Your Brand Hit ¥10 Billion and Still Can’t Turn a Profit. The Problem Isn’t Marketing.

You built a brand. You scaled to billions in revenue. You won the shelf wars, optimized the supply chain, crushed the logistics game. And somehow — somehow — your margins are razor-thin, your competitors are cloning everything you do, and you’re trapped in a price war you can’t win.

If you’re a consumer brand founder, you’ve probably felt this squeeze. You did everything the playbook told you to. So why does it feel like you’re running on a treadmill that keeps getting faster?

I spent three hours with Chang Bin, a man who’s spent 20 consecutive years investing only in consumer brands — from JD.com in its 100-person days to October Rice Field, Snack Busy, M Stand, and dozens more. He’s seen two full generational shifts in Chinese consumption. And what he told me reframed everything I thought I knew about why brands succeed.

Your past victories were probably the infrastructure’s victories, not your brand’s.

That stings. But sit with it.

Chang Bin doesn’t think like most investors. While everyone else analyzes traffic, GMV, and marketing tactics, he walks around to the supply side first. He wants to understand how an industry actually matured before he touches a brand. Because here’s what he’s learned the hard way: brands that chase traffic without understanding the infrastructure underneath them are building castles on sand.

Take the snack industry. Over 20 years, it went through four distinct eras. First, brands like Laiyifen and Liangpin Puzi took bulk snacks, repackaged them, slapped on a logo, and captured 50% margins by making snacks feel premium. Then Three Squirrels rode the e-commerce wave — hitting ¥100 million in year two — because platforms like JD.com had finally built the logistics to ship food directly to consumers. Then Snack Busy came back offline with 30% margins and 60-70% discounts, winning on brutal efficiency. And now? Brands like Xue Ji Roasted Seeds and Lu Xi He are setting up shop in gleaming malls, roasting products on-site, letting customers taste before they buy.

Each wave looked like a brand victory. But what actually drove each shift? Infrastructure. E-commerce platforms. Cold chain logistics. Last-mile delivery. The brands that won each era weren’t necessarily smarter — they were the ones standing at the exact intersection where supply chain maturity met consumer demand.

When everyone has the same supply chain, the same logistics, the same efficiency — what exactly is left to compete on?

This is the question keeping founders up at night. And it should.

For 20 years, the dominant logic was ‘products by category’ — group users by what they buy, distribute by channel, differentiate by function. It worked brilliantly while infrastructure was still being built. But now? Infrastructure is mature. Efficiency is table stakes. Two-day shipping is expected. Competitive pricing is assumed. You can’t out-efficiency someone who’s willing to lose money longer than you.

Chang Bin put it bluntly: profit only comes from two places. Either you win a bloody knife fight against direct competitors, or you earn a premium because consumers genuinely love and identify with your brand.

The first option is a race to the bottom. The second is the only way out.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Chang Bin walked me through a framework he calls the BDH model — and it’s the clearest articulation I’ve seen of what brands are actually missing.

Three layers. HAVE is your hard capability — product quality, supply chain, distribution. DO is the functional and experiential bridge — what task does your product complete, what feeling does it deliver? And then there’s BE. BE is the identity layer. It answers the question: who does your customer become when they choose you?

You’re not selling a product. You’re selling who your customer wants to become.

Most brands are stuck competing on HAVE. Some have graduated to DO. Almost none have seriously committed to BE. And that’s exactly where the opportunity is.

Look at what’s happening in luxury. BCG’s latest report shows 70% of affluent consumers abandoned purchases in the past year because they felt prices were unjustified. Where did that money go? Not to cheaper alternatives — to experiences, wellness, lifestyle brands that made them feel something. The Row over LV logos. Smart rings over status watches. Songmont bags over heritage monograms. Not because the performance is better. Because these brands helped consumers answer a question the old luxury brands stopped asking: who am I when I choose this?

And before you think this only applies to premium brands — think again. Pinduoduo was underestimated by everyone, including Chang Bin’s own team, who initially dismissed it as a fifth-ring business. What Pinduoduo actually created wasn’t just low prices. It was consumption freedom for people who’d been left out. Snack Busy and Mixue Bingcheng did the same thing: they added joy to basic consumption. That’s a BE-layer play disguised as a price play.

The brands that survive the next decade won’t be the ones with the best products. They’ll be the ones who answer one question: who does your customer become when they choose you?

Chang Bin learned this lesson through a personal journey that started in Alxa — a remote desert region in Inner Mongolia with fewer than 300,000 people across an area larger than Zhejiang province. He was a textbook ‘small-town test-taker’ who mail-ordered a motivational book called ‘Waiting for You at Peking University,’ read it alone on a hillside, and decided to aim for something that seemed absurd. Two people from his region had made it to Tsinghua or Peking University in the previous two decades. He became the third.

That experience shaped his entire investment philosophy: believe in your judgment, even when it looks nothing like the consensus. In 2020, while everyone chased flashy new consumer brands, he invested in a rice company — October Rice Field — in a category that had existed for a thousand years. It became the premium leader. He invested in Yuan’s Wood Language during a real estate downturn. It grew 10x.

When I asked him what he’d tell his younger self, he said: ‘You can be even more open.’ When I asked what his younger self would tell him now, he smiled: ‘At least the most real thing is still there.’

That’s the lesson for every brand founder reading this. The playbook that got you big won’t get you strong. The efficiency that won you scale won’t win you loyalty. The infrastructure that carried you here has already carried your competitors too.

The only question that matters now is the one Chang Bin asks every founder he meets: what are you actually selling? A function? An efficiency? Or a version of yourself your customer aspires to become?

If you can’t answer that in one sentence — not with a mission statement, but with the honest truth of why someone chooses you over a cheaper alternative — you don’t have a brand yet. You have a distribution channel with a logo on it.

The era of ‘products by category’ is ending. The era of ‘people by community’ has arrived. Pick a side. Commit to it. And stop pretending you can win by being everything to everyone.