Zhou Lizhen: Five years to develop HLA's "Evolution Theory"

Question AI · How does Zhou Lichens long-distance running philosophy shape corporate resilience?

At 5 a.m., thin mist hangs in the air. At 38 years old, Zhou Licen, Chairman of Hailan Group, is already running on the road. From the dead of night to the break of dawn, from daily morning runs to official race days, his figure can always be seen on the track.

On March 29, he once again stepped onto the 2026 Yangzhou Half Marathon course. Upgraded to a World Athletics Platinum Label event, the race saw him stand side by side with more than 20,000 runners, weaving through Yangzhou’s water alleys and a sky full of cherry blossoms in spring. With a personal best of 1 hour 39 minutes in the half marathon, this runner always pushes hard forward on the course. That persistence and bearing also reflects the steadfast choices made by this young helm-holder amid the ups and downs of industry waves.

But a company’s long-distance run is far more complex than an individual’s perseverance.

“During the ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ period, China’s manufacturing growth logic accelerated its shift—from traditional factor-driven to a new stage driven by technology and efficiency. The apparel industry’s transformation is especially urgent. E-commerce dividends have peaked, and consumption has entered a stock-and-compete phase. High inventory has become a stubborn industry ailment, and anxieties such as blind store expansion, declining performance, and closing stores have spread across the whole industry. In 2024, among 39 non-sportswear companies listed on the A-share market, nearly 70% saw performance declines or even losses, and some brands’ inventory turnover days reached as long as 300 to 400 days. Closing stores, losses, blind expansion of large stores… the entire industry has fallen into anxiety.

Under this industry winter, Hailan Home can still achieve growth against the tide. In 2025, the company realized operating revenue of RMB 21.626 billion, up 3.19% year over year, and attributable net profit of RMB 2.166 billion. By the end of 2025, Hailan Home’s total number of stores exceeded 7,300. According to data from Frost & Sullivan, based on the 2024 revenue caliber, Hailan Home has ranked first in the Asian men’s apparel market for 11 consecutive years since 2014.”

Such growth is not accidental; it is a proactive transformation that began five years ago. In November 2020, Zhou Lichen officially took over the helm and launched a firm, fast, systematic transformation. From design, R&D, and channels to branding—he responded to the challenges of the times with a systematic theory of evolution. This set of “combination punches” precisely responded to every shift in the times and quickly became a force for surviving across cycles.

Zhou Lichen transplanted the body-awareness developed through long-distance running into corporate management, emphasizing a “gut-level response” to market temperatures. Perhaps this kind of sensitivity is precisely the key for Hailan to maintain its rhythm through the industry winter.

But corporate long-distance running has no finish line. The overall growth space of the men’s apparel market is limited. After already reaching a high market share, how can Hailan find a new growth curve? In the trends of younger and more personalized consumption, does the “national brand” image still have enough appeal? In addition, R&D and transformation require continuous investment—can their effects stay ahead of pursuers for the long term? The real test may lie in whether it can maintain its own pace even at the next bend and achieve the best pace.

New opportunities, a new Hailan Home

Sensing change is the starting point of all evolution. At the moment when “the 14th Five-Year Plan” transitions into “the 15th Five-Year Plan,” what Hailan Home shows as “new” is an inward-to-outward systematic reshaping.

Back in Hailan Home’s offline stores, one notable sign is that female consumers are becoming important decision-makers in its stores—what they may have been only companions in the past, they now proactively choose products for their husbands, fathers, and even children. A female consumer who picks out clothes for her husband and father said that the design and styles of Hailan Home now, while meeting business travel needs, also offer more fashionable and commute-friendly scenarios.

Over the past five years, China’s apparel market growth engine has gradually shifted away from explosive self-indulgent consumption toward more stable family-unit consumption that is more practical and offers better value. This consumer’s direct feeling mirrors the quiet replacement of Hailan Home’s underlying logic: it is evolving from merely “selling men’swear” into “proposing a lifestyle.”

In the men’swear segment, the demand for a one-stop purchase for husbands, fathers, and children has become increasingly prominent, which places higher requirements on brand category breadth, product quality stability, and channel convenience. With its long-term accumulated national brand awareness, a men’s product matrix covering all age groups, and store networks across the country, Hailan Home has taken an early lead in its transition from “a man’s wardrobe” to “a provider of family-quality apparel.”

This shift is not just a slogan; it requires all-around alignment of the supply chain, product R&D, and store experience—and this is exactly the direction it has focused on investing in over the past few years.

Hailan Home has been deeply laying out RFID Internet of Things technology and smart factory construction for years. Its value is becoming apparent now: it not only greatly improves inventory turnover efficiency, but more importantly, it builds flexible manufacturing capabilities of “small batches and fast responses.”

Data shows that after the RFID technology was adopted, the efficiency of receiving and dispatching goods as well as sorting and packing improved to 5 to 14 times the original levels. As relevant leaders of Hailan Home explained: “Today, the Hailan Cloud smart factory can also achieve personalized made-to-order service of ‘placing an order in one day, making in four days, and delivering in two days,’ boosting production efficiency by 23%, and fabric utilization rate as high as 89%. With radio-frequency technology and PDA inventory scanning guns, store staff only need to lightly scan to achieve real-time transparency of inventory.”

“After having the chip, from factory to store, we can calculate the optimal replenishment ratio for each store, and efficiently deliver over 100 million pieces of apparel every year.” A factory负责人 explained. Hailan Home is no longer “betting” on the market based on experience; it has evolved into using algorithms to sense demand and using data to feed back into production. When consumer trends change overnight, this ability to respond quickly to real market needs—and even provide personalized customization—will become the key to escaping homogeneous competition and capturing niche customer segments.

More importantly, Hailan Home is rebuilding its brand value—from relying on “marketing bombardment” to relying on “trust accumulation” and “content resonance.”

Under Zhou Lichen’s push, “Lan Run Study Society” was created. Zhou Lichen himself is the best representative of this spirit. He turned his personal hobbies into content, repeatedly titled marathon events, and even appeared on camera to share the pain and breakthroughs of training and the joy of PB (personal best performance). In just a few months, some employees’ weight dropped from 268 jin to 160 jin. This extreme control over the body was quickly transformed into execution power at work. “I run with him. He has very high requirements for himself. That kind of presence infects everyone.”

As one employee admitted, this culture even spilled over and became a brand asset. The IP it created, such as the “King of Kings God Challenge,” quickly grew into a phenomenon-level benchmark in China’s mass running field. In recent years, Hailan Home has also caught the domestic marathon boom and has repeatedly been the title sponsor of events such as Wuxi Marathon, Jiangyin Half Marathon, and Hu-Lu Lake Half Marathon, enabling it to penetrate the new consumer group that now has higher expectations for brand meaning.

On March 22, the 2026 Hailan Home Wuxi Marathon kicked off at dawn in Jiangnan. As a World Athletics Gold Label event, this edition attracted nearly 500,000 participants to register, setting a new domestic record for the highest number of marathon registrations. Behind the rising heat of the event is a shift in running—from sports to a lifestyle.

Hailan Home, also the exclusive title sponsor for the third consecutive year, continues to deepen its involvement in this trend. On site, Hailan Home provided 20-inch yellow rolling suitcases customized for 35,000 runners as race materials, creating the distinctive “airport-style packet pickup” spectacle on the streets of Wuxi and quickly climbing to the top of local hot-topic lists.

Behind these breakout moments at the race venues is not only marketing creativity, but also an outward expression of Hailan Home’s “promote healthy living” philosophy. As a national brand rooted in the Chinese market, Hailan Home has focused on the sports track in recent years, parallelizing event support and sports-scene building. It has gradually formed a “sports+” ecosystem layout from mass participation to professional events, evolving from being a “event title sponsor” into a co-builder of healthy lifestyle development.

Hailan Home’s “new” is not an isolated product or marketing innovation. Instead, it is a calibration of its systemic capabilities and the direction of industry evolution. Behind efficiency is a deeper redefinition of “people.” This “post-90s/second-generation entrepreneur” who graduated from Tsinghua University’s finance program combines a rational capital perspective with sharp new-media instincts. He realized that to seize this opportunity, simply changing clothes is not enough—he must change the “way of communication.” That’s why people saw a chairman who personally went on livestreams and made videos. He is no longer a remote manager high above everyone; he is an IP that can crack jokes, run marathons, and feels real and alive. This “real human feel” gives Hailan Home genuine temperature in the online world built by algorithms. By combining persona-driven communication with digital supply, it successfully iterated the definition of the “national brand,” moving it from “your parents’ wardrobe” to “a partner who understands you.”

Slow decision-making, heavy verification—finding a new anchor in the business ecosystem

Sensing change is only the first step. The real test is how to make judgments that don’t follow the crowd amid chaos. This kind of judgment is often the crucial leap for enterprises during generational handovers and across cycles.

Behind Hailan Home’s “new” is the image of the new generation of helm-holder, Zhou Lichen—practical, committed, and enterprising—expressed through a series of key decisions made in complex cycles.

To understand Zhou Lichen’s judgments, you first need to understand complex cycles. During the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, China’s apparel industry fell into a profound “narrative crisis.” On one hand, some international high-end sports and outdoor brands rose through extreme vertical scenarios, pushing market expectations of brands toward a finer-grained value recognition. On the other hand, flow dividends peaked, and many brands陷入 anxiety about constantly “changing their face” to cater to Generation Z.

At the same time, traditional mass-market brands are facing “identity anxiety.” Their long-relying ODM (original design manufacturer) model, while ensuring scale and speed, is prone today to being labeled “conservative” because product power is what matters most—and designs lag behind trends.

Preconceptions are like a mountain. Facing that mountain, many brands choose aggressive transformation, even trying to fundamentally change their genes. But for a national brand with a huge scale, blind “transformation” often leads to losing the root. Under the double pressure of flow anxiety and identity crisis, Zhou Lichen demonstrates astonishing strategic resolve. He made a key judgment: embrace young people, but don’t abandon the core base. By revisiting data, he concluded that the foundation of the brand is still Chinese men aged 20 to 45—this group is the backbone of society. Under the dual pressures of work and family, what they need is not vague trends, but “certainty” with high quality and strong value for money.

Based on this, he insists on “slow decision-making and heavy verification.” Over the past five years, when Hailan Home introduced new categories, it established a “10% trial-and-error mechanism.” For aggressive innovative products, headquarters would buy out the risk and carry out gray-scale tests in 500 core stores nationwide. “Slow decision-making doesn’t mean slow decisions.” Fundamentally, this mechanism uses tactical “small steps and fast running” to serve strategic “long-termism.” It avoids the classic difficulty of a large conglomerate turning around quickly, and builds a firewall to protect brand assets in a volatile and impatient business environment.

After Zhou Lichen took over, he deeply realized that to break the stereotypes consumers held, it was necessary to build its own R&D barriers. He reorganized the company using modern management systems, treating R&D as a strategic focus. Today, Hailan Home has 5,000 people in its own-built factories, and its apparel R&D center team is nearly 200 people. He specifically set up a market research group to break down single items such as T-shirts and hoodies in detail. Even T-shirts alone are divided into two departments and more than ten categories.

This marks Hailan Home upgrading from a traditional operations and management model to a supply-chain collaborative R&D model. It is no longer just a buyer of products; it becomes an enabler of the industry—responsible for systematically pushing suppliers to develop and iterate based on the most competitive product trends in the market. This is not only a reconfiguration of production relationships, but also an upward climb along China’s manufacturing value chain.

Beyond the apparel main business known to the public, Zhou Lichen also focused on multiple industry sectors such as intelligent low-carbon initiatives, cultural and sports tourism, and commercial management, fully empowering corporate development, building advantageous industry clusters, and continuously deepening strategic landing projects.

In recent years, “carbon peak and carbon neutrality” has become a global consensus. With active fulfillment of national requirements for the “dual carbon” strategy, Hailan established Hailan ZhiYun Technology Co., Ltd. Its positioning is as a comprehensive intelligent energy service provider, and its carrier is the Hailan ZhiYun industrial Internet platform. It provides integrated intelligent energy services across dimensions such as intelligent low-carbon energy optimization and operations, intelligent power, digitalized industrial energy, AI model and intelligent agent development and applications, as well as carbon-asset and data-asset management—enabling the stepwise, optimized, and efficient utilization of energy across different categories.

In addition, cultural and sports tourism is another bright card in Zhou Lichen’s building of a better lifestyle. He vigorously developed a tourism industry centered on horse culture, bringing foot traffic and consumption to the Jiangnan town located in Jiangyin. To actively respond to calls from the General Administration of Sport of China, the Ministry of Commerce, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism regarding “sports events entering scenic areas, entering streets, and entering business districts,” Hailan invested in building the Flying Horse Sports Park. The goal is to further integrate sports event resources, expand new spaces for sports consumption, promote the development of mass sports, help build a sports superpower, and actively explore and practice a new “sports+” integrated development model.

This cross-industry layout of “apparel + X” is the second moat businesses seek amid cycle fluctuations. Against the backdrop of peers selling shells to survive, this diversified anchor gives Hailan Group greater resilience and room to maneuver when facing risks from a single industry.

Perhaps this is the crucial leap from rough-and-ready entrepreneurship to modern governance: use rational restraint to resist temptations, and respond to the times through systematic evolution. In Zhou Lichen’s view, a true moat is not a barrier made of traffic, but deep trenches and high ramparts built through supply-chain coordination.

“Full-domain evolution” to reconstruct a lifestyle

Sharp sensing and decisive judgment ultimately must land on the reconstruction of product forms and channel logic. Without product evolution, all strategies are castles in the air.

For a long time, Hailan Home has served as “a man’s wardrobe,” carrying the years Chinese men have spent fighting in the workplace. During the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, the state clearly proposed the “Brand Power” strategy. Zhou Lichen decided to lead Hailan Home in a comprehensive evolution from products and channels to globalization.

Today, when you walk into Hailan Home’s standard stores, the logic of the shelves has already been rebuilt. Five years ago, this might have been a kingdom of business men’swear. But now, the boundaries of the product lines have been infinitely widened. Taking the center stage are the “Aurora series” down jackets with innovative seamless direct-to-filling down application and hot-press channel lock-down technology, as well as hardcore assault jackets that combine windproof and waterproof functions in one.

Beyond the main brand, Zhou Lichen started the layout of a multi-brand matrix even earlier. He nurtured the workplace women’swear brand OVV and acquired children’s and infant brands such as YeeHoO. These new businesses contributed revenue of RMB 3.447 billion in 2025, up 29.18% year over year. Meanwhile, by obtaining the exclusive agency rights for Adidas FCC business, Hailan Home quickly entered the sports track and laid out 723 stores.

From business to casual, from children’s wear to sports, Hailan Home has built a wardrobe that covers the whole family and all scenarios. This is not merely an expansion of categories; it is a renewed battle for definition power over “the wardrobe.” Wu Sheng, founder of Scenario Lab, believes: “Hailan Home’s advantage is that once it completes the shift in cognition, the thickness of its resources can support more systematic and more sustainable innovation.”

The reach of evolution also extends into the channel’s fine capillaries. In 2024, Zhou Lichen met with Liu Qiangdong, founder of JD Group, enabling a deep bundling between Hailan Home and JD in the “city outlet” business. This is not a simple e-commerce collaboration, but an inverse correction to the “Veblen effect.” In the current era where consumer rationality has returned, high-quality and good-value outlet formats are becoming a new growth pole. By the end of 2025, JD’s outlet store count had reached 60.

At the same time, under what appears to be a traditional store system, an invisible digital web is spreading. From community operations of “Hailan e-commerce” to day-and-night rotation of dozens of matrix accounts, Hailan Home is breaking the limits of physical space and building an “always-on, omnichannel” retail ecosystem. Data shows that over the past three years, Hailan Home’s online sales increased from RMB 3.258 billion to RMB 4.435 billion, and its share rose from 15.70% to 21.06%.

Even more ambitious is Hailan Home’s global expansion pace. As of the end of 2025, it had 147 overseas market stores. In 2025, its overseas regions generated main business revenue of RMB 453 million, up 27.70% from the same period last year, covering multiple countries in Southeast Asia. It then opened stores in Sydney, Australia, and Dubai in the UAE. From “bringing it in” to “going out,” that once mostly sailed on inland waters super-ship is learning to fight storms in the deep blue sea.

When business tentacles extend across the globe, Zhou Lichen realizes that the endgame of competing as world-class brands is not just products, but the right to define culture. To break Western monopoly on popular colors, Hailan Home, together with the Tsinghua University Color Research Institute, conducted a special study on China’s traditional color system. From “Just this green” to “Chinese red,” it tries to establish a color language system belonging to Chinese people. This marks a clothing company moving from merely manufacturing products toward building cultural confidence. Perhaps this is the most difficult—and most worthwhile—psychological threshold to cross after China’s manufacturing goes global.

A two-way convergence between brand and consumers

All evolution ultimately has to return to specific people. As the world steps into “the 15th Five-Year Plan,” shared prosperity has become a core topic in China’s social development. For brands, being “present” matters. But more important is being present with dignity.

On social platforms, a girl shared her experience taking her fiancé to Hailan Home: “I originally just wanted to browse casually, but I didn’t expect that the moment he put on that gray suit, his whole vibe changed completely.” She felt the price was right, and she also conveniently bought a matching couple’s convertible jacket to prepare for their honeymoon trip.

This is undoubtedly the strongest recognition Hailan Home’s “national brand, great value for money” receives, revealing the real demands of mass consumption today: people want to look dignified, pursue quality, and also hope for reasonable prices.

The value of Hailan Home lies in its ability to provide high-quality products to the widest range of people in an egalitarian way through extreme supply-chain efficiency. In the context of shared prosperity, this is not only a business choice, but also includes a certain ethical value—providing ordinary people with a sense of dignity without having to pay a high price.

A senior expert in the apparel industry, Lü Changfu, who has been in the sector for 20 years, believes that Hailan Home’s group consensus is not suits, but goods with good cost performance. Breaking traditional men’swear concepts happens naturally, because the way people dress has changed. “It’s fine if business turns into casual. Hailan Home is price-driven, not style-driven.”

At the front line of stores, consumer scenarios are undergoing subtle changes: wives pull their husbands along; daughters bring their fathers; the family is becoming a new consumer unit. This emotional connection is built on “trust” and “long-term companionship.” In traditional promotion, Hailan Home has maintained the tradition of sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala, making “coming home to visit Hailan Home during Chinese New Year” a piece of national memory.

From “a man’s wardrobe” to “a family’s wardrobe,” and now to the “national lifestyle,” Hailan Home’s evolution history, to some extent, mirrors how China’s private economy is seeking endogenous motivation in the stock-and-slow-growth era. It no longer expands blindly; it grows inward. It no longer defines consumers; it tries to understand and accompany consumers.

In an era full of noise, Hailan Home chooses to stand beside the majority of quiet, ordinary people with design principles of “adapted to the body, excellent in how people feel, matched to people’s needs, and inspired by people’s intentions.” Perhaps this is the most plain and yet most resilient underlying color of China’s manufacturing after its noisy phase.

From the “tackling hard tasks” period of the “14th Five-Year Plan” to the outlook for the “15th Five-Year Plan,” these five years Hailan Home has gone through are a microcosm of how China’s private enterprises keep self-reforming and searching for value coordinates amid the tide of the times. It didn’t lie flat on past achievements, nor did it get lost amid industry fluctuations. It chose a difficult but correct path—unaffected by traffic, unbound by anxiety—actively evolving in sync with the times.

When asked how to define today’s Hailan Home, Zhou Lichen is more willing to compare the company spirit with an athlete’s spirit. He always remembers the perseverance and purity of marathon legend Kipchoge on the track. For Zhou Lichen, these five years of succession are more like a long qualification race. He uses data to sense the direction, uses resolve to cross through the fog, and uses evolution to reshape the body—until, finally, he runs together with countless ordinary people.

At the starting line of 2026, the starting gun sounds again. An IPO in Hong Kong is not an endpoint, but a new starting point for global competition. In this business-and-time marathon, what is being tested is no longer only market strategy, but also the wisdom of how a national brand reads this era and harmonizes with the country’s fate.

Time will eventually provide the answer. This long-distance runner, with a steady pace, runs toward the next golden age.

(Special Topic)

Author: Fu Jianci Editor: Cao Cailin