New Brands Entering Medical Aesthetics: Don’t Panic — Go Boldly

Over the past six months I have met a lot of new brands that have just received their registration certificate or are preparing to launch: small innovator companies entering on a single product with a few funding rounds behind them, and listed companies and medical-device groups standing up a new medical-aesthetics division.

On the surface the difference is the size of the capital behind them, but talk to them and you find that the larger ones do not necessarily move faster, and the smaller ones are not necessarily short of staying power. Backed by a large parent, a team entering an unfamiliar segment is often more conflicted and more encumbered; the unremarkable-looking small teams sometimes play more decisively and more aggressively, precisely because they have nowhere to retreat to.

For now, though, what determines how far a new brand can go is certainly the capital and R&D strength behind them — but what determines whether a new brand gains a footing in medical aesthetics is not who stands behind it. It is whether the person running it has settled a few of the most basic questions.

Plenty of products were approved over the past year, and most new brands landed 2025 sales around RMB 50 million. Much the same result. And yet from that same starting line, two completely different states have emerged.

One group is very good at packaging itself. Revenue said to be over a hundred million, so many tens of thousands of boxes sold, several funding rounds closed, a target of so many hundred million next year. The numbers are part true and part not, the story is lively, and the impression is of a leader in the category already.

The other group is almost invisible. The certificate is in hand but the launch keeps slipping; or the product has been out for a while with no ripple, or one or two ripples that quickly went still. What these companies have in common is an extremely unstable internal team — management may have turned over two or three times or more, and commercial strategy changes with the morning. From outside it looks like waiting. From inside it is being lost.

One runs a false fever, the other cannot get the stove lit. In essence the difficulty is the same: not knowing what to do, or doing a great deal while the solid basics are so full of holes they will not survive scrutiny.

One brand has held its certificate for nearly a year and still has no commercial launch in any real sense. Not for lack of money, and not because of the product — the team simply never came together. I am told they interviewed over a hundred candidates while also talking with dozens of external advisers and industry experts. They have talked to virtually everyone in the industry worth talking to, and still do not know what kind of team to build or in what posture to enter the market.

The line-up changed again and again in the meantime. Word travelled fast: that owner likes talking to people but never commits, harvesting free information and free plans. For a new brand that has not formally entered the market yet, the damage from that kind of reputation is far greater than you would think.

If an owner has talked to that many people and still cannot tell who is valuable, the problem is not with those people. It is that the owner does not know what they want. Without knowing the business model, you cannot know what team you need; without knowing the point of entry into the market, you cannot know what capabilities to look for. An interview is not market research, and a candidate is not your free consultant. Do your homework first, then go looking for people.

Some owners complain that there are too many charlatans in this market and they hardly dare hire any more, for fear of upsetting the balance of the team they have. I understand the disappointment, but reality also requires thinking about how a small company makes itself attractive to talent: a step up in seniority, a wider territory, a cross-functional opportunity, a stable environment, and so on. And thinking, too, about whether the company needs mature people benchmarked from peer companies, or should be selecting and attracting people with potential.

First: is the money in place?

Blunt, but real — I genuinely do ask this. And “money” has to be broken down: is it cash flow or assets on the balance sheet? Is it money the person at the helm can deploy freely, or a commitment from investors that has not landed yet? Or money headquarters has promised in tranches once you “show results first”? Those three kinds of money call for completely different play. Ample cash flow allows front-loaded investment and a talent bench; a company dependent on fundraising has to count carefully — spending big is fine, but beware the reckoning afterwards; and a company waiting for headquarters to watch the market before releasing funds has extremely little strategic flexibility. As for having none of the above and hoping the first shipment will fund the marketing budget, that is stretched thin almost everywhere now.

In medical aesthetics, working capital is hard capability, right alongside the registration certificate.

Second: is market investment front-loaded or back-loaded?

Spend heavily on market education first and buy penetration later, or test at small scale to validate the model and then scale volume? Neither path is inherently better, but it has to match your funding position. The worst case is wanting to build a brand without much money, or holding a budget and spending it timidly on what merely seems obvious — landing on neither shore.

Once the money question is settled, the outline of the business model has largely drawn itself.

However poor the market environment, it is the same environment for every new product. Since you are here, the first thing to do is always to work out where your advantage lies, and then concentrate every resource on making that advantage as large as it can be.

There are essentially three:

channel relationships (do you already hold distributor and clinic resources); brand traffic (does your background carry its own talkability and attention); product technology (does your product or material have differentiation in some indication or technical route that can be amplified).

Identify the advantage and let the small stand for the large. No need to cover every base, and certainly no need to copy whatever the next company is doing — you are not making knock-offs.

What a new brand should fear most is wanting to do everything and doing none of it thoroughly. That, or picking the wrong direction and wasting precious ammunition. Just do your own thing well.

Price is unavoidable, of course, and pricing strategy matters enormously. But if the entire commercial logic is built around price, you will be on the back foot before long.

A new brand has almost no chance of winning a price war: not enough scale, not enough brand premium, not enough bargaining power in the channel.

The direction with real opportunity is the niche. A specific indication, a specific treatment context, a specific group of patients. When physicians in one concrete field think of you first, that is your moat. It takes patient clinical education, physician training and case accumulation — and consumer education too, if the budget allows. Slow work, but real work.

Here is a real case.

Some new brands, with no clinics signed yet, distributors only just recruited and money tight, have opened a flagship store on Meituan’s medical-aesthetics channel. They have not decided whether the target market is chains, distributors or physician-owned clinics; they do not have coverage of even two hundred clinics nationally, which spread across cities is not enough to fill a single page of listings. What is the flagship store for? A consumer finds your store, taps in, and discovers there is not one clinic nearby that offers the treatment. That is not brand promotion. That is brand deterrence.

When the business is small and new, the return on every unit of spend has to be counted carefully, and every marketing action has to be judged first on whether it connects to a sale. Do not market for the sake of marketing, and do not waste money on appearances.

Medical aesthetics has already seen its era of spectacle. Today’s conditions make that hard to surpass, and there is no need to chase it. Do real work and the market will notice.

Frankly and objectively, a lot of companies are wasting their marketing budget right now, and it has nothing to do with how much money they have. Companies with ample budget waste more lavishly, companies with tight budget waste more painfully, but the nature of the waste is the same: no strategy.

The marketing department in a medical-aesthetics company has been reduced to a resource-allocation department, whose work is splitting the budget across channels and lining up activities on a calendar. Why this activity, what effect this money is expected to produce, whether conversion at the clinic can be tracked at all — nobody thinks about it and nobody asks. The more this holds, the more sales wishes it could allocate the marketing budget itself, and cut out the middle.

This is the problem that deserves to be faced. Money is finite, especially for a new brand, and every unit of spend should go to the cutting edge. Where that edge sits differs from company to company, so work out first which part of your product you want to amplify. That is the real craft of a marketing function.

One piece of common sense, and one common mistake.

Everyone knows about sales numbers by now, but you cannot read the number alone — you also have to watch inventory in the market, which includes distributor stock and clinic stock, and some less official channel stock besides. Once product leaves the plant, and sometimes before it leaves the plant, a company can announce it as “sales performance”.

So the hundreds of millions and the tens of thousands of boxes being publicised are really not worth much attention. They are for the capital markets. Do not let them disturb your own rhythm and your own plan.

Nor should you swing the other way and refuse treatment out of fear of the diagnosis. Having built a distributor channel and then loading no stock at all and setting no sales targets is equally unnecessary.

A well-run distributor system uses channel margin to draw on the cash-flow advantages of the distribution model, achieving the fastest possible collection and coverage and putting capital behind the company. If the worry is that loading stock triggers diversion and price disorder, what needs strengthening is inventory management, target setting, exchange mechanisms and distributor territory management.

There is no need to give up eating for fear of choking, and lose the first wave of fast collection and fast market coverage.

A new brand should build sell-through tracking from the earliest stage, and pay systematic attention to how product moves once it reaches the clinic. That matters more than any performance figure announced publicly.

The investment new medical-aesthetics products have made in aesthetic design over the past two years is baffling. Each time a new brand name or visual identity appears, the industry’s first reaction is not admiration but a round of gawping and mockery. Awkward brand names, crude UI and VI. I used to assume every company had at least an internal brand designer or an external design partner; it now looks as though many companies — some large manufacturers included — have no such function at all.

When taste across the whole market is sliding downward, that is precisely where differentiation lies. If a company puts some real work into its brand identity and produces something distinctive that people want to share, the goodwill earned may beat a million yuan of advertorials.

Back to the plainest fundamentals.

Medical aesthetics is, after all, adjacent to medicine. Some companies spend the better part of a year hiring senior executives and then, when the product is about to launch, do not have a single presentable set of clinical cases: which techniques worked, what the swelling looked like and how it was managed, how long the result held, the rate of allergic reaction… Sales and marketing arrive with nothing solid underfoot.

No hands-on demonstration work done, no operating SOP built, no demonstration files to hand. These are not lofty strategic questions; they are the basic homework before any product launches. Nor is hiring one person the solution — it needs medical, marketing and sales resources, internal and external, working together. It has nothing to do with the business model or the product strategy. What should be done should simply be done, without hesitation.

Do the solid work first, and along the way get to know the market, the team’s capabilities and how well you work together. But mind your reputation, and take care of your brand’s feathers.

Most owners of new brands are considerably more rational than they were a few years ago, no longer imagining hundreds of millions in year one and an IPO in year three. That is a good thing. The frothy era has passed.

Confusion and hesitation are normal, but confusion should not become the reason for standing still and wavering.

Somebody else’s volume, somebody else’s funding, somebody else’s noise — none of it has anything to do with you.

A small brand has only three things to care about:

1. Is the funding in place;

2. Is your own advantage understood well enough;

3. Are the fundamentals done solidly.

Get those three right and you will get through this winter and meet tomorrow.