The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2021–2022
Xiaohongshu (小红书) makes strangers acquaintances at a 33-room festival
China's Xiaohongshu (小红书) filled a 1,100 m² Shanghai air-raid shelter with 33 'xx我熟' interest rooms, inviting strangers with real sweet potatoes in steamers.
Xiaohongshu (小红书)
What it had to solve
Xiaohongshu is China's best-known lifestyle content community, but its users only knew each other through posts. By 2020 the company was pushing '烟火气 and 人情味' — lived-in warmth and human feeling — and a pure content community had no obvious way to make those bonds physical.
How it works
Xiaohongshu had built one of China's largest lifestyle content communities, but its users knew each other only as avatars and posts. In 2020 the platform began talking about '烟火气 and 人情味' — lived-in warmth and human feeling — and the open question was how a content community could make those bonds real instead of just scrollable.
The answer, from July 8 to July 12, 2021, was a 120-hour 'Community Acquaintance Festival' in a 1,100 m² air-raid shelter under a residential neighbourhood on Xianxia Road in Shanghai, at a cooperative called Xianxialai. Invitations were real sweet potatoes delivered in bamboo steamers — a pun, since 小红书 (little red book) sounds like 小红薯 (little sweet potato), and the theme '天慢慢热了，我们慢慢熟了' plays on 熟 meaning both ripe and acquainted. Bedsheets were hung as signs, and the shelter was split into 33 'xx我熟' rooms, one per interest category.
Each room was hosted by a Xiaohongshu creator — dancer Qin Ran, creator Rika0-0 and a hundred more — or by an actual neighbour: '咖啡我熟' was run by Maomao Coffee, a café operated by a family with Down syndrome, and '居家我熟' by an aunties' station of home helpers. Visitors cooked, camped, braided hair and held book circles together, while shy attendees could simply watch. The team behind it was the community content team, not brand marketing.
The festival turned an interest graph into a physical meeting place and became an annual event. The second edition ran August 4–8, 2022 in Shanghai with the slogan '一来二去就熟了', 35 rooms, more than 200 creators including Ouyang Nana and Liu Haoran, an online venue from July 29, and the same sweet-potato invitations. Chinese marketing press treated both editions as a model for taking content communities offline.
Why it lands
- The invitation was the idea: one sweet potato in a steamer said 小红书, 小红薯 and 熟 — ripe, cooked and acquainted — before a guest read a single line.
- The format mirrored the product: 33 rooms drawn from actual content categories meant any interest could become a gathering instead of a stage show.
- Creators and residents shared the floor, so the event belonged to the neighbourhood — a Down-syndrome family's café and home helpers were hosts, not props.
- The design made doing together the way to connect, and watching was also allowed, which lowered the barrier for people who find networking exhausting.
What it did
The festival made Xiaohongshu's content categories into places people could walk into, mixing creators, neighbours and visitors in shared activities such as camping cookouts and reading circles. It was organized by the community content team rather than marketing, was covered as a model for taking content communities offline, and became an annual event: the 2022 edition filled a 2,000 m² Shanghai space with 35 rooms and more than 200 creators.
What you can take
Give a digital community a physical form by treating its categories as rooms: shared activities, real hosts and one object that carries the joke let strangers get acquainted without a sales pitch.
Since then
The 2021 edition made the festival a recurring Xiaohongshu event IP. The second Community Acquaintance Festival ran August 4–8, 2022 in Shanghai's 2,000 m² 现所·创邑MIX after a last-minute venue change — organisers apologised on elevator walls — with 35 'xx我熟' rooms, more than 200 creators including Ouyang Nana and Liu Haoran, an online venue opening July 29 and limited digital artworks as prizes. Chinese marketing press treated both editions as a rare successful offline extension of a content community, and a first-person Adquan walkthrough alone drew over 89,000 views.
Sources
- Weather heats up, sweet potatoes get ripe: how Xiaohongshu's Community Acquaintance Festival works
- Xiaohongshu Community Acquaintance Festival: an experiment linking diverse sharing with community space
- Xiaohongshu's second Community Acquaintance Festival: strange, cute, and full of copywriting easter eggs
- Xiaohongshu's second Acquaintance Festival lets people get acquainted 'once or twice around'
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