Launch Date: May 2018
Geography: Beijing, China
Founders:
Executive Team: Ami Tsou, Chief Communications Officer
2026 Full Year Projected Revenue: $50M - $75M
Primary Category: Fragrance
Other Category: Skincare
Funding: Venture Capital
Primary Distribution Channel: DTC
Key Retail Partners:
Key Markets:
2026 Projected Offline Distribution Points: 28
To Summer is China’s pioneering Eastern artistic fragrance brand with a modern sensibility. Founded in Beijing in 2018, we trace the origins of our scents through landscapes, poetry, and art, blending these inspirations with contemporary culture to create fragrances made from precious natural materials. Our work brings timeless Eastern scents into a global context through experiences that engage all five senses.
We have launched acclaimed collections of artistic perfumes, home fragrances, and bodycare. In Jingdezhen, we continue to expand traditional porcelain craftsmanship through innovative collaborations.
Across China, we restore historic spaces—including a heritage house in Shanghai, a Beijing courtyard, and former publishing sites in Chengdu and Guangzhou—to honor architectural culture and open these places to the public.
Together, these creations express the multidimensional beauty of contemporary Eastern aesthetics. At To Summer, every experience sparked by scent is like an ink painting: spacious, expressive, and serene.
Insights: Ami Tsou, Chief Communications Officer
Why now and why you?
Because this is the moment when Eastern scent culture is no longer niche—it’s becoming a global movement. To Summer isn’t just another fragrance brand; we’re the originator and definitional voice of contemporary Eastern artistic fragrance and the most successful fragrance brand to emerge from China. Our growth trajectory proves that the world is hungry for new cultural narratives, and we translate Eastern culture and art into scent in a way that is both modern and deeply rooted. By 2025 Q3—our seventh year—we are still accelerating across consumers, retail expansion, and global visibility. The question isn’t “why now?” but rather “why not earlier?” And I’m here because I understand how to build a cultural brand with both creative integrity and global resonance.
What fuels your competitive advantage?
Our competitive edge begins with origin authenticity—working directly with Eastern ingredients at their source and building long-term ateliers to protect them. But it’s also our cultural fluency: We translate an ancient, complex, and uniquely Eastern aesthetic lineage into a contemporary, modern design language. This combination of deep cultural roots and modern expression is something only we can do because it’s not borrowed—it’s lived, researched, and continuously created.
What’s your proudest accomplishment to date?
We‘re proud that we’ve fundamentally reshaped the global understanding of Eastern fragrance. We work with ingredients that hold real cultural and ecological meaning—Jingmai Pu’er tea, osmanthus from Hubei, Chinese cedar, camellia, Xinhui tangerine peel—and we participate in every step from cultivation to extraction. Establishing the Jingmai Eastern Ingredients Atelier in 2021 and launching our ten-year origin program was a milestone. Extracting Pu’er tea essential oil for the first time globally and adding it to the International Fragrance Association (IFRA) fragrance map in 2024 gave Chinese tea a voice in international perfumery. Doing the same for Xinhui tangerine peel in 2025 created another new coordinate for Eastern scent on the global stage. These are not just technical achievements; they are cultural recoveries. We’re proving that Eastern ingredients, ecosystems, and aesthetics deserve a respected place in the world’s fragrance vocabulary.
What is the one thing you wish someone had told you?
That when you’re building something culturally original, the silence at the beginning isn’t rejection. It’s simply the world waiting to understand. And that understanding always takes longer than you think.
What would you tell your past self before starting this journey?
Stay the course. Building a cultural brand requires unreasonable patience, and the world will eventually meet you where you are. This path, with all its difficulty, is the right one.
What does success look like in the next 3-5 years?
Success means becoming the global reference point for Eastern artistic fragrance—creatively, culturally, and structurally. Not just expanding internationally, but shaping conversations around provenance, identity, and modern eastern aesthetics. It means our ingredient-origin programs becoming models for sustainable cultural ecosystems. And it means our spaces, publications, collaborations, and scents influencing how the world perceives contemporary Chinese creativity.
What's one industry trend that is overhyped, and what's being overlooked?
Overhyped: surface-level storytelling—brands treating “ingredients” or “origins” as decorative mood boards rather than lived histories.
Overlooked: the emotional truth behind fragrance. Real provenance, real cultural context, and the respect for the people, craft, and ecosystems behind raw materials. The industry talks endlessly about notes and accords but rarely about memory, land, time, and meaning.
How do you think the industry needs to evolve?
For the local market in China, the industry needs to move beyond aesthetic appropriation toward genuine cultural collaboration. Not borrowing symbols, but engaging with traditions, communities, and histories with depth and reciprocity. Fragrance should be a bridge between cultures—not a costume. Consumers are more perceptive than ever; they know when a brand is building culture and when it’s just borrowing from it.
If you could wave a magic wand, what one wish would you make for your business?
That every To Summer space, scent, and story becomes a doorway for global audiences to understand the depth, softness, and modernity of Eastern aesthetics—as naturally as they understand any long-established Western house.