The archive · Brand & Identity · Strategic decision · 2023
Beneunder coins 'lightweight outdoor' — parasols to ~300 stores in one year
A seasonal parasol brand names a new category, 'lightweight outdoor', opens it with a solar-term anthem film, and nearly triples its stores in a year.
Beneunder (蕉下)
What it had to solve
Beneunder built a decade on its UV-blocking 'black umbrella' and summer sun-protection gear, a profitable niche that peaked in one season and capped the brand's reach. In 2022 it decided to widen from sun protection into outdoor lifestyles and to announce the move as a full brand relaunch rather than a product launch.
How it works
Founded in 2013 on a UV-blocking 'black umbrella', Beneunder became a leading Chinese sun-protection brand, with revenue growing from 385M yuan in 2019 to 2.4B yuan in 2021. The problem was the label itself: sun protection is bought mainly in summer, so the brand, its products and its geography were all locked to a narrow window.
In 2023 Beneunder relaunched around a category it coined — 'lightweight outdoor', defined as low-intensity outdoor life such as walking, camping, cycling and city sport for ordinary people. The public opening was timed to Jingzhe, the solar term on March 6 when spring thunder wakes insects: a film called Jingzhe Decree, sung by Tan Weiwei with a dance inspired by a Song-dynasty walking-song painting, and a new 'Jingzhe' all-terrain shoe named for the day.
The campaign then moved from ritual to evidence: Beneunder and iResearch published a Lightweight Outdoor white paper counting about 500M light-outdoor participants today and up to 730M potential, followed by the films All the Sun and Simple Love with Jay Chou. Retail followed the narrative — 99 stores in mid-2022 became roughly 300 by the end of 2023, with same-store productivity up double digits.
The relaunch also changed how the market described the brand: the opening film brought 700M+ exposures and a 19,345% jump in Beneunder's search index on launch day, and the year's work collected 30+ industry awards, including grand prizes at the ROI Festival and Golden Eye. A once-seasonal parasol maker had become an all-season outdoor lifestyle brand.
Why it lands
- The brand named a category it could own instead of fighting rivals inside sun protection, so every product and ad advanced one story.
- The launch date was itself the idea: a solar term, a Song painting and an anthem explained the new direction without a single feature list.
- One sentence ran through white paper, films, shoes, stores and camps, so the repositioning read as a fact rather than a slogan.
- Turning a seasonality problem into a lifestyle claim gave the shift a retail argument, not just buzz.
What it did
The opening film drew 700M+ exposures, lifted Beneunder's search index 19,345% on launch day and put the Jingzhe shoe in the top 3 outdoor-shoe bestsellers. Stores grew from 99 in mid-2022 to about 300 by the end of 2023 with double-digit same-store growth, and the repositioning won 30+ industry awards, including grand prizes at the ROI Festival (金投赏) and Golden Eye (金瞳).
What you can take
When your category is a season and a niche, do not fight the calendar with more product — name the wider world you already live in, and make the launch moment a cultural ritual people want to share.
Since then
The 'lightweight outdoor' platform carried Beneunder through 2023 and beyond: it opened larger concept stores including a street-level flagship in Chengdu, and northern and autumn-winter sales grew as the product matrix expanded. The white paper's scale numbers became the sector's vocabulary, and rivals borrowed the light-outdoor framing. Commentators kept debating whether concept-led branding could carry such a fast retail build-out, but the shift stuck: Beneunder was no longer filed under umbrellas.
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