Original Article Luxury brand building in China: Eight case studies and eight lessons learned Received (in revised form): 15th October 2014 Klaus Heine wrote his doctoral dissertation at TU Berlin about ‘The Identity of Luxury Brands’. He developed and instructed the first luxury marketing course at a German university at TU Berlin, and worked also with leading German luxury brands such as Glashütte Original, Meissen, Mercedes Benz/Daimler, Poggenpohl and Robbe & Berking. He now works as luxury marketing professor at EMLYON business school in Shanghai. Michel Gutsatz is Director of DBA & MBA of Euromed Management (Marseille, Bordeaux & Shanghai) and Adjunct Professor at CEIBS in Shanghai. Prior to this, he has created the MBA in International Luxury Brand Management at ESSEC Business School in Paris. As Human Resources and Internal Communication Director of the Bally Group in Switzerland, and member of the Executive Committee, he had developed the whole HR function and redesigned the Bally in-store luxury service strategy. In addition, he advises investment funds, luxury & prestige brands and retailers in Europe and China. ABSTRACT Although there has been a global growth of luxury business start-ups for about 100 years, which accelerated especially since the 1990s along with the upswing of the global luxury market, it is barely acknowledged that the luxury segment today is highly entrepreneurial. This is even more the case in China, where a variety of Western and Chinese market players are setting up China-specific luxury brands. Although surprising for most experts and consumers, the luxury business community in China is emerging in leaps and bounds. The main objective of this article is to analyse the major challenges and strategies for the development of luxury brands in China. For this purpose, the article discusses the concept of Chinese luxury brands and the major players and luxury start-up models. On the basis of that, success factors of Chinese luxury brands, with reference to their stage in the brand lifecycle, are analysed with eight instructive case studies including Charles Philip Shanghai, Gieves & Hawkes, NE Tiger, Seagull, Shanghai Vive, Shang xia, She Ji-Sorgere, and Sheme. Each of them represents a major luxury market entrance strategy and highlights typical success factors for luxury brand building in China, which are summarized by some major lessons learned. Journal of Brand Management (2015) 22, 229–245. doi:10.1057/bm.2014.25; published online 21 November 2014 Keywords: luxury; brand building; entrepreneurship; success factors; China Correspondence: EMLYON Business School, Asian Campus, East China Normal University, 2/F, Global Education Centre, No. 3663 North Zhongshan Road, Shanghai 200062, China E-mail: Heine@em-lyon.com © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1350-231X Journal of Brand Management Vol. 22, 3, 229–245 www.palgrave-journals.com/bm/