Urban Revivo is drawing up its roadmap to conquer the West. The Chinese fashion chain, which seeks to compete directly with the European retail kings, especially Zara, the flagship of Spanish giant Inditex, will use London and New York as enclaves to boost its expansion beyond Asia. The company’s expansion plans include continuing to gain global reach and opening up to 200 stores worldwide over the next five years.
“Our strategy is to use both cities as a foothold to enter foreign markets and drive our globalization,“ confirmed Li Giangming, founder of Urban Revivo and chairman of parent company Fashion Momentum Group (FMG), in an interview with the Financial Times. It is precisely in London and New York that the company launched its first stores outside Asia just a few months ago.
Although the entrepreneur acknowledges that the brand lacks visibility in these markets, he is confident about the long-term boost this strategy will have on the company’s business.“Opening stores in Europe will force us to internationalize our products… which is the best way to prepare for changes in consumption in 20 to 30 years,“ explains Li Giangming.
Urban Revivo operates one store in New York and two in London
After landing for the first time in New York in May of this year, with a store in Soho of over 27,000 square feet, Urban Revivo arrived in London shortly after, in the middle of the year, with a first store in Covent Garden, to which it has just added a second location, in London’s Westfield shopping center, of some 29,000 square feet of floor space.
In the short term, the company, founded in 2006 and inspired by the Spanish chain Zara, plans to open up to 25 stores outside China during the year. By 2030, the Asian giant has set itself the target of generating a turnover of 5 billion yuan ($700.4 million) outside its local market.
According to the latest available figures, FMG achieved a turnover of around $1 billion in 2024, with 7 billion yuan. The company’s target is to reach an international turnover of at least 5 billion yuan by 2030.
The first store outside China was opened by the company in Singapore almost a decade ago, and it has been expanding its presence to have 23 stores in different international markets, mostly, however, still Asian. “We have learned from Zara, just as JD.com learned from Amazon’s business model, Nio and Li Auto learned from Tesla and Xiaomi learned from Apple,“ Li Giangming acknowledged.
The entrepreneur, however, highlighted the greater localization of Urban Revivo’s products, which are adapted to the styles and fit of consumers in each region, a strategy implemented in his local market to address the weakness of consumption in China. In a sign also of localization of the offer, the company launched in 2019 a design center in London, which works in parallel to its army of designers in China, and does not rule out starting to produce part of its offer in Morocco, Turkey or Vietnam.
