Old Shunxing Tea House, located in Chengdu and reconstructed in 1999, is a leisure place composed of restaurant, tea bar and stage. The style of the tea house is a mixture of western Sichuan and Neoclassicism. The client intended to combine four kinds of business, including Shunxing tea house, Shunxing hot pot, Shunxing cuisine, and Shunxing snack, to form “Shunxing Selection”.
By such integration, brand image would be promoted, and chain stores would be built nationwide. Hanloong launched the project in the August of 2009 and started the journey of theme creation and brand promotion.
To be a local brand, multiple questions came out in terms of national expansion. How to target the market in a new potential city? Will the Sichuan culture integrate well into the local culture? Will the customers with existing tastes accept the flavour of Old Shunxing? How to coordinate the combination of four business types in different cities? To find the answers to all these questions, Hanloong’s team had investigated into culture contexts, market settings, and the brand of Shunxing from various cities, such as Chengdu, Shanghai and Beijing.
Based on the cultural and market researches, Hanloong’s team focused the theme on the style of Western Sichuan, which was supported by the fantastic mysterious culture, flexible construction culture, versatile folk-custom culture, relaxing tea-house culture, and ancient town culture. Eventually, the team put forward the creation of “the harmony of water and fire”, connecting hot pot culture and dock culture. From strategy, standard, model and culture, the project created flexible and localized managing models according to different markets, maximizing the brand culture and multiple business of Old Shunxing Tea House.
