfrew. Inevitably, that led some people to assume the Ms MIN business was not something Liu Min built on her own. The suspicion probably baffles Hylton. He did not step down as Ports 1961's menswear creative director and join Ms MIN as chief executive until 2014. "I had little to do with the early period," he said.

"I admire Liu Min's work. She's talented, and she understands what kind of design women need. Not just what Chinese women need — what women in other countries need too. That's why I'm willing to put myself into this brand," Hylton said of his wife, sounding like nothing more than a business partner. "It's also why I think Ms MIN can become an international brand. From where I stand, we're not competing with anyone. What we're after is the outlook of an international brand."

He now handles marketing, outside communications, sales and visual merchandising. The interiors of Ms MIN's 900-square-meter studio headquarters in Xiamen are all his work. In picking the site for the Shanghai store, Hylton weighed the Taobao numbers too: by that data, Shanghai held more Ms MIN VIP customers than anywhere else, which is why the brand's first physical store went there and not to Beijing, a city of equally international standing.

Even now that she is a fashion designer with a store of her own, Liu Min doesn't think her identity has shifted from her Taobao-brand days. She wants to stress that she has been a designer all along. "I hope people can see me as a womenswear designer, not just a Taobao seller. I want my designs to be recognized, not just to sell things. I'm doing design, and Taobao is a good platform where I sell my clothes independently," Liu Min said.

That sets her apart from the Taobao shops hanging out signs that read "independent design," "original made-to-order" or "limited made-to-order." Most of the styles and looks these shops sell are "borrowed" from whatever brand is hottest or trendiest. This year you can find Celine's and Vetements' design language all over Taobao. Lambo, a made-to-order clothing shop ten years old, put out a rainbow-sleeved V-neck varsity sweater in the winter of 2015 and wrote in the product description that "the original is from Preen." You can find plenty of other Taobao shops that opened around the same time as Ms MIN and also work the "original design" line. The difference is that six years on, they are still small shops on Taobao.

Vintage shops rarely change themselves either. Six years ago, when Bai Yu started following Ms MIN, she also followed Mary Jane, another Taobao shop that worked retro with an approach much like Liu Min's. Now seven years old, that shop still holds to its original line; the word "retro" turns up in every one of its product descriptions.

Ian Hylton thinks one big reason Ms MIN has come this far is that even in its Taobao era it stuck to genuinely original design instead of copying. Still, it really was Taobao that caught consumers' attention. "Taobao got a lot of people to notice Liu Min and get to know Ms MIN. They bought, they experienced the brand. By the time we went into Dong Liang and into Lane Crawford, a lot of people already knew Ms MIN," Hylton said — all of it before he joined.

In 2012, on "word of mouth built up on Taobao," Ms MIN was invited to Get It Louder, the exhibition run by New Vision, a Modern Media magazine. Alongside Ms MIN, that year's show — which puts forward emerging Chinese designers and artists — included Chen Man's Future Star series and Wang Tianmo's "Old Times." Ms MIN's theme was "the use of digital print on different materials." After Get It Louder, Ms MIN entered Dong Liang the same year.

In 2013, when Lane Crawford opened in Shanghai, its fashion director picked Ms MIN, Liu Qingyang's Chictopia and Li Hongyan's Insh by Helen Lee out of 150 designers. This high-end boutique, more than 160 years old, required Ms MIN to adapt to more commercial rules and a bigger fashion system.

Ms MIN couldn't adapt at first — the same trouble Liu Qingyang's Chictopia ran into on joining Lane Crawford. Before Lane Crawford, Liu Qingyang had released her designs two months behind the international calendar. Ms MIN, too, had been "working at its own pace." "At the start I got scolded a lot by Sarah Rutson, Lane Crawford's design director. What she meant was that if you want to move up to a bigger stage, you have to keep pace with fashion's rhythm, you have to think ahead," Liu Min said. "But that was what working with Lane Crawford asked of me. I don't actually agree that fashion needs a pace this fast."

Lane Crawford's store layout carries a quiet verdict on how mature a designer is. Every designer brand falls into one of three groups — designer, emerging designer, contemporary designer — and the group decides which floor and which section of the store a brand gets. "Generally, first-tier names like Celine and Balenciaga go under 'designer'; pricier, more independent designers, like Victoria Beckham, go under 'emerging designer'; and 'contemporary designer' is for diffusion lines and younger, lower-priced brands — Alexander Wang's T by Alexander is in that area," a Lane Crawford employee who asked not to be named told QDaily.

After Ian Hylton joined, you could watch Ms MIN grow inside this system of judgment. On entering Lane Crawford it was put in the contemporary designer area. Because it sold "pretty well" there, by the fall/winter 2015 season it had moved into the emerging designer area.

Liu Min didn't understand any of this at the start. "I didn't know. We all think, 'Ah, I'm a very talented designer, I want to be in the best area.' But you have to have a grasp of reality, and my husband brought me that grasp," she said. "My husband told me this is a system in fashion, and we have to work up through it step by step." Hylton then chose to work with CD Network, the best showroom in the United States, and that showroom took Ms MIN into the American department store Saks Fifth Avenue, where it was put in the designer area rather than emerging designer.

Because Lane Crawford had already trained Ms MIN's production speed, the Saks Fifth Avenue partnership, which began with the spring/summer 2016 season, has had "no friction yet." "We have fairly high standing and recognition in the US. That's a great start," Hylton explained, sounding like the marketing director of a big brand.

What's interesting is that Liu Min doesn't think her designs have changed because her sales channels did. If change has happened, she puts it down to "a person's growth." "It's been six years from the beginning to now. It isn't that I have to change because I got into Lane Crawford, because I opened a store," Liu Min said.

Whether or not Liu Min meant to change the designs, though, Bai Yu never bought another Ms MIN piece after that black puffball skirt. Her explanation: "because the brand's prices became the same as affordable luxury."

Losing customers is probably not what Hylton, the chief executive, wants. In his plans, Ms MIN goes international, won't open a second store right away, and above all keeps steady a business that has grown well for two years. But for a Ms MIN that keeps moving up, a new set of consumers has clearly already taken their place.