Teresa Cheung fired up her Xiaohongshu app, turned on her camera and dazzled her nearly 1.8 million online followers over a seven-hour livestream. One moment, she was demonstrating a palette of eyeshadow: “This colour is called ‘Love Letter’,” she said in Mandarin, touting a dark berry-coloured shade.
The next, she was reciting an excerpt from the poem A Valediction: Of The Book by John Donne in perfect English: “Study our manuscripts, those myriads Of letters, which have past ‘twixt thee and me, Thence write our annals, and in them will be, To all whom love’s subliming fire invades, Rule and example found.” By the end, the 60-year-old actress from Hong Kong had promoted dozens of beauty products, read some Shakespeare verses and become the first on the platform to top 100mil yuan (RM66.43mil or US$13.
8mil) in sales in a single session. Xiaohongshu Technology Co – part Instagram, part Pinterest – has boomed in recent years as a combination of top influencers like Cheung, its artificial intelligence technology and soft marketing tactics make it a lifestyle bible for many of China’s high-income earners. It also created a US$6bil (RM28.
28bil) fortune for its co-founders, Charlwin Mao Wenchao and Miranda Qu Fang, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. “Xiaohongshu is a powerful tool for brands wanting to enter the Chinese market or attracting Asian customers in the United States,” said Frost Li, founder of Loup.ai, an ecommerce solution provider .