Positioning CASETiFY as the curator of an art marketplace to justify its premium in mainland China
China Brand Strategy
CASETiFY had been in mainland China for less than a year, and it was struggling. Competitors were pricing cases far below it, and CASETiFY had no good answer for why anyone should pay several times more for what looked, on the surface, like the same product.
Globally, CASETiFY had always leaned on IP and artist collaborations to drive that premium. But China is a different game. IP protection is weak, and Taobao is flooded with rip-offs of the exact collabs CASETiFY was trying to sell at a premium. The global playbook wasn't going to work here.
We also saw a bigger shift working in our favor. China's creative class was growing fast, and creativity itself had become aspirational for young people in a way it hadn't been before. Taste and personal expression were becoming a legitimate way to stand out and elevate your own identity, one that didn't depend on the traditional social or economic ladder. Young people were actively hunting for art and creative inspiration online, but there was no real destination built for them, just scattered content and the same repetitive, disconnected exhibitions.
So we looked at CASETiFY's actual product truth. There's no single hero product. What CASETiFY has instead is range, a huge variety of designs, artists, and collaborations wide enough that almost anyone can find a version of creative expression that speaks to them. That became the opening: not one product to defend, but an entire space to own. We positioned CASETiFY as the “Curator of an Art Marketplace,” a brand whose role isn't to sell you one case, but to help you discover your own taste.
We brought that positioning to life through a brand experience built around discovery, giving people a way to find new artists, creators, and IPs, or to rediscover art they already knew and loved, in a way no competitor selling the same collabs at a lower price could copy.
