Amber Xiang

We are not selling flowers, but stories.

The journalist who learned to sell #

Fudan University trained Xiang in the disciplines of journalism: how to frame a story for a specific audience, how to make cultural reference accessible without becoming derivative, how to hold attention in a crowded field. She graduated into a media industry where those skills had direct commercial applications, and she built a career applying them. Dragon TV’s marketing director role was one of the most senior brand-facing positions in Chinese broadcast media — the kind of job that teaches you, above all else, how audiences calibrate authenticity. When something rings false, they leave. When something rings true, they pay.

The decision to leave Dragon TV and open a flower account on Weibo with Zhuang Ying — her co-founder, whose background was in global luxury cosmetics operations rather than editorial — was, in retrospect, a direct application of that education. Both were leaving high-status careers at a stage when the financial cost of founding something was not abstract, both betting on a thesis that the market had not yet validated. Xiang’s thesis was specific: Chinese consumers at a certain income level would pay a premium for a flower that came with a story. Not a bouquet delivered in cellophane, but an arrangement that arrived with a Monet reference, a Van Gogh citation, a cultural narrative that transformed a perishable object into something worth keeping, at least in memory.

“We are not selling flowers, but stories.” She said it to a Zhihu interviewer in 2022, but the line describes the 2011 thesis exactly. One hundred thousand followers in six months confirmed that the instinct was scalable. The question was whether it was a business.

The story with a price on it #

Lane Crawford’s decision to stock Beast in 2013 answered the business question with precision. Lane Crawford does not need Chinese floral brands. It stocks them only when they carry enough cultural authority to sit alongside international luxury labels without apologizing. Placement in Lane Crawford was not a distribution decision — it was an editorial endorsement, made by buyers whose job is exactly what Xiang had been doing at Dragon TV: assessing whether a story is credible enough to charge premium prices for proximity to it.

Matrix Partners followed in 2014. The Series A was institutional capital endorsing the editorial thesis — a bet that story-ordering had a market large enough to justify professional investment. Celebrity weddings — Zhou Xun’s, Angelababy’s — arrived in the same period, cementing Beast’s role not as a flower supplier to cultural events but as a curatorial presence at them. Xiang was not arranging flowers for these occasions; she was collaborating on the narrative they generated.

The Van Gogh Museum collaboration in 2016 was the clearest expression of the editorial model at scale. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers did not need Beast to reach Chinese consumers. Beast needed Van Gogh’s Sunflowers to demonstrate that its editorial ambitions were legible to international cultural institutions. The collaboration worked in both directions, which is the only kind that ever does. By 2017, Beast was recording RMB 160M in Tmall sales, splitting its identity into Ms Beast and Beast Home, and beginning to look less like a floral brand that told stories and more like a lifestyle brand that used flowers as its native language.

The 2019 Beast x Gubi House collaboration belongs in the same sequence. Gubi is a Copenhagen design house whose aesthetic — mid-century European modernism with Scandinavian restraint — was precisely the kind of design language that had currency with the affluent Shanghai consumers Xiang was curating for. Gubi needed a credible China retail partner; Beast needed a Danish design imprimatur. What made the collaboration distinctive was that it was structured as a genuine co-production rather than a licensing arrangement — both brands produced new work for the space. For a media director who had spent years constructing cultural partnerships from the outside, this was the moment Beast began operating as a cultural institution that commissioned work rather than a retailer that licensed names. Wallpaper and Design Anthology covered it. The international design press noticed. The editorial thesis had reached a register that Xiang had previously inhabited only as a journalist observing from the other side of the page.

“The hardest moment in 9 years” #

COVID-19 arrived in January 2020 and produced, within weeks, an inventory crisis with no precedent in Beast’s nine-year history. Lockdowns emptied the stores. The warehouse was sealed with perishable stock inside. The business that had been built on the premise that people pay premiums for beauty experienced, without ceremony, the moment when beauty cannot be delivered.

“2020 was the hardest moment in Beast’s 9-year history.” Xiang said this in multiple interviews across that year. What she did next is more interesting than the quote. The editorial instinct — rather than suppressing the emotional reality of the moment — found a way to name it. Golden Teardrop (黄金泪) was a fragrance that arrived not as an escape from quarantine anxiety but as a crystallisation of it. The grief had a name. The name had a price. Consumers paid it.

The pivot from floristry to fragrance was accelerating before COVID, but the pandemic compressed a strategic transition into a founding decision. Fragrance could be warehoused, shipped, experienced alone, and repurchased on a cadence that flowers could not match. The storytelling model transferred perfectly — a fragrance is, almost by definition, a story you tell with your body — and Xiang was already fluent in the genre. By 2021, the Unrequited Love (单相思) fragrance reached RMB 10M in sales within its first hour on Beast’s tenth anniversary, achieving in sixty minutes what the flower business had taken years to build toward.

The story under stress #

The OEM scandal of 2022 was a different kind of test. Investigative reports established that Beast’s perfumes were produced at a factory in Huzhou (湖州御梵) that also manufactured Miniso fragrance products — a price differential of approximately fourteen to one. A regulatory fine for mislabelled tea products added institutional credibility damage to the reputational exposure. The story reached 360M+ views on Weibo in its first days.

The scenario was structurally uncomfortable in a way that the COVID crisis was not. COVID was a supply-chain emergency that happened to every premium brand simultaneously; the solidarity of shared adversity was available as a register. The OEM scandal was specifically about whether the story Beast had been telling — that its products justified premium prices because of their editorial identity — was internally consistent with the production reality. The media professional’s whole skill set is calibrated toward an audience she can read. For the first time, the audience was reading her.

No direct public statement from Xiang on the OEM sourcing specifically is recorded in the sources available. What is recorded is the arc: the brand survived. Fragrance sales grew through and after the scandal. The market answered the implicit question — whether the price was right even when the story was wrong — by continuing to pay the price. The thesis was not vindicated; it was tested and found to have a price limit that the market had not yet reached. That is a different, and more interesting, result.

The first time she tells her own story #

China Workshop, opened in Xintiandi Shanghai in 2025, is Amber Xiang’s most direct editorial statement in thirteen years of brand-building. The concept is not difficult to summarise: a permanent space dedicated to Chinese craft culture — lacquerware, cloisonné, silk, hand-dyeing — presented with Beast’s characteristic editorial weight. What is harder to summarise is what it means for the founder who built it.

Every major Beast collaboration up to 2025 referenced material that Xiang had encountered as a media professional and art collector, not as someone whose cultural inheritance it was. Monet’s Garden. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. The V&A collection. Gubi’s Danish modernism. These are citations in a language Xiang learned fluently and deployed with precision. They were other people’s stories.

The China Workshop changes the grammar. Chinese craft culture is not a borrowed reference for Xiang; it is the material she is actually made of, however far her editorial career has taken her from the explicit claim to it. The fragrance that emerged from the Workshop’s first season did not reference a European master or an international museum partnership. It referenced the specific smell of a Suzhou lacquer workshop in the morning, before the craftspeople arrive — a sensory detail available only to someone who had been there, not to someone who had read about it.

Whether the editorial identity can sustain the weight of being its own subject is a question that the China Workshop is still answering. The journalist’s whole training was in framing other people’s experience for an audience. The harder discipline — the one journalism schools do not teach — is knowing when the frame fits the subject because you understand it from the inside.

Xiang built China’s domestic fragrance category on the premise that a good story justifies a premium price. The China Workshop is her first attempt to discover whether the premise holds when the story is hers.

The question has a commercial dimension that is not separate from the personal one. Beast’s fragrance category generated RMB 418M in domestic sales in 2024, making it the category’s domestic leader by Mirror Insight data. That figure reflects the story-ordering thesis at full operational maturity — a brand whose pricing is built almost entirely on narrative credibility. The China Workshop does not abandon that thesis; it deepens it. If European art references created the foundation, Chinese craft culture is the next layer — one that is structurally harder to challenge, because the founder’s claim to it is not borrowed. A journalist who curates other people’s stories can always be asked whether she understands them from the inside. A founder who grew up with lacquerware and cloisonné as the material culture of her own upbringing cannot be asked the same question in the same way. The China Workshop is Xiang’s answer to the OEM scandal’s implicit challenge — not a rebuttal, which would be the media professional’s instinct, but a deepening, which is the founder’s only truly durable move.

Last updated: June 12, 2026