The Last Trendy Shop Has Closed, and Shanghai's Changle Road, Once Full of Imagination, Is Finally Empty

There is no next chapter.

On the night of January 31, an hour before the NPC store on Changle Road in Shanghai closed for good, close to 50 employees stood together in the dark in front of the shop for a group photo. That was how they said goodbye. At 12:55 a.m. on February 1, NPC founder Li Chen wrote on Weibo: "2009.7.2–2018.1.31, Unit 11, No. 139 Changle Road, Shanghai. Contentment is lasting joy — 'Changle.' Happy New Year. NPC will get better."

And so the store billed as "China's first street-brand concept shop" shut its doors.

Changle Road was once a thriving street, and NPC was one of the stories it told over and over. In 2009, Channel V host Li Chen took over Unit 139-11 from Edison Chen and built NPC with Wilber Pan. It was the first street shop in Shanghai to sell Jordans. At the first release, Jordan executives cut a ribbon inside the store while young people queued outside along both sides of the road, three or four hundred of them penned in by steel barriers, the line running from one end of the block to the other.

After that, brand after brand tried releasing sneakers through street-side concept shops. Every Chinese New Year, Nike took over NPC's windows to launch that year's newest models. In the Year of the Dragon the window was carved with a golden dragon and white oars; at Mid-Autumn Festival the decorations changed again. Every release drew a crowd of hundreds, big enough to alarm the Huangpu District police, so NPC had to file notice with them in advance each time.

In eight years on Changle Road, NPC set plenty of sales records. "I remember it very clearly: there was never a single blank day on Changle Road. Even if all we sold was one phone case, we sold something," Li Chen said. By 2010, a month with 1 million yuan in sales was nothing unusual for NPC.

Dozens of similar shops gradually gathered around No. 139. To Li Chen, this was "the birthplace of Chinese street culture" — from the underground "Urban Style Street" built in 2004 to the trendy shops clustered near No. 139, Changle Road was "a kind of utopia that belonged to young people." Some people in the business compared it to Tokyo's Ura-Harajuku.

Li Chen never much liked the comparison. "Ura-Harajuku has a very deep street culture, one that's really rooted there. Those people hang out there every day, doing graffiti, listening to music, breakdancing," he said. In Ura-Harajuku, plain commercial selling had turned into style and attitude with deep roots, and everyone involved took an active part. A shop owner would walk customers from one store to the next, as if leading them through a festival rather than a piece of commercial property.

Changle Road, even at its peak, never got that far.

As a business, Ura-Harajuku has a large number of original streetwear labels, and behind them investors and property developers who manage and fund the whole district as one. Hiroshi Fujiwara, the "godfather of Harajuku," owns a good many shops there by himself.

On Changle Road — and in China generally — most so-called trendy shops sold export-overrun goods or designer womenswear. Shops built on original Chinese streetwear labels were almost nonexistent.

NPC carried about 30 Chinese streetwear brands. "If every brand we sold could open its own store on Changle Road, this could have become Ura-Harajuku," Li Chen said. But those labels were barely formed; most ran nothing more than a Taobao shop, and none could stand on its own.

Li Chen thinks the root of it is that China is simply too big. Ninety percent of the country's streetwear labels are scattered across different cities — Hangzhou, Shanghai, Xiamen, Beijing, Chengdu, Wuhan. Even if you gathered them in one place, it would take five years at the least to grow a real street-culture atmosphere.

He did try. Li Chen once wanted to take every storefront near No. 139 Changle Road and hand them to the Chinese streetwear designers on NPC's platform, one independent shop each, and build a Chinese Ura-Harajuku. Then he found that many units at No. 139 had been leased from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences by middlemen landlords, who partitioned them and sublet the pieces. "A middleman takes a storefront for 100,000 yuan in rent and splits it into three units, one upstairs and two on the ground floor. The upstairs unit rents for 100,000, each ground-floor unit for 50,000 — 200,000 yuan in revenue and 100,000 yuan in profit. How are you supposed to shake up a business like that?" Li Chen said.

Even so, Changle Road had its own market-driven way of growing — it did once, at least — and that is what produced a shopping scene that flourished for a while.

Ueno Eyewear, one wall away from NPC, opened three years later. By 2012 Shanghai had no shortage of eyewear chains, but the merchandise in each was much the same. "Everything was identical except the staff," said Ueno's founder, Yooni. Her plan was to hunt the world for distinctive frames and bring them back to China.

Ueno's first store was only 20 square meters. One customer usually sat in the eye-test chair while five more stood in line, and a single clerk had to serve several at once. "People bought eyeglasses the way they buy vegetables," Yooni said, describing how busy it was. On weekends, customers often waited outside the door to get in.

Shops like Ueno and NPC built a following so fast partly because China was still walled off then. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, people here could read about overseas trends but could not buy the goods quickly, the way cross-border shopping allows today. NPC and Ueno were among the first to break that ground, and among the few options young people had. NPC worked with partners to release limited-edition foreign sneakers; Ueno was Shanghai's first eyewear buyer's shop.

Their merchandise was different, but it meant the same thing to the people who bought it: "Wearing this proves I'm young."

In 2016 Ueno rented the storefront next door to expand, and its rent went from 25,000 to 50,000 yuan a month. Sales did not suffer. Over six years on Changle Road, Ueno's annual sales grew 20% every year. In peak season a month could bring 800,000 yuan; the average was around 300,000.

Godhands, at 139-9 Changle Road, was hairstylist Pan Yulan's second venture. In 2009 he cautiously leased a 20-square-meter second-floor space, hired stylists who looked cool, and cut the Japanese and Korean styles that were fashionable at the time.

The salon succeeded beyond his expectations, and he puts that down to Dianping, which was just taking off. Godhands built a following quickly and ranked first among salons in the area. "In one day a single stylist could take 10 to 20 phone bookings from new customers," Pan Yulan recalled.

Ueno built its clientele on Weibo. "We did no promotion at all, not one yuan," Yooni said. Li Chen introduced the store on Weibo on its opening day, and the name spread from there. Social networks were not yet drowning in posts, so Ueno caught people's eye without effort. "Back then everybody read Weibo. The slightest stir on Weibo and people could find your shop," Yooni said. "Now you post on Weibo and nobody even sees it."

The atmosphere that formed on Changle Road kept pulling in the most fashionable young people, and kept filtering out the rest. Anyone who knew the road had heard of a buyer's shop called Bald Head, where the owner would refuse to sell to anyone who walked in dressed badly. When Yooni and her college classmates went to Changle Road, they had to dress from head to toe first. "You had to put the trendiest things on, look sharp, so he'd feel you spoke the same language before he'd let you in," she said.

All of this together pushed Changle Road's name to its peak around 2010. In those years tour buses often parked along the street, and its trendy shops were one of Shanghai's sights. As late as 2013 the South China Morning Post ran a piece called "Style tripper: get high fashion in Shanghai", and Changle Road was still its first recommendation.

"In today's language, Changle Road had traffic back then," Li Chen said.

The people who did well on Changle Road tried at one point to reproduce it elsewhere.

A month after opening there, Yooni realized: "I should have moved here long ago. These are the people who understand what I sell." Ueno began in 2009 as a shop in the underground mall at Zhongshan Park subway station, back when young people liked to "go underground." Rent below ground was cheaper than on Changle Road, and the shop stayed profitable. Changle Road was a gamble for Yooni: the rent was higher, and a street-side store loses its customers on rainy days, without the guaranteed traffic of a subway mall.

But compared with the customers at Zhongshan Park, the ones on Changle Road were easier to talk to, because most of them had done their homework. Many were young people back from abroad and willing to try something new; they already knew eyewear labels from magazines or from living overseas, could accept a frame costing around 2,000 yuan, and saw the value behind that price. At Zhongshan Park the response Yooni got was always the same: it's expensive, and it's not that I can't afford it, I just don't understand what these glasses are. The same model that sold a few pairs a month at Zhongshan Park sold a few pairs a day on Changle Road.

In its first month, the Changle Road store took in three to four times what Zhongshan Park did — close to 300,000 yuan. Six months later, Yooni closed the Zhongshan Park shop.

Next to a big shopping mall, Changle Road came with its own foot traffic, moderate store sizes, and relatively low startup costs. It fed and made Shanghai's first generation of trendy shops. NPC grew to eight branches, Godhands to four; Ueno now has five stores in China and one overseas.

They copied the operating model and the brand idea they had built on Changle Road into the new branches. The one thing they could not copy was the customers. Godhands has shops on Hengshan Road, on Jianguo West Road and in the Riyueguang Center, and the three clienteles have nothing in common. Riyueguang draws women around 30 with money to spend; Jianguo West Road draws more conservative white-collar workers in their twenties. Changle Road always had the most fashionable crowd — internet celebrities, stars, students back from abroad, young people chasing a look of their own. The Changle Road shop had been open longest of any of them, and it stayed the youngest.

"Changle Road is the youngest of our three shops. I still like cutting hair there. It has energy, and in that environment it rubs off on you," Pan Yulan said.

Ueno's first branch went to Xinle Road, not far away. Xinle Road sits closer to the old French Concession and Huaihai Road and draws more bourgeois-bohemian types and office workers, who spend more — but the Changle Road store was still the one packed with the most fashionable young people.

Changle Road's rise cannot be separated from Shanghai's back-street culture. It caught the crowds spilling over from nearby Huaihai Road without inheriting Huaihai Road's cookie-cutter mass taste. The plane trees along it stayed thick, and the small shops in all their different styles were both the cause of the street's character and its result.

"My generation grew up shopping on the street," Li Chen said. He met his girlfriend in high school, and their favorite way to spend time was walking through street shops. "Qipu Road, Changle Road, Xinle Road, Shaanxi Road, Julu Road — we left footprints on every one of them."

Trendy shops grow free and wild, and that suited open street-front units. "If you're in streetwear, the first thing anyone thinks of is a street shop," said Xiong Qi, NPC's former store manager. "Shopping in a mall and shopping on the street are two different feelings. What you buy is different too." In middle school he used to queue at NPC for sneaker releases.

Then, in 2013, things turned sharply for the worse.

The reasons look complicated. E-commerce quickly broke up a trend scene that was never solid to begin with. As Li Chen said, no street culture with a force of its own had taken root here; people's enthusiasm never went past buying things. E-commerce made streetwear easier to get, and at the same time it drained the appetite for walking into a physical store.

In 2012, nobody at NPC was running the Taobao shop yet. When the iPhone 4 came out they sold their first phone case online, and it became NPC's first internet hit: 500 orders in one day. That night the staff filled out all 500 order slips by hand, delighted. "I remember thinking, look how powerful the internet is," Li Chen said. After that, NPC pushed hard into online sales.

Ueno opened a Taobao shop in 2013 too. It sold 30,000 yuan in the first month and 80,000 to 90,000 two months later. Ueno now runs a dedicated online-sales team out of Hongqiao.

The other reason no one could avoid was a vicious circle in rent. Changle Road was one of the few places in Shanghai where taking over a storefront also cost a transfer fee, usually 50,000 to 100,000 yuan, on top of a rent already in the tens of thousands. For a shop just starting out, that is not a small sum. When Bald Head changed hands, the transfer fee reached 1 million yuan.

Rent on Changle Road rose 7 to 8% a year. As foot traffic fell and rent climbed, shops could only push the added cost into their prices — while their merchandise faced e-commerce head on. You could count on one hand the shops that lasted more than a year on Changle Road; only three lasted more than three.

Yooni recalls that from the day Ueno moved in, in 2012, the two storefronts beside it never stopped being renovated — two or three times a year on average. Buyer's shops, shoe shops, clothing shops and other trendy shops came and went. Sometimes a renovation had only just finished, and before Yooni could say hello to the new neighbor the next round of work had already begun.

The fatal blow came when the primary landlord, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, took its buildings back.

In 2012 the academy reclaimed the shops on the Ruijin Road end of Changle Road. Several closed one after another and sat empty for years; their doors are still shut today. That hurt the womenswear shops across the street directly, and in turn thinned the foot traffic on the stretch of Changle Road between Ruijin Road and South Chengdu Road.

The same year, the underground Urban Style Street, which had guaranteed a flow of people, closed because of "poor management and the relocation of stores." Both sides of Changle Road between South Chengdu Road and Ruijin Road went bare. Liu Jing, a Godhands store manager, transferred to the Changle Road salon in 2013 and watched the street slide. "By the time I got there in 2013 it was already finished. When we reopened after Chinese New Year there was nobody on Changle Road. It was frightening — dead quiet."

In early 2016 the academy would sign only a one-year lease with Ueno. In early 2017 it told tenants it would be taking the storefronts back, though the news was not confirmed until July, with the reason given that the academy needed the space for its own offices. NPC's time was up.

If you have to name a last straw, it was parking. Cars used to fill both sides of Changle Road after work and on weekends, and shops would even hand out vouchers to cover the parking fee. Then, on March 25, 2017, Shanghai published a revised version of the Shanghai Municipal Road Traffic Management Regulations, which said that "within the city's outer ring road, no new all-day roadside parking spaces will generally be added, and existing all-day roadside parking spaces will be gradually reduced." After that, yellow no-stopping lines were painted along both sides of 239 roads in Shanghai. Changle Road was one of them.

Now people had one more reason not to come. "Why would he come to Changle Road? What business does he have on Changle Road? You can't even park there, and whatever he wants, he can get anywhere," Li Chen said.

In truth, Changle Road was already empty before the parking rules. In 2016 its small trendy shops fell one after another. That year Liu Jing came back from a two-month business trip to find four shops near Changle Road closed. "It was unbelievable. We wondered at the time, is Changle Road going under? Why have all the shops vanished?"

NPC had grown used to being ignored. "The staff told me that if someone walked in after 8 p.m., it felt like seeing a ghost," Li Chen said.

Changle Road is now gentrifying faster. Rob Schmitz, an American NPR reporter who has lived on the street for eight years, thinks it has turned into a rich people's neighborhood over those years. "The big developers have plans for this area. They like large chain brands to move in, and local rents follow them up. Small shops eventually get pushed out because they can't pay. For a city like Shanghai, that's completely normal."

Shopping centers have indeed opened nearby, one after another, but NPC's Changle Road store never found its next home. A street brand prefers a street unit, and Shanghai has only so many of those — with the risk of another landlord taking the space back.

Li Chen considered HKRI Taikoo Hui in Jing'an District and backed off because "the rent is extremely high, high enough to scare you to death."

Ueno Eyewear chose to lean on a bigger tree and moved its Changle Road business into Lane Crawford, then discovered that the rules of the game there are entirely different. Godhands moved its Changle Road salon to the second basement level of Riyueguang. "A mall is oppressive. We've only just moved in and we're not used to it," Liu Jing said.

The officials who run the city feel nothing for these trendy shops, and never lifted a finger to support such fragile "small businesses." They presumably have more important work — Shanghai's larger goal of controlling its population, for instance. Using policy to stop landlords from renting storefronts may be one way to get there, as with the academy's storefronts on the Ruijin Road end, now four years depressed and empty.

They do not know that these things are what a trend is made of, that these things are what makes young people happy, that these things are in fact the market economy, that these things are "the aspiration for a better life."

On Xinle Road next door, a row of street-facing shopfronts not far from Ueno Eyewear and Nike Lab has been cleared out as well. An old man still holding on there said the landlord had stopped renting. This time the landlord is the Education Bureau.

Cover image: 55df, unsplash