China moves faster than the deck on your screen. Land here and see it work for yourself.

Every expedition is built around the brief you send us. Kick-off call, draft agenda within five working days, two rounds of iteration before we lock it in. Fixed-track templates exist for teams that want a faster setup, but most clients run a fully custom programme.

Yes. We have run expeditions for beauty, fashion, food and beverage, automotive, luxury, home, mother and baby, pet and health. Visits, operators and case studies are picked for your category, not pulled off a generic shelf.

Nine to seven. One expert session and one company visit in the morning. A store walk or second visit in the afternoon. Day four or five is a workshop. Evenings are open unless you book a networking dinner.

Yes. Roughly a third of groups bring their lead agency, technology partner or distributor along. It helps align the whole working team on what is realistic and what is not, which is half the value of the trip.

Three to five days is standard. We can run two-day focused programmes on a single topic, like Douyin commerce, or extend to seven or eight days for multi-track briefs that span two cities.

March to May and September to November. Avoid Chinese New Year in late January or February, Golden Week from October 1 to 7, and the days around 618 in June and Double 11 in November. Operations stretch during festivals and access drops.

Most programmes anchor in Shanghai with optional days in Hangzhou for the Alibaba ecosystem or Shenzhen for technology and AI. Beijing for luxury and traditional retail. Tier 3 city visits available with two days of additional planning.

No. Professional interpretation runs throughout, for every expert session, company visit and store walk. Interpreters are briefed on your category in advance so the technical vocabulary lands clean.

Six to ten people. Eight is the sweet spot. Smaller groups get tighter access during company visits and more airtime in expert sessions. We do not run programmes for larger groups.

Per-person pricing scales with group size, depth and number of cities. Half-week single-city programmes typically start in the high four figures per person in euros. Multi-city deep dives with AI access run higher. We quote against the actual brief, not against a price list.

The full programme: company visits, expert sessions, store walks, workshops, professional interpretation, all in-China ground transport between sites, working materials and the post-trip report. Flights and hotels are not included by default.

Yes, as an add-on. We work with hotel partners in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Shenzhen, mostly in the Bund or Jing’an corridor for Shanghai. Some clients prefer their own corporate travel team. Either works.

Fifty percent on signature to confirm dates and lock in the company visits. Balance due thirty days before departure. Wire transfer in USD or EUR for overseas clients, RMB for domestic.

Account managers and category leads from Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Tmall, JD, WeChat and Pinduoduo, depending on the brief. Brand operators in your category. MCN agencies. AI and retail tech companies. The roster shifts with the agenda.

Tell us in the kick-off call. Where we have a working relationship, we arrange the visit. Where we do not, we say so. Some companies decline visits for confidentiality reasons. We will tell you which.

Working dashboards, backend systems and live campaign data where the company allows it, which is more often than not because we already operate with them. You will see numbers that do not appear in any public deck.

Photos in public spaces and most visits, yes. Recording is decided session by session. Some experts speak more openly off the record, and we respect that. Your post-trip report captures what was said.

C-suite executives, eCommerce and marketing directors, digital transformation leads, brand managers, agency principals. Most groups mix senior decision-makers with operators who will execute. That mix is part of what makes the workshop work.

A written report within thirty days summarising what we saw and what we recommend for your specific category. Slide deck, contact directory of everyone you met, and a sixty-minute Q&A call with the lead operator four weeks after you land.

Yes, but it is not the default. About a third of clients work with us afterwards on market entry, store operations or advisory. The expedition is sold on its own merits, without an attached pitch.