What is Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu)

Enter Xiaohongshu (“Little Red Book”), China’s most trusted social shopping platform. Based in Shanghai, this innovative app helps over 100 million users - mostly younger women - to discover and review beauty and health products that can be hard to find in China.

This represents an amazing opportunity for global brands to build their market presence in China. It’s why big players like Chanel and Dior are paying so much attention to the platform.

In this post, we’ll give you the low-down on this amazing site. In particular, we’ll show you how global brands are jumping on Little Red Book in a big way, using it to help drive their growing presence within the Chinese market.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu), and how does it work?

Created in 2014, XiaoHongShu, Little Red Book, or simply Redbook, has grown to become China’s foremost fashion and luxury shopping platform.

Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu) isn’t really a shopping platform at all.

Rather, it’s first and foremost a content sharing site, where users can post product photos with reviews and tips for other users to read, comment, and save to their boards - like Pinterest.

In fact, some have described the platform as being a product seach engine, or “like Instagram and Pinterest sprinkled with a dose of Taobao.”

In contrast with other e-commerce platforms, Little Red Book focuses on a unique blend of trusted user-generated content, word of mouth advertising, and online community-building.

However you describe it, this curious mix has proven to be a huge hit with young urban Chinese women, who often struggle to find trusted sources of product information.

But how does the site work, exactly?

Well, Little Red Book has two sections: the user community, and the e-commerce platform.

Little Red Book users can engage with platform content in three ways:

  1. Liking the content - similar to Facebook’s “like” feature.
  2. Collecting the content - saving it under a bookmark for future reference.
  3. Commenting on the content - interacting with the post and the user.

Little Red Book focuses heavily on building trust and reliability between the platform and consumers, rewarding users for posting suggestions and advice to followers.

By posting regular, quality content, users can quickly attract significant followings,and can even earn commission by becoming influencers.

In fact, the most popular posts end to be author-tagged lists of convenient, economical, or easy-to-use products.

The popularity of these kinds of posts shows the value of authenticity on the platform, with users rewarding influencers for realism, accessibility, and being relatable.

For an example, let’s turn to the following post - a user discussing the trials of finding products suitable for sensitive skin:

The site also includes a high focus on security, with qualified brands and retailers having to submit an application before being accepted on the platform.

All of this adds up to a unique value proposition for the platform, in that users can share content, review products, and purchase items all from the same place.

Combine this with a strong focus on trusted communities of like-minded shoppers, and it’s not hard to see why Little Red Book has resonated so strongly with users.

Now, let’s take a look at who exactly is using the platform.

Who is using Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu)?

Little Red Book had attracted 100 million users by late 2018.

Crucially,90% of these users are middle or upper class women with higher degrees of disposable income. This is an incredibly lucrative market for global fashion and cosmetics brands.

Co-founder and CEO Mao Wenchao has said that 70 to 80% of Littler Red Book’s users are women.

Other estimates have put this number even higher, with one source suggesting it could be as high as 95%. What’s more, over 50% of these users are between the ages of 18-35, and are living in Tier 1 and 2 cities in China.

Which industries are Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu) best suited for?

With its strong focus on the beauty and fashion markets, Little Red Book has set itself aside from other Chinese social media and e-commerce platforms such as WeChat and Weibo.

This content focus, plus the unique demographics of Little Red Book’s user base, make it a great fit for luxury beauty brands like Dior and Chanel, as well as high-end cosmetic brands like Fenty and Lancôme.

It is the platform for Female Star in China

How to move to Social Commerce?

The Little Red Book has integrated e-commerce links, redirecting to official shops that have been audited. The Houses also have the opportunity to work their presence through good plans, much sought after by the community, and collaborations with Key Opinion Leaders like the actress Fan Bing Bing.

Using KOL is the best way to Sell on this plateform

LIttleRedBook is also a Crossborder E-Commerce platform

Interestingly, the platform also offers feedback e-commerce by developing tour guides and shopping internationally.

Result: in less than five years of existence, The Little Red Book has become a reference for Chinese consumers and especially for Millennials “anxious to have a maximum of information before investing in a product, even more, when it is a luxury product.

The network has over 200,000 new users every day and about 80% of the users are women, mostly between 18 and 35 years old. A growing success pushed the Alibaba group to invest 300 million dollars in the platform last spring.

LIttleRedBook encourages like-minded consumers to create a “safe space” to write reviews and share their shopping experiences, good or bad.

It is the App for KOLS (or influencers) in China

The app contains an “Explore” section to explore the user’s content on topics such as fashion, food, and travel. However, the most popular category on the app is beauty and cosmetics.

For example, use this App to promote her new Perfume and fashion Brand.

The application is often used when a user is studying a new cosmetic product they want to try and is curious about the experience of other customers. When reading a message, users typically add “hyperlinks” to the brand’s page that may contain an e-commerce section. There can be a smooth transition between content consumption and e-commerce. LIttleRedBook moves from social network to Social commerce platform

Before becoming today’s social and e-commerce hybrid, LIttleRedBook was initially an editorial tool allowing Chinese users to create fashion and beauty shopping lists before traveling in the world, with a similar interface. to Pinterest. It was essentially a content-sharing platform for the unsatisfied desire of Chinese buyers to discover and share their shopping experiences.

After accumulating a considerable amount of social and consumer data from a predominantly urban user base, LIttleRedBook has since developed a closed shopping cycle for cross-border luxury goods sales.