Did the Mid-Autumn Festival gifts from Laopu Gold fail to strike a chord with customers?

Can gold jewelry brands become luxury brands?

What do people focus on when giving gifts for Mid-Autumn Festival? It is not the high price, but the suitability.

Recently, the Mid-Autumn Festival gifts from Laopu Gold have backfired among some of its members. Members categorized into the "homophone implication group", "appearance and material group" and "product quality group" have racked their brains over a pair of cups.

On the other hand, the packaging cloth bags of Laopu Gold have also been complained about by some customers. Many people think that the bag looks like the one used by monks to beg for alms, or the one for funeral offerings, but never the one for holding gold jewelry.

People keep complaining about Laopu Gold, which seems to be because it positions itself against luxury brands. After all, Laopu Gold is sufficiently high-end in product craftsmanship, store location selection, service attitude, and even staff recruitment. However, this sense of premium has shown cracks now.

The continuous luxury transformation of Laopu Gold seems to stem from the fact that the performance of gold jewelry brands is often affected by fluctuations in gold prices, while brands with a higher inherent tone are more capable of resisting the resulting impact.

However, many Chinese consumers buy gold jewelry for investment purposes. It is unclear whether consumers are willing to pay for Laopu Gold's attempt to elevate its status with a luxury brand identity.

Sending the wrong Mid-Autumn Festival gift?

In 2026, Laopu Gold gave its gold card and black gold card customers a Mid-Autumn Festival gift: a pair of cups.

However, this act of giving back high-value customers made some of them dissatisfied, and the reasons for dissatisfaction can be divided into three groups:

The first group is the "homophone implication group". Customers in this group generally believe that Laopu Gold could have chosen any other gift, but it deliberately gave them a pair of "cups" at Mid-Autumn Festival. In Chinese, the pronunciation of "a pair of cups" is the same as "a pair of tragedies", which implies a complete set of misfortunes.

The second group is the "appearance and material group". Apart from thinking that the appearance of the cups is ugly, customers in this group also point out that the material of the pair of cups does not look high-end, which does not match the brand tonality of Laopu Gold.

For example, Xiaowan, a gold card member, told Brother Pan: "The cups are made of ceramics, but they are very thin, just like the cups we use to rinse our mouth when brushing teeth."

The third group is the "product quality group". The Mid-Autumn Festival gifts of Laopu Gold they received have quality problems, leading to counterproductive results.

Xiaoqing, a gold card member, told Brother Pan: "After I received the Mid-Autumn Festival gift from Laopu Gold, I tried to take pictures of it with backlighting as people do online, only to find a small defect on the surface of the cup. Later I contacted the customer service on Taobao, sent the cups back and got a new pair."

The Mid-Autumn Festival gifts of Laopu Gold have backfired among some members. On the other hand, their outer packaging cloth bags have also attracted complaints from some customers due to their unique shape and color matching.

The packaging cloth bags of Laopu Gold, whether in shape or color matching, are very similar to the robes and cloth bags of monks in temples. Some netizens therefore tease them as alms-begging bags.

At the same time, because the bag has a large storage space, it can directly become a super-capable schoolbag. Some netizens carried it for travel, looking like a monk going down the mountain to beg for alms.

Not only that, if customers put the jewelry box of Laopu Gold into this cloth bag, the style may instantly change from a compassionate Buddhist vibe to a creepy and horrifying one.

This is because in the cloth bag full of religious style, there is a rectangular box. If you hold it with both hands and leave seriously, it looks like you are holding an urn.

If a customer carries the cloth bag with one hand, it looks like an assassin has taken someone's head and put it in the bag to go back for assignment.

Has Laopu Gold become a luxury brand?

The complaints about Laopu Gold's Mid-Autumn Festival gifts and packaging bags seem to indicate that people have higher requirements for it than for other gold jewelry brands.

At the same time, Laopu Gold itself is moving towards "luxury transformation", which is reflected in the following aspects:

In terms of product craftsmanship, Laopu Gold adopts ancient craftsmanship with more complex production techniques and more exquisite shapes. Among them, ancient craftsmanship such as filigree inlay and gemstone inlay have been included in the national intangible cultural heritage list.

Supported by this special craftsmanship, the prices of its products are also very high. For example, its Twelve Flower Gods Cups are priced at nearly 4 million yuan, and its Goujian Sword of King of Yue is priced at nearly 2 million yuan, truly realizing the concept of "buying gold as expensive as buying a house".

In terms of store location selection, Laopu Gold's stores are usually located in the core areas of first-tier and second-tier cities, adjacent to luxury brands such as Hermès and LV.

Most of the shopping malls that Laopu Gold has settled in are high-end malls such as Mixc series and SKP. At present, Laopu Gold has fully covered the top ten shopping malls in Chinese mainland.

In terms of service quality, different from most gold jewelry brands, the staff of Laopu Gold will not take the initiative to market to customers by adding WeChat or other methods, and customers who ask to add the corporate WeChat of the staff will most likely be politely refused.

When there is a long queue, Laopu Gold will also provide waiting customers with chocolate, biscuits, mineral water and other items. Some bargain hunters never expected that they could get full in a gold jewelry store.

In addition to the above three aspects, Laopu Gold's recruitment of staff is even extremely strict. On social platforms, many netizens have reported that they went to interview for Laopu Gold, but were rejected for various reasons in the end.

Netizen Xiao Wang told Brother Pan: "After my last round of interview, Laopu asked me to go to the store to try on the work uniform and take photos. After trying on the uniform, they said I was not suitable, because I looked too Western-style, and I still looked too Western-style even after wearing the uniform."

The extremely high interview elimination rate of Laopu Gold also makes some people think that its long-term recruitment behavior is more of a promotion for the brand, rather than a real need to hire people.

Xiaoxue, a former flight attendant, told Brother Pan: "I feel that their large-scale recruitment is just to brush KPI. I was once approached by a headhunter online and interviewed for Laopu Gold. I had already submitted the onboarding materials, but then they never replied to me."

In this regard, Xiaoxue guessed: "I guess it's because they can't afford the salary. A friend of mine joined Laopu Gold this year, and her monthly salary is only more than 20,000 yuan. My after-tax salary in the airline was 25,000 yuan, so according to my salary flow, they should offer me an annual salary of 450,000 yuan."

With the above methods, Laopu Gold is increasingly like a luxury brand, but its brand tonality is also showing cracks.

For example, customer Xiaoya bought a seal of Laopu Gold at Hangzhou Mixc. She asked Laopu to engrave words on the seal, but when she took it back after engraving, she found multiple scratches on the seal.

Xiaoya told Brother Pan: "The engraving service of Laopu Gold in Hangzhou is provided by a third party. At first the staff said this was unavoidable. After some negotiation, they said that the seal could be sent back to the factory for repair, but I had to bear the loss caused by the repair. Finally, I kept safeguarding my rights, and they gave me a new seal. I didn't dare to engrave words on the new seal again."

Who dragged down Laopu Gold's performance?

Although the "luxury golden body" of Laopu Gold has shown some cracks, its performance is very good.

Financial reports show that in the first half of 2026, Laopu Gold achieved a revenue of 19.81 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 60.3%; its net profit reached 4.27 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 88.2%.

Also in the first half of 2026, the gross profit margin of Laopu Gold increased to 41.3% from 38.1% in the same period of last year; the net profit margin increased to 21.5% from 18.4% in the same period of last year.

However, the outstanding performance of Laopu Gold did not lead to the growth of its market value, but instead caused its stock price to fall.

On the day the financial report was released, the stock price of Laopu Gold fell by 2.7%. At present, its market value is about 62.5 billion Hong Kong dollars, which has dropped by nearly two-thirds compared with its peak in the middle of 2025.

With a sharp growth in performance on one hand and a continuous decline in stock price on the other, this strange performance of Laopu Gold needs to be explained from the financial data.

Previously, Laopu Gold released the estimated performance for the first quarter of 2026, showing that its revenue was between 16.5 billion yuan and 17.5 billion yuan, and its net profit was between 3.6 billion yuan and 3.8 billion yuan.

Calculated in this way, the revenue of Laopu Gold in the second quarter was only between 2.31 billion yuan and 3.31 billion yuan, and the net profit was between 470 million yuan and 670 million yuan.

While it was advancing triumphantly in the first quarter, why did its performance drop sharply in the second quarter? The key seems to lie in the fluctuation of gold price.

In the second quarter of 2026, the global gold price recorded the largest quarterly drop in the past ten years. At the beginning of this year, the gold price was about 5600 US dollars per ounce, reaching an all-time high; but in late June, the gold price dropped to 4000 US dollars per ounce, falling by 29% in less than half a year.

This sharp price fluctuation has made gold jewelry brands that take gold as raw material suffer a lot, and has also brought huge operating pressure to Laopu Gold.

To this end, in addition to adhering to the fixed-price sales model in pricing, Laopu Gold is also carrying out various promotional activities.

For example, during this Mid-Autumn Festival period, Laopu Gold launched a four-fold preferential activity at its Tianjin Mixc store, offering a 50-yuan discount for every 1000 yuan spent, and other discounts can be superimposed.

We can see that because gold jewelry brands are greatly affected by gold prices, Laopu Gold wants to take the high-end route, trying to resist all kinds of impacts from the cost side with its luxury brand identity.

However, different from many other luxury brands, gold jewelry products have relatively stronger investment attributes. Consumers tend to "buy when the price rises and not buy when the price falls". They queue up at the store early when the gold price rises, and wait and see outside the store when the gold price falls.

It can be seen that as a hot player in the industry, Laopu Gold wants to plant a different brand image from other gold jewelry brands in the hearts of consumers. Even if this cognitive change can be achieved successfully, it may take a long time to wait for the results.

This article is from WeChat Official Account "Zinc Consumption Research Center", written by Pan Ge, authorized for release by 36Kr.