Vipshop Brand Guidelines: A 2008 Guangzhou Flash-Sale Site, VIP.com & Shan Shan Outlets

A Guangzhou discount site that began in 2008.

Vipshop is the English name of 唯品会 (Wei Pin Hui), an online discount retailer based in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province. Chinese Wikipedia says it sells mainly clothing and cosmetics, alongside small appliances, toys and daily goods, and lists branch offices or logistics warehouses in cities including Shanghai, Tianjin, Chengdu, Zhaoqing and Wuhan. Caixin Global dates its founding to August 2008, and English Wikipedia says the website Vipshop.com went online on 8 December 2008. Its co-founder, chairman and chief executive is Eric Shen (Shen Ya), as Caixin reported in 2017 and 2019. The Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, where he studied, says in an alumni profile that he started the business with a fellow student, Hong Xiaobo.

The same profile says the site first tried to sell luxury goods and drew very few orders in its first month, after which it turned to mid- to high-end fashion brands sold in limited-time sales, working with labels such as Adidas, Nike and Casio. It also says the company took venture funding from DCM and Sequoia Capital in 2010 and 2011. That flash-sale model is still how the press describes Vipshop. Caixin wrote in July 2019 that it rose to prominence by persuading clothing retailers to use it to clear their inventory, which let it sell branded products relatively cheaply, and in November 2019 that it was known for selling brand-name clothes, cosmetics, baby formula and home appliances at discount prices.

The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 23 March 2012, under the ticker VIPS, according to English and Chinese Wikipedia. In November 2013 it moved from the Vipshop.com domain to VIP.com, English Wikipedia says, and in September 2014 it launched a service called VIP International. The Chinese name stayed in use alongside the new address: in November 2026 the VIP.com home page was titled with both 唯品会 and vip.com.

Logistics, shareholders and two rulings.

Vipshop built its own delivery arm as it grew. Caixin reported in November 2019 that the company had set up the wholly owned Pinjun Express unit in 2013; English Wikipedia says it began running its own logistics and distribution system in 2015. In November 2019 Vipshop said it would hand last-mile delivery to the courier SF Holding, and a company representative told Caixin that Pinjun would keep warehouse management and air freight. An analyst at the China E-Commerce Association told Caixin the change would reduce costs. English Wikipedia also records a consumer-credit product, 唯品花 (Wei Pin Hua), launched in 2016, and a 2017 announcement that the financing service would be spun off.

In December 2017 Tencent and JD.com announced that they would buy stakes in Vipshop, taking about 7% and 5.5% of its issued stock, with the right to appoint a director and an observer to its board, Caixin reported. The tie-up gave Vipshop a place on the interface of Tencent’s WeChat app and on the main page of JD.com’s mobile app. By December 2019, after open-market purchases, Tencent held 9.6%, which Caixin described as the second-largest holding after Eric Shen’s.

Vipshop has also had two rulings from China’s market regulator. On 30 December 2020 the State Administration for Market Regulation fined the operators of JD.com, Tmall and Vipshop for illicit pricing activities, Caixin reported. In January 2021 the regulator opened an investigation into Vipshop over suspected unfair competition, Chinese Wikipedia says, citing Xinhua. On 8 February 2021 it fined the company, saying Vipshop had used information gathered from merchants’ websites, search engines and other online sources to steer shoppers’ behaviour to its own benefit, according to Caixin.

Platforms, stores and festivals.

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 flash sales to outlet malls.

In July 2019 Vipshop agreed to buy the physical outlet chain Shan Shan Outlets from Shan Shan Investment Holdings, a Zhejiang conglomerate, paying in cash instalments; the chain then ran five sites, Caixin reported, and Eric Shen called the deal a step in exploring online and offline integration. The seller’s businesses spanned clothing and new energy technology as well as retail, and Caixin set the purchase alongside other internet companies’ moves into physical shops, such as Alibaba’s stakes in supermarket chains. Writing in January 2026, the retail trade site Winshang said the July 2019 purchase covered all of Shanshan Commercial and that the business held 23 large outlet projects. The same report said Vipshop had taken a 36.1% stake in the warehouse-style discount chain BIGOFFS in a funding round completed on 26 December 2025.

The headquarters is a two-tower building in Guangzhou’s Pazhou internet district, which Chinese Wikipedia says came into use in July 2020, replacing an earlier base in Liwan district. The same encyclopedia notes a naming habit: when Vipshop places its products in costume dramas, it appears under the stand-in name 唯品阁 (Wei Pin Ge). English Wikipedia describes a “12.8” anniversary sale period in 2016, and dates the launch of the site to 8 December 2008; in November 2026 the VIP.com home page was dressed for an 11.11 sale.

For a design guide, Vipshop shows how a discount retailer can carry one short name across a website, an app and a chain of outlet malls. Compare Pinduoduo, another Chinese platform built on low prices, and Alibaba, whose Tmall marketplace was named in the same 2020 pricing ruling. For this guide we use a deep rose, plum and blush with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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