The brand our own staff cross-shop most does not sell a shirt at its own tag price. It has no non-event price at all. That is not a promotion. It is what the tier below RMB 350 has become.
Each line below is a section further into the deck, where it carries its own sources and dates.
This study measures one thing across forty brands: what a garment is tagged at, and what a customer actually pays for it. Every finding in the deck comes out of that pair.
One brand, one shirt, three numbers, no contradiction. Youngor's shirt is tagged 780 on its Tmall flagship. People pay 310. That is a hold of 40%. The same shirt in Youngor's 商场同款 department line holds 95%. And 355 appears later in this deck because it was the price one event window earlier, on the way down to 310. The channel decides which of those numbers a customer ever sees.
What this study does not do. It sets no growth number and it contains no forecast. It does not write the brand character. It does not tell this room which play to pick. It says what the market charges, what it costs to hold a price at each level, and which routes our own margin can currently pay for.
No brand tracker, no syndicated report. We priced the market ourselves, garment by garment, on the channels where the money actually changes hands, and recorded how much we trust each reading.
Two prices per garment, never one. The ticket is what the tag says. The take-home is what you actually pay after every stacked coupon. The gap between them turned out to be the finding.
We asked 158 colleagues which menswear brands they and their customers actually buy. The answer is not the brands we benchmark against in strategy documents.
Mentions across 158 respondents. Nice Rice's single mention came from APAC.
This is what sets the roster for everything that follows. We studied the brands our customer actually buys, not the brands we would prefer to be compared with.
Below that price, almost nobody charges their own ticket. Above it, almost nobody discounts. This is not a segmentation we chose. It is where the behaviour changes.
Below 350 the event price is the price. Youngor's shirt moved from 355 to 310 across two consecutive event windows in one week. There was no week in between at full price. Same shirt, same channel as the worked example earlier: the tag on it reads 780.
How to read this chart. Each dot is one brand. Left to right is what its shirt actually costs a customer. Up the axis is how far that brand discounts off its own tag, so a dot near the bottom holds its price and a dot high up does not. The vertical rule is 350.
The same brand, the same season, the same garment holds its price in one channel and collapses in another. Choosing a channel mix is choosing a price integrity.
| Brand | Channel where it holds | % of tag paid | Channel where it collapses | % of tag paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Youngor 雅戈尔 | 商场同款 department line | 95% | Tmall flagship | 40% |
| LILANZ 利郎 | JD line | 100% | Tmall flagship | 38% |
| Arc'teryx 始祖鸟 | 官方旗舰店 | 85-100% | 百亿补贴 channel | 67% |
| 比音勒芬 | core SKUs, three channels | 95% | 百亿补贴 tier | 51% |
| DETERMINANT | JD 常卖 | 92% | JD 真5折 events | 50% |
The nationals run synchronised weekly event windows. On 28 July all four read the same dates, 26 to 31 July.
The channel does not just reach the customer. It sets what the customer will pay.
We expected price integrity to decay steadily across the wardrobe. It does not. What happens instead is a deliberate split: one garment defended at full price, another used to move volume.
| Brand | Shirt | Trousers | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 霞湖世家 | 100% | 50% | 50 pts |
| Lululemon | 100% | 51% | 49 pts |
| 比音勒芬 | 87% | 51% | 36 pts |
| LILANZ 利郎 | 80% | 47% | 33 pts |
| DETERMINANT | 80% | 82% | 2 pts |
Across 20 China brands holding all three of shirt, polo and trousers, the shirt holds higher in 11 and lower in 9. There is no general decay. There is a strategy that some brands run and others do not.
We discount everything a little rather than defending one thing completely. That is either discipline or a lever we have never pulled, and the room should decide which.
This is the first time our own wardrobe can be read against the market garment by garment.
The 318 we quote as our position is the 301 清仓 line on Tmall. It is the shirt that sells, at 900 units a month, inside a subsidy window that has been running since June 2025 and is scheduled to run to July 2028.
The tag says 358 to 398. The price that actually sells is 318, and it has sat there since June 2025 inside a subsidy window scheduled to run to July 2028. The channel, not the pricing sheet, is setting our anchor.
Both bars are one hundred renminbi of sales, split into what it costs to make the garment, what it costs to sell it, and what is left before head-office costs. Same basis on both sides. 比音勒芬 is here because it is the most disciplined premium player in our category and it files its numbers.
Their selling bill is 40.3 and its largest line is being physically present. Ours is 66.3 and its largest line is marketing, at 35.3 against their 4.9. Our own store count went from nine to four over the same period.
The study started by asking how much marketing a price tier needs. The market answers that marketing is one of seven ways, and the most expensive one.
| How they hold it | Everyone we found running it | % of tag paid | What it costs to run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Channel scaleVolume and distribution reach set the floor. The brand is everywhere, so it never has to be expensive. | Youngor 雅戈尔 · HLA 海澜之家 · JoeOne 九牧王 · LILANZ 利郎 · SeptWolves 七匹狼 · Navigare 小帆船 · Uniqlo · MUJI | 73% | Distribution capital and franchise mechanics, built over decades |
| Product authorityOne fabric story, told for years, plus the discipline never to discount it. | 比音勒芬 · ICICLE 之禾 | 91% | Fabric R&D, and a physical retail machine to demonstrate it in |
| Function proofThe garment does something measurable, and the proof is the reason to pay. | 龙牙 · 白小T · 布先生 · Descente 迪桑特 · Arc'teryx 始祖鸟 · Kolon 可隆 · On Running · Lululemon | 96% | Product engineering, and the discipline to keep one hero SKU |
| Design voiceA point of view and the community that shares it make the price feel fair. | Nice Rice 好饭 · Pane · Bananain 蕉内 | 100% | A content engine, and years of community building |
| Factory trustThe factory is the credibility and the low price is the proof of it. | 衬衫老罗 · 霞湖世家 · 欧定衬衫 | 100% | Cost discipline, and a transparency story told relentlessly |
| Borrowed-luxury designDesign authority rented onto a factory cost base and sold direct, pointing up into the band. | Gremade 顾大师 · KKRS ERIC · DUTTMOKN · G FOR INNERTHOUGHT | 80% | Design authority, fabric buying, content discipline. No stores, no media |
| Brand worldA built-out world of meaning charges what it likes. | Ralph Lauren · Hugo Boss | 96% | Decades of media, flagship stores, ambassadors |
Marketing spend appears in exactly one of these seven rows, and that row needs decades and a balance sheet we do not have. The other six are bought with something else entirely.
Read those as two facts, not one ratio. The band is not empty of transactions. It is empty of positions. The money is taken by premium brands discounting down into it and mass brands eventing up into it.
How to read this chart. The same chart, zoomed onto the 350 to 620 stretch. The shaded stripe is the open ground. Our own dot is the one ringed in cyan, sitting one band to its left.
Everything above carries a source and a date. These are the places where we do not have one.
The interactive map behind this deck carries every one of the 204 price observations with its source, date and confidence rating. Nothing here is asserted without one.
Each one proves or kills a play. The question in every case is never what the brand is, but what its model costs and whether we could structurally run it.