百货商场迈入“古法黄金”时代

This article centers on the recent rise of traditional craft gold jewelry in Chinese department stores and summarizes key takeaways as follows:

1. Industry landscape: The current traditional craft gold sector is divided into two camps. The first includes emerging niche high-end brands focusing on traditional handcraft, such as Lao Pu Gold and Junpei Gold. Lao Pu Gold has seen an extremely fast 221% year-on-year revenue growth projected for 2025. The second camp consists of traditional gold giants including Chow Tai Fook and Lao Fengxiang that have launched their own traditional craft gold sub-lines. For example, Chow Tai Fook’s "Heritage" collection already accounts for 39% of the brand’s mainland China gold retail sales, demonstrating strong market acceptance.

2. Shifting consumer behavior: Gold consumption has shifted from focusing purely on value retention and wedding/gift purchases to self-purchasing for personal enjoyment and decoration among younger consumers. Today’s buyers value craftsmanship, design and cultural connotation more, making fixed-price traditional craft gold increasingly popular.

3. Shopping tips for consumers: General buyers are advised to prioritize shopping at leading high-end department stores including SKP, Mixc and Intime. These venues have already pre-screened high-quality brands, and offer additional options such as IP collaborations and experiential events to enrich the shopping experience.

The traditional craft gold category is currently experiencing explosive growth, bringing new development opportunities for gold and jewelry brands. Key insights are summarized as follows:

1. Consumer trends: The core consumer base has shifted to middle-class and younger groups, with demand moving from value retention and wedding use to self-indulgent consumption and social-oriented decoration. Consumers are willing to pay a premium for craftsmanship, design, and cultural storytelling, and the sales share of fixed-price, piece-counted products continues to rise. The industry is gradually shifting from selling raw material to selling design and aesthetics.

2. Channel strategy: Brands should prioritize entering leading high-end department stores including SKP, Mixc and Intime. These venues help brands accurately reach high-net-worth target customers, and actively act as buyers and promoters to co-launch marketing campaigns, creating a win-win outcome for both brands and malls.

3. Brand positioning recommendations: Emerging brands can pursue a niche high-end, anti-scale growth path that differentiates itself through traditional handcraft. Established traditional brands can enter the sector by launching dedicated sub-lines, and unlock growth through IP collaborations and scenario-based marketing.

Traditional craft gold is currently in a period of rapid growth, and gold and jewelry sellers can seize the following opportunities while noting related risks. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Market opportunities: Demand for traditional craft gold is booming, and leading brands are growing extremely rapidly. Lao Pu Gold is projected to post a 221% year-on-year revenue increase and a 234.9% year-on-year net profit growth in 2025; Chow Tai Fook’s "Heritage" collection accounts for 39% of its mainland China gold retail sales. The market has enormous room for growth, and capital is increasingly flowing into supporting brand development in the sector.

2. Channel and operational opportunities: Leading high-end department stores are now actively curating and introducing traditional craft gold brands, and provide marketing and operational support. For example, Intime Department Store helps brands organize IP collaboration events and build experiential scenario operations to help new brands quickly gain market traction. Operationally, sellers can prioritize developing high-end luxury collection lines or IP-designed art lines to align with young consumers’ demands.

3. Risk warning: Traditional craft gold relies on handwork, making rapid large-scale expansion inherently difficult. Sellers should not expand blindly, but control store opening speed in line with their own brand positioning and pursue differentiated growth.

The boom of traditional craft gold has brought new demand and business opportunities for gold production and processing factories. Key insights are as follows:

1. Shifts in product design and production demand: The industry has moved past the era of competing purely on weight. The market increasingly values traditional handcraft, original design and cultural attributes. Consumers favor classic ancient techniques such as hollowing, hammering, engraving and filigree, and also prefer IP-collaborated, thematically designed original works. Factories need to adjust their production focus and improve their craftsmanship and design capabilities.

2. New business opportunities: Both emerging traditional craft gold brands and established legacy brands are expanding their traditional craft gold product lines, creating a large market gap. Factories can expand their business accordingly: offer custom handcraft services for niche high-end brands, and produce standardized craft products for mass-market brands to cover the needs of different customer tiers.

3. Transformation insights: The industry is transitioning from selling raw material to selling culture and aesthetics. Factories should not stay stuck in low-value-added rough processing, but can gradually expand into higher-value-added craftsmanship and design links to increase profit margins and align with the overall industry transformation trend.

The gold and jewelry industry is currently undergoing in-depth transformation, and service providers can seize new opportunities brought by industry changes. Key takeaways are summarized as follows:

1. Industry development trends: The rise of traditional craft gold is driving the transformation of the entire gold and jewelry industry. The sector is shifting from selling raw material by weight to selling design by craftsmanship, while consumer demand is moving toward self-indulgent consumption and cultural-aesthetic experiences. Leading department stores have transformed from pure counter lessors into brand curators and operational promoters, and the entire industry chain is being restructured.

2. Core pain points of clients: On the brand side, emerging traditional craft brands lack access to high-end channel resources and operational experience, while traditional brands need to expand new product lines and adopt new marketing methods. On the mall side, venues need to build differentiated categories to attract footfall and boost performance, and lack access to high-quality brand resources and content operation solutions.

3. Actionable solutions: Service providers can offer services including high-end channel connection, IP collaboration development, and scenario-based marketing planning for brands; for department stores, they can provide traditional craft gold brand recruitment and cultural experiential scenario building services, which accurately meet the industry’s current core demand for craftsmanship, culture and experience.

The rise of traditional craft gold has brought new opportunities for role reshaping for platform operators such as department stores, and leading platforms have already developed mature, replicable practices. Key insights are as follows:

1. New industry demands: On the brand side, brands need platforms to help them accurately reach target customers and provide operational and promotion support, and are no longer satisfied with simply leasing counter space. On the consumer side, shoppers want cultural and aesthetic experiences, and are no longer content with buying standardized gold products, which puts forward new requirements for platforms.

2. Replicable latest practices: First, proactively curate high-quality traditional craft gold brands, introducing both leading brands and promising new entrants to build a differentiated advantage in the gold category. For example, Nanjing Deji Plaza is about to gather the four most prominent traditional craft gold brands, and Shaoxing Intime’s gold category accounts for 60% of the local market share. Second, transform the core role to act as a brand curator and promoter: use four strategies—zodiac economy, first-launch economy, IP collaboration, and scenario-based experiential marketing—to help brands grow, and build cultural experience bases to improve consumer experience.

3. Strategic outlook: Platforms should adapt to the industry’s transition from selling raw material to selling design, preemptively secure access to high-quality traditional craft gold brands, and complete the transformation from providing shelf space to curating aesthetics to capture the growth dividend of this rising category.

The rise of traditional craft gold in department stores reveals a brand-new transformation of the gold and jewelry industry, with many new topics worth researching. Key insights are summarized as follows:

1. New industry trends: The traditional craft gold track is clearly segmented. Emerging brands have adopted an entirely different anti-scale growth path from traditional gold brands, focusing on high-end handcraft and differentiated competition; mass-market traditional brands enter the track through dedicated sub-lines and achieve rapid penetration relying on their existing channels. Large amounts of capital have entered the space, and leading department stores are actively participating in industrial restructuring to drive industry change.

2. New business model changes: Gold has transformed from a hard currency priced by weight to a consumer good priced by craftsmanship and design, and the business model has shifted from selling products to selling culture, aesthetics and experience. Department stores have also transformed from counter-leasing property owners into brand curators and industry operators, and the distribution of industrial discourse power is shifting.

3. Recommended research directions: Researchers can explore the feasibility of the anti-scale growth model in the high-end consumer goods sector, the role of leading channels in the rise of new categories, and the commercialization path of traditional handicrafts. These topics carry high reference value for researching industrial transformation against the background of new consumption upgrading.