Tea and coffee brands are waging a fierce battle to seize new market spaces.

In China's tea and coffee market, a fierce new space battle has already broken out, which is an inevitable choice in the development stage of the industry. However, it seems easy to create exclusive characteristics, but it is actually far from easy.

01 Tea and Coffee Brands Are Launching Fierce New Space Battles

In the past one or two months, the tea and coffee industry has seen new competition labels, and the market is extremely active, with several leading brand players launching their big moves one after another.

First of all, it is worth noting that Starbucks China's new-generation flagship store — Starbucks Reserve Star Workshop — made its debut at SKP, the high-end shopping mall in Beijing in September. The store sells Reserve coffee, Italian-style desserts, "Ode to Milan" SKP merchandise and "Global Inspiration Series" gifts.

With unique design and high-end store image, this store not only fits Starbucks' brand image, but also aligns with the high-end positioning of SKP. It can be seen that Starbucks' new-generation flagship store focuses on the top luxury mall experience store.

In mid-to-late September, CHAGEE opened a cultural-themed "tea shop" store on Beijing Road, a well-known historical and cultural street in Guangzhou. This is a themed experience store built by CHAGEE in cooperation with Guangzhou Tea Museum.

"New Consumption Insight Finance" visited the store on September 22 and found that different from ordinary stores, this store has four floors. Its spatial design revolves around the context of tea from circulation and transaction to integration into daily life, and is equipped with a tea culture exhibition area, handcraft area, guest area, stamp interaction area, as well as boxed tea retail and peripheral display areas.

Integrating professional tea culture content, the store's spatial design is more in the style of a traditional tea shop, full of tea charm, tea aroma and tea culture, and has become a popular check-in spot. It is also CHAGEE's first tea shop cultural themed store, as well as the latest type of store explored by the brand.

In mid-to-late August, Luckin Coffee's largest store in Guangzhou was launched in the Financial City. This is Luckin's first Enjoyment Store opened in the core area of Tianhe Central Business District. Its design deeply integrates Lingnan local culture and retro aesthetics, reproducing elements such as the copper coin-patterned floor tiles of ancient coins, themed commemorative images, and dome chandeliers.

Luckin has previously opened an Enjoyment Store in Foshan, which also takes Lingnan culture as its design concept. It shows that Luckin is opening more themed and large-scale stores, focusing on localization, and even creating a unique style for each individual store.

Also in late September, Guming's first national Fresh Enjoyment themed store opened in Nanjing, focusing on exploring and experiencing freshness. The brand also launched its first Gulado handmade Italian gelato series. Guming is also exploring new store types and striving to build a high-end brand narrative.

These leading brands in the industry have created new stories, and they all share one thing in common: they are all busy launching new types of brand stores and upgrading their experience spaces.

There is no doubt that this directly reflects that tea and coffee players have already started the new space battle.

02 The Inevitable Choice

The tea and coffee industry is at different development stages, and different enterprises make different choices according to their own brand development stages and business models.

The tea and coffee industry is a retail service industry that requires scale effect. Some brands will stick to direct sales or control the proportion of franchised stores, but most brands will expand rapidly through investment promotion and franchising.

The key to achieving rapid scaling lies in standardization, which of course includes standard stores under the full standard system of store types, most of which present a "uniform look across thousands of stores" feature.

Combined with the overall industry background, the coffee and new tea beverage markets are both huge markets. Although there is still incremental space to tap in the future, they have already become stock markets on the whole.

At present, different brands adopt different strategies in store opening: some brands continue to step on the accelerator to open new stores, some slow down their store opening pace, and some even speed up store closure.

According to data from Yilan Business, in August 2026, the total number of stores of 55 domestic brands reached 241,400, a 2.50% increase over the previous month. After excluding Luckin Coffee and Cotti Coffee, which were included for the first time this month, the original 53 brands opened 6,780 new stores and closed 3,223 stores in the month, with an actual net increase of 3,557 stores.

The tea and coffee industry has gone through the stage of rapid scaling and entered a stage of intensive cultivation, which requires different brands to tell more new stories. Among them, expanding new store types has become an inevitable choice.

The basic function of a cup of coffee or a cup of milk tea is of course a drink, for example, drinking coffee can refresh you, and drinking milk tea can bring you sweet happiness.

Different tea and coffee brands have different positioning and different product prices. In the coffee industry, brands such as Starbucks and Peet's Coffee maintain high unit price per customer, while in the tea beverage industry, CHAGEE maintains a relatively high unit price per customer.

The key behind this is that the price of a product includes costs such as raw materials and operations. To maintain a high unit price per customer, more of the cost comes from brand added value and consumer experience.

American business strategists Joseph Pine and Gilmore proposed in the book *The Experience Economy* that economic offerings have evolved from "agricultural products → commodities → services → experiences". Experience is the fourth economic form, and what enterprises sell is no longer the product itself, but "memorable events". This theory also applies to the tea and coffee industry.

Essentially, by opening more new space stores, tea and coffee brands push the industry competition to a new stage, where they start to sell experience, sell space and sell memories.

Tea and coffee brands are looking for new incremental space to build new narratives, including new brand stories and new product stories, among which are the new stories of new spaces and new scenarios. New space can bring consumers more freshness and experience, as well as enhance brand image and increase brand value.

The competition for new space in the tea and coffee industry aims to occupy consumers' mental resources through spatial experience. This is exactly why Starbucks has always adhered to the "third space" concept. Although Starbucks China is accelerating the implementation of the "unique look for each thousand stores" plan, spatial experience remains its core label.

03 What Is the Key to Achieve?

Now leading brands in the industry have all chosen to upgrade their brand experience spaces, and this trend will become more obvious in the future. To put it more bluntly, this tea and coffee space scenario battle will only become more intense in the future.

But in the view of *New Consumption Insight Finance*, it seems easy for tea and coffee brands to explore more store types, but it is not easy to do well and make them exquisite. The key is to achieve the following four aspects.

The first is branding: the development of new spaces for tea and coffee brands must first realize branding.

Branding is still a key element for tea and coffee enterprises to develop new spaces and new store types. Different store types can be opened in different markets, but the overall brand tone must be adhered to. We cannot use novel innovations to attract consumers at the expense of brand characteristics.

Take Starbucks as an example again: Starbucks opens different stores according to different regional markets and store addresses, but the overall brand image remains unified. Although there seem to be thousands of different Starbucks stores, what consumers feel is still a consistent Starbucks.

The second is differentiation: not only to achieve differentiation, but also to be unique.

When exploring new store types, tea and coffee brands must focus on differentiation most importantly, which is not only the differentiation of the brand, but also the differentiation of store types, visual experience, in-store furnishings and other aspects.

This differentiation should also be adapted to different regional markets, such as the north and south markets, and even different cities in one province have different regional cultures, so that each store can be unique, and even each store has its own differentiation feature.

The third is to combine and balance speed and slowness, and maintain a proper development rhythm of its own.

Leading tea and coffee brands will speed up the pace to explore more store types, and tell more new stories in the new space and new scenario experience. But on the whole, they cannot follow the trend blindly. Instead, they should combine and balance speed and slowness, and grasp their own development rhythm.

It is not easy to create a unique new space, and there are not many options available for new spaces in mainstream landmark business districts of a city.

The fourth is that the number of new spaces does not matter, the key is to create exclusive characteristics, quality, exquisiteness and texture.

Different from the high efficiency and speed of opening standard stores, the key of new space is to create exclusive store characteristics. At the same time, it has high investment cost, long payback period and high operating cost. The attribute of this type of store determines that the number is not the priority.

Another key to creating exclusive store characteristics is to build brand characteristics, which can bring consumers a greater sense of quality and exquisiteness, and all these require long-term brand precipitation.

The more intense this new space scenario battle in the tea and coffee industry is, the more new stories tea and coffee enterprises can tell. They become the business winners, and consumers can also get more new scenario space experience.

After all, the tea and coffee industry is accelerating from the past stage of "selling a cup of coffee or tea drink" to a new stage of consumer scenario operation and "managing consumers' brand mind".

This article is from the WeChat official account "New Consumption Insight Finance", written by Wu Wenwu, and authorized for release by 36Kr.