This latest strategic experiment not only concerns whether Hennes & Mauritz AB can accelerate growth domestically, but will also determine its weight in the global market.

With a striking red exterior, Hennes & Mauritz AB signals its glamorous transformation to the market and lights up the next chapter for the mass fashion industry.

Months ago, news of the upgrade and reopening of Hennes & Mauritz AB's Shanghai Huaihai Road flagship store had already sparked discussions in the industry. Today, this red standalone building officially opens as the country's first brand experience center and largest domestic flagship store, attracting numerous consumers to experience it.

This independent building spans a total area of 6,000 square meters with 3,000 square meters of retail space. It has also become the new home for Hennes & Mauritz AB's Greater China retail headquarters, with headquarters offices located on the upper floors of the store. The importance of HOUSE OF H&M as a strategic stronghold for Hennes & Mauritz AB in China is evident.

As an established commercial district in Shanghai, Huaihai Road possesses enduring vitality. Beyond its distinctively local shops, it has continued to upgrade in recent years, attracting numerous fashion brands and young demographics, becoming one of Shanghai's few highly inclusive and customer-integrated core commercial districts, and a key window for observing trends in China's mass fashion market.

Hennes & Mauritz AB's choice to return to this location carries clear signals. It's not just a retail layout, but aims to create a new urban cultural landmark that echoes the brand's core philosophy of "fashion for everyone." This HOUSE OF H&M represents the brand's highest level of understanding and execution at its current stage.

In terms of fashion retail, it brings together Hennes & Mauritz AB's full range of women's wear, men's wear, youth clothing, children's wear, and H&M Move sportswear. The H&M 2025 Fall/Winter collection also had its global premiere on September 9th, highlighting HOUSE OF H&M's future role as a launch platform and fashion frontline window.

Simultaneously, this new flagship store is called a brand experience center because, beyond providing global fashion trend experiences, it introduces the H&M HOME concept store for the first time and opens an H&M&Café coffee shop and H&M flower shop, enriching the store's lifestyle experience with a full category product mix. Bringing these new categories to Shanghai also taps into Shanghai's characteristics as the city with the strongest domestic coffee culture and a broad population that values quality of life.

The H&M livestream studio serves as an exclusive independent space within the flagship store, a first in the brand's global retail layout, visually outlining the advanced digitalization level of China's fashion market. But beyond understanding China's advanced digital channels, Hennes & Mauritz AB observes a further omnichannel trend where online and offline boundaries are increasingly blurred, with consumers encountering brands in various scenarios.

The brand experience center also features an H&M&SPACE exhibition space showcasing selected fashion items, images, and special art exhibits. Here, the brand hardly discusses commerce, focusing on creating an inspirational fashion space that sparks emotional resonance. The H&M&SPACE exhibition space may also be used for more fashion events and designer support projects in the future, creating deeper connections with the fashion industry.

The comprehensive HOUSE OF H&M showcases Hennes & Mauritz AB's sophistication and rich content as a fashion brand. Compared to past standardized stores, today's experiential stores reflect more refined concept planning and operational standards, providing consumers with the latest integrated brand image experience.

More importantly, it's not just a unidirectional brand expression but also creates interaction with consumers and the city. The flagship store features a glass observation elevator that provides consumers with stunning views overlooking Huaihai Road's iconic streetscape, establishing deeper connections between the brand and the city. The Hennes & Mauritz AB China retail headquarters can also use this to stay closer to consumers and quickly perceive their continuously changing needs.

As consumers raise higher demands for both tangible products and intangible experiences, mass fashion brands may sell products at prices lower than luxury brands, but their brand-building thinking dimensions are equally sophisticated, creating inspirational and inclusive shopping journeys for consumers.

Saed El-Achkar, President of Hennes & Mauritz AB Group Retail Greater China, believes HOUSE OF H&M is a brand communication hub connecting fashion, entertainment, and commerce.

This means Hennes & Mauritz AB is upgrading stores into multidimensional communication tools that serve local consumers' lifestyle needs while externally conveying the brand's values and cultural expression. In other words, HOUSE OF H&M is Hennes & Mauritz AB's window for building new brand discourse power in China, using retail space's openness and multifunctionality to establish deeper emotional connections between the brand and city, while providing more extensible possibilities for future digital and omnichannel layouts.

The HOUSE OF H&M project demonstrates such ambitious confidence because Hennes & Mauritz AB's systematic organization of "internal capabilities" in recent years has evolved from a retailer into a true fashion brand.

In the global market, Hennes & Mauritz AB's 2024 Fall/Winter collection became a key turning point, marking the brand's most fashionable autumn/winter season to date, signaling its transformation from traditional fashion retailer to fashion brand with a qualitative leap in fashion sensibility.

To convey its new image to global markets, Hennes & Mauritz AB has successively upgraded brand content through fashion, music, and culture, conducting performances in London, Berlin, Paris, and other cities. Beyond inviting popular star Charli xcx to perform in London last year, the brand also held a music festival in Los Angeles in April for its 2025 Spring/Summer collection launch, inviting young people's favorite musicians like Doechii, refreshing market perceptions of Hennes & Mauritz AB.

Beyond brand marketing, Hennes & Mauritz AB's experiential store innovations are also expanding in channel layouts in London, New York, Paris, and other cities. For example, the Paris store that opened a few days ago, located in the trendy Marais district where young fashion crowds gather, made many experimental innovations, including reducing basic items and highlighting limited series and high-end lines.

According to Hennes & Mauritz AB Group's Q2 and first-half fiscal 2025 financial results released in June, same-store net sales increased 3% year-over-year, reflecting the effectiveness of the group's strategy in product innovation, market layout, and omnichannel integration.

In this grand global transformation, China market's role is crucial, and the challenges are also the greatest.

China's fashion market ecosystem is highly competitive and rapidly changing. For global fashion brands, maintaining strategic clarity and execution agility is extremely difficult. For Hennes & Mauritz AB, which entered the Chinese market in 2007, grasping market pulse over 18 years requires the brand to have both global and local perspectives while putting in over 100% effort.

At the current stage, China is a key puzzle piece for Hennes & Mauritz AB to achieve complete global transformation success, and its acceleration will drive other regional markets.

This is why El-Achkar previously proposed an "accelerated growth" strategy in China. The core of this strategy is achieving sustainable profitability and growth through more reasonable store layouts to promote upgrades in China's retail business, specifically including optimizing inefficient stores, upgrading high-potential existing stores, and opening new flagship stores in key cities and locations.

In May this year, Hennes & Mauritz AB's store at U-Town Shopping Center in Beijing's Chaoyangmenwai core area opened, spanning over 1,500 square meters.

In August, Hennes & Mauritz AB's flagship store at Shenzhen 1234space reopened after renovation, and the Shenzhen Joy City store also opened. Among them, the Shenzhen 1234space flagship store, as Hennes & Mauritz AB's largest flagship store in South China, demonstrates the latest global store design concepts with 1,764 square meters of open space.

The consecutive openings of two stores in Shenzhen reflect strategic layout in the Greater Bay Area beyond Shanghai, where headquarters is located. This incremental fashion retail market sees large influxes of young demographics annually while connecting to Hong Kong and becoming a travel destination for foreign business and leisure travelers, meaning Hennes & Mauritz AB will have opportunities to reach considerable new customer groups.

In digitalization, the "accelerated growth" strategy manifests as Hennes & Mauritz AB continuously enhancing capabilities through proprietary digital channels and major e-commerce platforms, providing seamless shopping experiences for customers, enabling the brand to offer products combining style and value.

In online markets, Hennes & Mauritz AB has entered third-party e-commerce platforms including Douyin, JD.com, and Pinduoduo. Early this year, Hennes & Mauritz AB officially entered Douyin Mall with a Super Brand Day debut. During this year's 618 period, Hennes & Mauritz AB partnered with Tmall Super Fashion Launch to create a 6-hour non-stop Summer Solstice Spectrum livestream show, ranking first in Tmall apparel category livestream viewership that day.

After years of market discussions about online and offline channels "competing" for share, El-Achkar states that consumers now meet and interact with brands across all channels, so brands need to create immersive brand experiences for consumers in any channel. Particularly in the Chinese market, Hennes & Mauritz AB provides almost all pathways from WeChat private domain and official channels to third-party platforms. The brand has no channel preferences for consumers; everything serves consumer convenience and interests.

After years of adjustment in the Chinese market, the initial success of the "accelerated growth" strategy provides the foundation for Hennes & Mauritz AB's current acceleration, with HOUSE OF H&M serving as an important footnote for the brand's fresh start in China.

From the current market environment perspective, Hennes & Mauritz AB will tangibly experience a tailwind push beyond its own acceleration.

Among similar fashion brands, while Hennes & Mauritz AB has evolved from retailer to fashion brand, it hasn't raised prices like some competitors, consistently maintaining affordable pricing to create a quality-value fashion world. Consumers' simultaneously strengthened fashion needs and value pursuit provide opportunities for Hennes & Mauritz AB, which maintains its brand pricing strategy.

Hennes & Mauritz AB's philosophy of "fashion for everyone" precisely meets consumers' actual needs in the current challenging market.

They can not only obtain one-stop shopping convenience and purchase localized products with significantly improved product strength and international category combinations, but also enjoy the fruits of brand development through member loyalty programs like enterprise WeChat and opening celebrations. For example, during HOUSE OF H&M's opening celebration from September 9-15, single purchases over 299 yuan get 40 yuan off, over 399 yuan get 70 yuan off, over 499 yuan get 100 yuan off, with the first 100 customers on opening day receiving no-threshold gift vouchers, plus limited opening gift activities in-store.

Fashion, price, and sustainability are often viewed as an impossible triangle, but Hennes & Mauritz AB benefits from industry giant advantages in resource mobilization and long-term planning, plus 18 years of deep cultivation in the Chinese market, achieving substantial progress in this triangle.

The birth of HOUSE OF H&M clarifies the brand's differentiated positioning, grounding "fashion for everyone" in high-quality, affordable products and immersive experiences. Facing the increasingly mature and competitive Chinese market, this strategic experiment not only concerns whether Hennes & Mauritz AB can achieve "accelerated growth" domestically, but will determine this mass fashion giant's weight in global markets.

A brand that understands both Chinese markets and global perspectives, establishing authority in high fashion while understanding mass psychology, represents Hennes & Mauritz AB's most imaginative brand story.

Once the Chinese market succeeds, Hennes & Mauritz AB's global growth logic will become completely clear.