The cross-border revelation of an 85-fold surge in GMV: How to master localization in overseas beauty products

Another dark horse seller emerges in the overseas beauty and cosmetics market!

At the CBE China Beauty Expo in May 2024, the new domestic brand Mooekiss broke through the circle with the help of the famous Coser Karina's "scene-based makeup promotion". As early as March of the same year at the Hangzhou AD02 Animation Exhibition, Karina used Mooekiss products to touch up her makeup. Its innovative lip makeup matrix (including lip mud, lip cream, etc.) and three-dimensional contouring product combination became the focus of the exhibition. This brand, which has only been established for two years, has built a global growth flywheel: it has not only won the sales champion of the makeup category on mainstream e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, but also demonstrated amazing explosive power in the Southeast Asian market - during the 12.12 promotion in 2024, its Shopee Vietnam station's single-day GMV peak reached 85 times the daily average, and the order volume increased by 115 times.

In recent years, Chinese cosmetics brands have rapidly risen both at home and abroad, not only being able to compete with some European, American, Japanese and Korean brands, but even surpassing international brands in some niche markets. Mooekiss is one of the top brands among them. It not only provides a "from 0 to 1" overseas model for Chinese brands, but also reflects how Shopee, with its dual-wheel drive of "infrastructure + ecology", has become a "must-have" for cross-border brands to conquer the Southeast Asian and Latin American markets.

From "Purchasing Agent Gene" to "New Cross-border Species": Mukeshi's Supply Chain Breakthrough

Mooekiss's parent company once engaged in Korean beauty purchasing business. At that time, Korea was a well-deserved pioneer in the field of fashion and beauty. However, it had already conceived the forward-looking layout of returning to the domestic market and subsequently built a mature international supply chain system in 2017.

However, the quality inspection standards and consumer demand iterations in the domestic beauty market have pushed it to turn to independent brand research and development. In 2023, Mooekiss entered the market with "high quality-price ratio + ultimate design" and quickly topped the category list on domestic mainstream e-commerce platforms. Within a year, it achieved rapid breakthroughs and repeatedly topped the top 1 list of cosmetics categories on mainstream e-commerce platforms such as Taobao.

When Mooekiss set its sights on Southeast Asia in 2024, this one-year-old Chinese cosmetics brand was facing a gamble: how to find new growth poles in the context of saturated European and American markets and intensified domestic competition? The answer lies in the booming consumer market in Southeast Asia: the average annual GDP growth rate here exceeds 5.2%, the young population accounts for more than 50%, and social media activity is the highest in the world. Shopee's localized infrastructure has become a key lever in this battle.

"Southeast Asia is not a 'substitute market', but an important springboard for brand globalization." said Hao Te, head of Mooekiss' overseas brand. Unlike mature markets in Europe and the United States, Southeast Asia's beauty market has not yet formed a monopoly, and local brands and international giants are still in a melee. This "dispersed dividend" enables Mooekiss to enter the market segment through differentiated positioning - it advocates the inclusion and integration of multiple cultures, accurately hitting the complex needs of Southeast Asian consumers for cultural identity and individual expression.

But what really turned this adventure into commercial success was the "localized e-commerce infrastructure" built by Shopee. The combination of "localized infrastructure + content traffic" provided by the platform became the core driving force for its rapid breakthrough.

Shopee’s “Platform Leverage”: How Localization + Content Ecosystem Drives Growth

When Mooekiss was officially launched on Shopee Vietnam at the end of May 2024, this emerging domestic beauty brand might not have expected that its Southeast Asian journey would evolve into a textbook experiment in the symbiosis of platform and brand - within half a year of its establishment, it achieved a single-day GMV of 85 times that of normal days during the 12.12 promotion, and a 115-fold increase in orders.

The cold start of a new brand is often a life-or-death struggle, but Shopee's "startup incubator" model has rewritten the rules of the game. Shopee is very friendly to new brands. Mooekiss quickly received advertising subsidies, resource support, and event policy submissions in the early days of its entry into the platform. Shopee's account manager also provided targeted suggestions for the optimization of the store's main image and the adjustment of the operating mechanism, helping the brand to integrate into the market more smoothly and gain user attention. In the actual operation process, Mooekiss also found that the operating logic of the Shopee platform is similar to that of domestic shelf-type e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, which enabled the team to reduce the learning cost of entering a new market and improve operational efficiency.

The real breakthrough came in the iteration of product strategy. While most overseas brands were still using "Chinese hits" to replicate Southeast Asia, the consumer insights revealed by Shopee allowed Mooekiss to capture a key trend - Vietnamese consumers' demand for cosmetics was significantly lower. To this end, Mooekiss launched a product with specifications suitable for Vietnamese consumers in a timely manner. Once the product was launched, it quickly began to receive orders, proving the lethality of "data-driven product selection."

Now, this lip mud has become Mooekiss’ most popular item on Shopee. During the big sale on January 15, 2025, the daily sales volume reached 10 times the normal level.

The synergistic explosion of the content ecosystem has pushed the growth curve to a new high. As a new domestic beauty brand, Mooekiss has developed strong content marketing capabilities in the domestic e-commerce market. In its overseas expansion, it also regards content marketing as a top priority. Short videos and live broadcasts are exactly the areas where Shopee focuses its efforts, and Mooekiss has hit the right spot.

"The sales volume skyrocketed on January 15th, which can be said to be inseparable from the strong support of Shopee." Mooekiss said that on the eve of the big sale, some local influencers had been independently connected through the Shopee backend, and a three-stage rocket of "KOC matrix - breaking the circle of mid- and low-level influencers - endorsement by the top influencers" was built based on their influence.

From the fission spread of unboxing reviews by long-tail KOCs, to the pulse growth of store traffic caused by mid-level influencers, to the instant conversion potential created by the live broadcast rooms of top anchors - the three circles of potential have resonated in the Shopee content ecosystem. This "marketing snowball effect" supported by the platform's content infrastructure is the explicit expression of Shopee's content ecosystem resource integration capabilities, driving brand awareness to achieve an exponential breakthrough in the Vietnamese market.

The evolution of Shopee's logistics network is reshaping the cost structure of cross-border business. "Shopee's logistics services are very complete in terms of Southeast Asian e-commerce infrastructure." Mooekiss said that by preparing goods overseas in advance through the localized fulfillment model, the delivery time can be significantly shortened. Currently, it takes about 7 days to ship from domestic cross-border to Vietnam. After adding localized fulfillment, the delivery time is expected to be shortened to 2-3 days, which can effectively reduce logistics risks and improve the stability of order fulfillment.

From traffic support to data empowerment, from content infrastructure to logistics reconstruction, Mooekiss's Vietnam campaign revealed a truth: in the era of stock competition, the key to success for overseas brands is no longer a single hit product or marketing trick, but choosing to resonate with an ecological platform that is well versed in localization rules.

The story of Mooekiss is essentially a two-way journey of "high-quality supply chain + platform dividend". As Southeast Asia becomes one of the fastest growing e-commerce markets in the world, Shopee, with its 48% market share and continuously iterating ecological capabilities, has become an indispensable "infrastructure" for Chinese brands to go global.

Shopee Platform