A number of "Chicecream"-like brands in the perfume industry have exited the market.

The cutting-edge perfume brand that was once regarded as one of the most beloved niche players in the fragrance circle has closed all its stores.

Recently, Jumeili learned from Xiaohongshu that Plustwo has officially shut down all its outlets. All products have been removed from its Tmall flagship store, and official stores on other platforms can no longer be retrieved via search.

In addition, some netizens revealed that the brand's customer service confirmed the store closure back in April this year. This store with 183,000 followers quietly exited the market in a completely deserted manner.

Source: Screenshot from Xiaohongshu

Contrary to its current fading status, Plustwo was founded in 2018 at the early stage of the booming new consumer brand wave. Its signature product, the Moon Solid Perfume, sold over 150,000 units within 3 months after launch, once topping the Tmall solid perfume category TOP 1 ranking[1].

Beloved Fragrance Brand Plustwo Closed All Stores

The story of Plustwo started with a "cross-industry shift" of its founder Zhu Ran. Zhu Ran graduated from the Actuarial Department of the University of Kent in the UK, and used to work as an actuary at a leading domestic insurance company, but his real passion lay in fragrance products. After four years of work, he left the financial industry and became the co-founder of an essential oil aromatherapy product company, accumulating a large amount of experience and resources in relevant fields.

Zhu Ran, Founder of Plustwo

In 2018, Zhu Ran proposed to build a personal care and home care brand with oriental fragrance notes. At that time, he publicly shared his market insight with the media: "The post-90s and post-95s generations grew up in the stage of rapid domestic economic development, have high acceptance of domestic brands, and are willing to try emerging things. Their core consumption logic is to please themselves, that is, to obtain the dual experience of purchasing and using the products."

Therefore, the founding team officially launched the operation of Plustwo in 2018. In August 2019, Plustwo launched its first product line "Magic Mirror Series", including ampoule shampoo, body wash and other products.

In January 2020, Guangzhou Plustwo E-Commerce Co., Ltd., the parent company of the brand, was established, with Zhu Ran serving as legal representative, executive director and general manager. The co-founder Guo Qianyun is a nationally certified perfumer and formulator with nearly 7 years of working experience in personal care product R&D and supply chain management. Such a team combination was not uncommon in the new consumer brand wave at that time.

In March of the same year, Plustwo settled in Tmall, and 7 months after launch, the brand's sales on Tmall increased by 700%.

In January of the following year, Plustwo completed tens of millions of yuan in angel round financing, led by Nut Capital and followed by Zhonghui Capital.

Source: Screenshot from Qichacha

In terms of positioning, Plustwo focuses on "fragrance + efficacy", targeting girls' bedroom and bathroom scenarios. Among its products, the Moon Solid Perfume is its signature offering, and the reason why it is remembered in the fragrance circle.

Source: Screenshot from Xiaohongshu, Plustwo's signature product Moon Solid Perfume

This product was launched in August 2020, and continued to sell well in 2021, helping the brand aim for a revenue target of 100 million yuan. These figures are still remarkable in today's emerging fragrance track.

But the problem lies exactly here: a hit product can bring the first wave of public attention, but it may not support a brand to survive long-term cycles.

Against the background of continuous entry of new fragrance brands, Plustwo was caught in plagiarism disputes, which was in sharp contrast to its consistent claim of adhering to original design and owning patents.

In January 2020, some netizens pointed out on Douban that Plustwo's Magic Mirror Series was suspected of plagiarizing the South Korean brand PIBU PIBU. In addition to the packaging, its "separate ampoule" concept is quite similar to PIBU PIBU's custom essential oil addition method. The narrative of the Magic Mirror Series that "there is a magic world inhabited by a rabbit elf wearing a magic hat with long feathers and a cloak embroidered with stars and moons" is also similar to the "magic" and "little rabbit" elements of PIBU PIBU derived from *Alice's Adventures in Wonderland*.[2]

Source: Previous article from Jumeili

The shape of another product, the Moon Solid Perfume, is highly similar to Kjaer Weis eyeshadow, with almost identical metallic texture and slide cover design.[2]

Source: Previous article from Jumeili

In addition, Plustwo has long adopted the hit product strategy focusing on online channels. Although it has made offline layouts, it has never formed a scale. All these factors led to the continuous decline of the brand's subsequent sales.

Third-party data shows that from 2021 to the first 8 months of 2026, the sales of Plustwo on mainstream e-commerce platforms plummeted from 35.588 million yuan to 675,300 yuan.

What is more noteworthy is that its founding team has not completely left the fragrance track, but has incubated a new fragrance brand "Soulvent". This brand is under the company Guangzhou Momo Wuwu Brand Co., Ltd., whose legal representative is exactly Zhu Ran, the founder of Plustwo.

Source: Screenshot from Qichacha

Soulvent focuses on modern naturalistic oriental fragrance notes. Its sales in 2025 were about 4.95 million yuan and is still growing, but its scale is still small[3]. It remains unknown whether the new brand can avoid the pitfalls that the old brand stepped into.

Source: Screenshot from Xiaohongshu

Emerging Perfume Brands Say Goodbye to the "Money-Burning Narrative"

In retrospect, Plustwo's exit mainly comes from two aspects.

First, capital cycle and category challenges. Its financing and investor exit exactly match the 5-8 year exit cycle of RMB funds. After completing the angel round financing in 2021, from March to April 2025, investors Nut Capital and Zhonghui Capital collectively transferred 15% of the shares to Plustwo founder Zhu Ran, co-founder Guo Qianyun and the brand operation entity.

This timeline is almost perfectly aligned. Although the brand's response to the equity repurchase at that time was "the company did redeem the equity, and the specific reason is not convenient to disclose for the time being", it also caused a lot of speculation about the market environment at that time.

As @Xia Tian, founding partner and editor-in-chief of Jumeili, once said, "VC and other funds have a short duration, usually 5+2 years in China (5 years of investment management + 2 years of exit). Investors must obtain large returns within three to five years, otherwise they will be forced to exit, and repurchase and gambling clauses are usually set, which objectively promotes involution and short-term operations."

At the same time, the characteristics of perfume, such as low repurchase rate, high market education cost, non-essential demand, strong novelty-seeking and slow loyalty cultivation, are difficult to support the large-scale expectation of capital. The scale obtained by burning money will decline once the investment is stopped. Without hematopoietic capacity in the economic downturn, it will be unsustainable once the capital is withdrawn.

Second, the brand mainly relies on online channels and lacks offline experience stores. The fragrance industry is extremely dependent on offline experience and olfactory tasting, which is its "fatal weakness".

Zhu Ran said that the brand has tried social media platforms including Bilibili, official WeChat accounts, Xiaohongshu, Douyin and others, and then screened them according to ROI and fan fit. Even if the first video on Douyin got more than 50 million views, single video sales exceeded 2 million yuan, and the ROI reached 30, the online channel can still create hit products but it is difficult to settle consumer minds. Without offline touchpoints, there is a lack of long-term entry and buffer against traffic fluctuations.

Plustwo's exit actually reflects that when the tide of capital burning recedes, the perfume market presents two completely different scenarios:

First, the emerging perfume brands with early capital intervention are either operating steadily or exiting the market through clearance. This is especially true for brands that rely on capital to expand their scale. They lack hematopoietic capacity in the economic downturn and cannot sustain operations once capital is withdrawn.

Plustwo is not the only emerging perfume brand that has closed stores in recent years. Another once well-known fragrance brand Scentooze released a store closure announcement in August 2023, investors including Gao Lang Holdings withdrew one after another, and the brand entered the stage of bankruptcy and clearance.

The niche perfume brand Xizi Linglong officially stopped operations in March 2025 after nearly a year of clearance. The fragrance brand Chunshan, which focuses on exploring natural energy, also announced store closure and clearance in April 2025 due to the company's strategic adjustment.

The common characteristics of these brands are short establishment time, mid-to-low end positioning, and rapid growth by taking advantage of the "olfactory healing economy" trend. Once capital withdraws or the capital chain is tight, they will face great survival challenges.

Some emerging perfume brands have maintained steady development: such as Tea Fragrance Master and Busuo Suo, relying on channel advantages and accumulated consumer recognition.

Among them, Feigua Data shows that the GMV of Busuo Suo in the first half of 2025 ranged from 100 million yuan to 250 million yuan, ranking TOP 1 in sales popularity of the perfume segment among domestic brands[4].

Source: Feigua Data

Eight Lao Wang, the founder of Tea Fragrance Master, also shared with Jumeili in this year's communication: "Since Tea Fragrance Master expanded to offline channels, the online growth rate has remained above 30%, and the advertising investment cost has decreased instead of increasing."

They either have clearer product differentiation, more solid channel operation, or have found a repurchase logic that does not rely on a single hit product. There are still opportunities in the fragrance track, but opportunities are no longer evenly distributed to every brand that can tell good stories.

Second, a new batch of perfume brands are pouring into the market to seize market share. Huai Xu, which emerged around 2024, takes Tibetan-region oriental fragrance as its differentiated positioning, and its cumulative sales have reached 15