Pinduoduo Brand Guidelines: Shanghai’s 2015 Team-Up Shopping App, a 2018 Nasdaq Listing & PDD

A shopping app built on teaming up.

Pinduoduo, written 拼多多 in Chinese, is an online shopping platform that began in Shanghai in 2015. Chinese Wikipedia says the app went live in September 2015, run by a Shanghai company called Shanghai Xunmeng Information Technology, and names its founder as Huang Zheng, known in English as Colin Huang. Caixin Global, reporting in July 2018, described Huang as an ex-Google engineer and Pinduoduo as a group-buying site; English Wikipedia describes him as a businessman and software engineer, and says the business focused at first on farm produce and the agriculture trade.

The name carries the idea. Chinese Wikipedia says the platform works as its name suggests: shoppers team up with other people to place an order with a seller or a maker, and in return get a lower price. The same article describes the model as one that mixes entertainment and sharing into shopping, with a user starting an invitation and the discount arriving once enough others join the order. The Chinese technology site TMTPost noted in May 2023 that the group’s later international platform took its name from the phrase “Team Up, Price Down,” which it described as close in meaning to Pinduoduo in Chinese.

The idea arrived at a crowded moment. English Wikipedia says Pinduoduo grew at a time when Alibaba and JD.com had already consolidated much of China’s online retail trade, and when many analysts believed there was little room left for a new entrant. Pinduoduo’s answer was to make shopping social: rather than spending on traditional advertising alone, it asked buyers to bring in their friends.

Group buying, WeChat and groceries.

The mechanism is simple to describe. Caixin Global wrote in July 2018 that Pinduoduo is noted for its “group purchase” system, which encourages buyers of groceries, electronic devices and other goods to invite their friends to join in shopping to get discounts. Shoppers share the products they want on social apps such as Tencent’s WeChat and invite friends to join the order for a larger discount, and the company offered cash-back incentives and free products to encourage that sharing, the magazine reported. Tencent was among the company’s backers, according to the same report.

On the day of the company’s New York listing, Huang argued that, while Chinese shoppers were moving towards more expensive products, the demand for cheap goods was still very large, Caixin Global reported.

The platform has since widened. English Wikipedia says Pinduoduo launched Duoduo Maicai, a service for pre-ordering groceries and collecting them at set pick-up points, in 2020, and a business-to-business platform, Duoduo Wholesale, that same year to connect merchants with manufacturers and wholesalers; Chinese Wikipedia dates the grocery service to March 2020, alongside a group-buying tool for neighbourhood organisers called Kuaituantuan. The company’s farm roots remain part of its story: English Wikipedia says that in 2020 Pinduoduo ran a programme to help rural farmers sell their produce online rather than through traditional markets.

Design and documentation.

Chinese retailers and e-commerce platforms present themselves across a wide range of surfaces at once. A single group may run hypermarkets, appliance showrooms, shopping malls, small franchised shops and a shopping app, and each has to carry the same name at very different sizes, from a rooftop sign on a city-centre store to a small icon on a phone. Many of these companies grew from one shop or one website into groups with several store formats, so their names often began with one product category and later had to stretch to cover many.

Naming is often plain and descriptive. Store and company names commonly pair a short brand word with a description of what is sold, such as electrical appliances, and later drop that description as the business widens. Platform names and company names can swap places: a group may rename itself after its own website or app, or give an app a new name and later return to the original one. Chinese characters and an English or pinyin form usually appear side by side, and the two do not always translate each other.

Shopping festivals shape much of the visual calendar. Dates such as 11 November, known as Double Eleven, bring campaign artwork across store windows, app home screens and delivery packaging, usually set around the date itself and the company’s own name. For a designer, the useful material is how the companies publish these campaigns and how the core name holds steady while the seasonal graphics change around it.

Corporate pages fill in the rest. Listed retailers publish their founders, owners and exchange listings in annual results and announcements, and these records also show renamings, store closures and changes of control as dated facts. Read together with independent press, they give a fuller picture of how each name has been used over time.

From a Shanghai app to a listed group.

Pinduoduo moved quickly into public markets. Its American depositary receipts began trading on the Nasdaq on 26 July 2018 under the ticker “PDD,” with a ceremony held in Shanghai the same day, Caixin Global reported; Chinese Wikipedia gives the same date.

Leadership changed three years later. Chinese Wikipedia says that on 17 March 2021, in his annual letter to shareholders, Huang announced that, with the board’s approval, he would hand the chairman’s role to the chief executive, Chen Lei, and turn to research in food science and the life sciences.

The group then grew beyond China. In September 2022 it launched an international shopping platform, Temu, for markets outside mainland China, Chinese Wikipedia says. In 2023 the listed company was renamed PDD Holdings, becoming the parent of both Pinduoduo and Temu, TMTPost reported in May 2023. TechCrunch reported on 3 May 2023 that the group’s annual report, published in late April, listed a Dublin entity as the “principal executive offices” of PDD Holdings, and that the new structure appeared designed to separate the branding and some operations of the two platforms; it added that Pinduoduo itself was still run from Shanghai. The company told TMTPost that the Dublin address was used mainly for regulatory correspondence as a US-listed company, called it “an arrangement purely out of convenience,” and described reports that its headquarters had left China as inaccurate. English Wikipedia now describes PDD Holdings as domiciled in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in Ireland, with Pinduoduo as its main business.

For a design guide, Pinduoduo shows how a brand can be built around a single social action, the invitation to team up, more than around any one product. Compare Alibaba, the Hangzhou group whose marketplaces Pinduoduo grew up alongside, and Vipshop, another Chinese online retailer built on discounts. For this guide we use a lantern red, a persimmon and rice paper with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pinduoduo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.