Auntea Jenny Brand Guidelines: A 2013 Shanghai Tea Shop, an Orange Auntie & a 2025 Listing

One Shanghai shop in the summer of 2013.

Auntea Jenny is the English name of Hu Shang A Yi (沪上阿姨, Hù shàng āyí), a milk-tea chain from Shanghai. English Wikipedia translates the Chinese name as “Auntie Shanghai” and gives the company’s full name as Auntea Jenny Shanghai Industrial Co., Ltd.; the Hong Kong newspaper The Standard wrote it in January 2025 as Auntea Jenny (Shanghai) Industrial. The brand was founded in 2013 by Shan Weijun and Zhou Rongrong, according to English Wikipedia, and its first shop opened on 18 July 2013 at People’s Square, in the centre of Shanghai. VnExpress International, reporting in May 2025, also dates the first Shanghai store to 2013 and names Shan as the company’s chairman.

The chain grew quickly, and largely outside China’s biggest cities. English Wikipedia says it passed 1,000 stores nationwide in 2018 and 2,000 by 2020, and had more than 6,000 by 2023. TechNode, writing on 6 May 2025 from the company’s listing documents, put the network at 5,307 stores in 2022 and 9,176 in 2024. VnExpress International gave a similar picture: more than 9,100 outlets in more than 300 cities at the end of 2024, nearly all of them run by franchisees, with around half in the smaller and faster-growing places known in China as lower-tier cities, and most of them on the street rather than in shopping malls or railway stations.

The company’s own history fills in the early steps. It says franchising began in 2014 in parts of Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, that it then pushed north into Tianjin and Shandong, and that its first company-run store in southern China opened in Shenzhen in 2018. It also says it built its own food factory in Zhejiang province in 2021.

English Wikipedia gives a count of 9,367 locations as of 2025. The company’s own text on a shopping-centre directory page, read in November 2026, says it now has more than 10,000 stores across China and overseas; that figure is the company’s claim, and it is not dated on the page.

Grain milk tea, fruit tea and a drawn auntie.

The menu is built around tea mixed with grains and fruit. VnExpress International described the range in May 2025 as tea with glutinous rice, fruit teas, yogurt shakes and snack boxes. The company says its signature drink from the start was its “Five-Grain Milk Tea,” and that it went on to specialise in fresh fruit tea; those descriptions come from its own brand text. Its Malaysian website, read in November 2026, sorts the menu into groups that include fruit tea, fresh milk tea, coffee and premium matcha.

The brand’s face is a drawn woman — the “auntie” of the Chinese name. English Wikipedia traces two redesigns. In 2019 the logo became a woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a cheongsam and holding a cup of milk tea. In 2024 it was updated again, to the current version: a smiling woman with a bob haircut, drawn in orange.

Packaging illustrations have also drawn attention. In February 2023, English Wikipedia says, an illustration of a woman in a cheongsam printed on the brand’s tea cups set off a debate on Chinese social media; the market regulator for Shanghai’s Jinshan district reviewed the image and found that it complied with China’s advertising law.

In English the company describes itself as a “contemporary tea brand” that began in Shanghai, and on that page it writes its name in capitals, AUNTEA JENNY. The English name spells the word “auntie” with “tea” inside it; the Chinese name, as English Wikipedia translates it, refers to Shanghai itself.

Shopfronts, cups and franchise networks.

China’s tea-drink, coffee, burger and restaurant chains present themselves first at street level. A shopfront, a cup and a paper bag are often the first things a customer sees of the brand, and many chains add a mascot, a theme song or a recurring character that appears on signs, packaging and social media at the same time. Some keep their shops small and built for takeaway; others put the same care into seating, lighting and a bakery counter as into the drinks.

Menus are usually organised by named drinks and dishes rather than by codes. Fruit teas, cheese-topped teas, lemon drinks, soft-serve ice cream, fried chicken and hotpot appear under house names, and chains that move abroad often add local flavours while keeping the core list the same. The names, the cups and the colours of the shop carry the brand from one city to the next.

The size of a network is something these companies publish themselves, in annual reports, listing documents and on their own sites, and the press repeats those counts with a date attached. Some chains run every shop directly; others rely mainly on franchisees, and several have moved from one model to the other. Store networks now reach Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe and North America as well as the home market.

Ownership is usually set out plainly on corporate pages: who founded the business and where, which group owns it now, and whether its shares trade in Hong Kong, on a mainland exchange or in New York. This guide follows those published facts, attributes counts to dated sources, and treats each chain’s visual identity as a design subject rather than a claim about its food or drinks.

From Shanghai to Hong Kong’s stock exchange.

The company went to the Hong Kong market in 2025. On 10 January 2025 the China Securities Regulatory Commission approved its plan for an offshore listing, The Standard reported, allowing it to issue up to about 13.09 million overseas-listed shares in Hong Kong. TechNode reported on 6 May 2025 that the offering had been heavily oversubscribed. The shares began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 8 May 2025, according to VnExpress International and English Wikipedia, and rose sharply on their first morning, VnExpress International reported. The company gives its stock code as 02589.

The listing came in a busy period for Chinese tea-drink chains. VnExpress International set it beside Chagee, which had listed on Nasdaq the month before, and Mixue, which had listed in Hong Kong earlier in 2025.

Outside China, the brand has moved step by step. English Wikipedia says its first overseas shop opened in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in February 2024; by May 2025 it ran 30 stores in Malaysia, VnExpress International reported. English Wikipedia adds that its first American location opened in Queens, New York, in May 2025. A directory page at Westfield London, read in November 2026, lists an Auntea Jenny tea shop in the shopping centre.

The company remains run by its founders: VnExpress International named Shan Weijun as chairman at the listing in May 2025.

For a design guide, Auntea Jenny shows how a drawn character can carry a franchise brand across thousands of small street shops, and how that character can be redrawn — from a bun and cheongsam to an orange bob — without losing its place at the centre of the cup. Compare HeyTea, another Chinese tea chain, and Chagee, which listed in the same year. For this guide we use an orange, a fired clay and a grain cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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