for Derek Sulger and his fellow Lunar Capital partner Jerry Mao, who bought the 32-year-old Hong Kong-founded luxury fashion label Shanghai Tang in 2018. “The iconic, classic jacket sold out in five minutes,” recalls Sulger in an interview with Inside Retail at Shoptalk Luxe in Abu Dhabi earlier this year. “It became a viral sensation. That is what we are trying to do with the brand: we are trying to show how perfect and how elegant it can be. That video was when we knew we were getting it right.” Sulger freely confesses that he and Mao are “obsessed” with Shanghai Tang, founded by the late Sir David Tang in 1994. “We really consider ourselves founders. I know sometimes people get confused, because we are founders of the group – we are not David Tang who founded the brand – but we think like founders in that we want to grow it.” At the heart of the current custodians’ passion for the Shanghai Tang label is a clear conviction: it is, unapologetically, a Chinese-born brand with a truly global identity. “I think it’s very international, but I always tell people it is very hard to pigeonhole, because David was so international. He was definitively Chinese, but he was very Anglo-Chinese. That is what we are. I always like to say that we are based in London and China, only because so much of the core of the brand is, in a way, British eccentricity. But we are deeply rooted in China.” As for the aesthetic, he prefers the term Asian to Chinese in the same way as you refer to luxury European fashion, rather than French luxury or Italian luxury. “We are a little more Asian. Of course, within Asia, we are heavily dominated by the Chinese aesthetics.” An international journey Shanghai Tang was born as a high-end tailoring house, before evolving into the high-profile independent Asian luxury brand it is today. Tang set out to create a global brand that represented China. “As Coca-Cola is American, as Mercedes is German, I think there should be something that is quintessentially Chinese,” Tang once said in an interview published in The Irish Times.  European luxury giant Richemont took a controlling stake in the business in 1998 – two years after Tang had forayed into ready-to-wear – and progressively built its stake in the business over a decade, assuming full ownership in 2008. Tang would die of cancer in October 2017, but his legacy lives on. The name Shanghai Tang (上海灘) refers poetically to the Shanghai Bund and the city’s 1920s-1930s golden-era glamour, drawing on David Tang’s family roots in Shanghai and his desire to give a Made-in-China luxury label international cachet. Tang also founded the famed China Club restaurant in 1991. While Tang had struggled to build a global following as strong as the brand’s local Chinese popularity, the brand’s original 6300sq ft flagship store, in the historic Pedder Building in Hong Kong’s Central district, became one of the most highly praised examples of retail design globally, drawing architects, retailers and designers from all over the world. It opened with a flourish, touted by celebrity ambassador actress Gong Li. That store closed in 2011, Richemont citing unaffordable rent. The space was converted into a dark, claustrophobic Abercrombie & Fitch flagship, before that US brand, too, quit the site in 2017. During the nine years since, the space has largely remained empty. Soon that may change, with Sulger and his team evaluating a reopening – a welcome step back to the future. Under Richemont’s stewardship, Shanghai Tang opened boutiques as far from Hong Kong as London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Singapore, its offer positioned as a “global Chinese” luxury label. Its range extended beyond apparel into homewares, fine bone China, fragrances, accessories and even timepieces. However, try as it might, Richemont could never quite unlock the brand’s potential, perhaps too tethered to the haute European aesthetic of its more successful brands, such as Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Vacheron Constantin. Richemont sold the brand in 2017 to a consortium of investors led by Italian textile and fashion scion Alessandro Bastagli, which planned to reposition it with more Western-facing design and attract a broader international audience. That strategy proved to be flawed, the new owners completely misunderstanding Tang’s ethos and core design DNA. As Inside Retail Asia reported in December 2017, Bastagli planned to open stores in Paris and Milan, add more Mainland China locations, and enhance the e-commerce offer. But just a year later, Sulger and Mao took it over, creating Shanghai Tang Group and charting a course to refocus the business on greater-Asia luxury markets, returning to the brand’s Asian design ideology and doubling down on its lifestyle appeal. A brand rediscovered, not reinvented “My experience was as an entrepreneur in China,” Sulger recalled. “Jerry and I had started many other businesses, and just before Covid, we decided that of every business we’ve ever been involved in, the luxury end worked better, particularly in Asia, meaning ‘the more expensive, the better’. “People underestimated the proclivity to spend in Asia and in China, and also they underestimated the intelligence of the Chinese consumer and the Asian consumer. We found that if you did something that appealed to their intelligence, you could actually charge aspirational and higher prices,” he recalls. “All that led to us deciding that we wanted to make a bigger push as entrepreneurs into luxury…and that’s when we acquired Shanghai Tang from its former owners.” The timing of the acquisition, just before the onset of Covid-19, proved an unlikely benefit. “Covid hitting was a huge advantage, because it allowed us to make some very difficult decisions…Covid allowed you to do things in a rapid, draconian way, rather than in a gradual way.” What followed was less a reinvention than a process of excavation – stripping back years of misalignment to reveal the brand’s original intent. The genius – and timing – of David Tang “Many geniuses are crazy. There’s no doubt David Tang was crazy, but like all crazy people, some of what he did was genius,” reflects Sulger, clearly intending it as a compliment. Sulger returns repeatedly to Tang – as a blueprint, rather than as a nostalgic figure. “When you look at what he did in that era, it was genius.” But he believes Tang’s vision was fundamentally misunderstood – not just by later owners, but by the market itself. “Like most geniuses – almost ahead of his time – he was trying to appeal to the internationalisation of Asia and China, when China and Asia really weren’t that international. So he was early.” This idea – that Shanghai Tang was never about exporting ‘Chineseness’, but about expressing an already international identity – is central to the brand’s repositioning today. “What David Tang was trying to do was not say this is Chinese, necessarily,” Sulger explained. “He was trying to show that Chinese is and was and can be international. I think that’s what some people get wrong.” Instead of framing the brand as culturally specific, Tang treated Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing as global cultural crossroads; places where East and West were already intertwined. “It was the internationalisation of that aesthetic that appealed to him,” Sulger said. “What excites us the most about the brand is…when you meet people, they’re always like, my god, do you remember Pedder Street?” While long gone, that flagship has taken on near-mythical status. For Sulger, it is less a store than a standard. “That first five or six years of Shanghai Tang’s history with the famous flagship helped build the brand’s DNA…everything about the brand that we aspired to make perfect.” Re-creating it, however, is not straightforward, Sulger continues. There are ongoing discussions today with the building’s owner to explore possibilities. “The challenge we have is that it is very difficult now to renovate ageing, old buildings and reuse and adapt. We are still trying to do it…but it’s very challenging.” Instead, the strategy has been to reinterpret its essence across new locations, all about recapturing the essence rather than just a façade. “A recently opened store at Hong Kong International Airport features flooring and molding…‘tastefully modern, cool, well-designed’ features that echo Pedder Street,” Sulger said. “A lot of people said to me, ‘Well, I saw a smattering of some Pedder Street.’ I was like, thank God.” The discipline of restraint If the first chapter of Shanghai Tang was defined by ambition, the current one is defined by restraint. “We tend to think of ourselves as a little more like Hermès or Chanel: We do not need to have a tonne of stores, we just need a few really good stores. I don’t think we need to have more than 30 to 40 over the next five years.” This runs counter to the ‘scale first, refinement later’ growth logic that has dominated luxury for decades – . “Anyone can open another store, but there is a lot of risk associated with that.” Instead, Sulger is focused on depth: “The key to success is having that store whose sales per square metre keeps crawling higher.” The results, at least in Hong Kong, suggest the approach is working. Hong Kong store sales are higher than they have ever been, measuring in sales per square metre at about five times what they were. Designing for intelligence, not spectacle Shanghai Tang’s product evolution reflects the same philosophy: less spectacle, more subtlety. Twenty years ago, the brand was known for vibrant, bold colours: Lime greens, oranges, yellows, scarlet reds or purples. Those codes remain, but are now deployed with restraint. “We do not make a jacket lime green, but you might have lime green trim inside. I think it is nice because I’m wearing it, but I’m not walking around in bright gold.” The goal is to avoid costume – to create clothing that is recognisably Shanghai Tang, but entirely wearable, he adds. “No one would ever accuse a guy of looking like he was dressed to go to a costume party.” This extends into a tightly defined set of product “verticals”. “There’s sort of 12 iconic, like, vertical products we can go deep in…what I would call the bread-and-butter iconic products.” At the centre is the Tang jacket – both a design and a cultural artefact. “You can’t copyright ‘Tang jacket’ in China, but the English usage was first by David Tang. It was tongue in cheek – a play both on the fact that [the word] sounds like Tang jacket and that it was Tang, David Tang.” These products anchor the brand, a benchmark in a fashion sector often driven by constant novelty. From fashion to experience Where Shanghai Tang diverges most clearly from its peers is in its embrace of lifestyle – not as an extension, but as a core identity. “The other beauty that we love about Shanghai Tang is that it ultimately also fits so well into lifestyle and hospitality,” Sulger said. The roots of this lie in Tang himself, whose China Club blurred the boundaries between dining, design and culture. Today, Sulger is expanding that vision. In Abu Dhabi, the brand is developing a flagship that combines retail and restaurant – a fully immersive environment. “One of the things that the landlords we work with are excited about is they really wanted to see the staff all elegantly dressed in Shanghai Tang,” Sulger said. It felt like they were watching ‘In the Mood for Love’.” Such theatricality is deliberate. “When a waitress comes out in a cheongsam…it will add to the aesthetic, and to the theatricality and the cinematism of what we’re trying to create.” The aim is not just to sell products, but to stage an experience, he furthers. “It is more about making it feel like they’re immersing themselves for more than just popping in and out of the shop.” Shanghai Tang’s expansion into homewares, fragrance and hospitality is rooted in memory. “The silver filigree teacups, chopsticks, and bowls – the kind of things people remember from dining at the China Club.” Even scent plays a role. “The ginger flower smell… Everyone sort of thinks back to Pedder Street. Our smell is really iconic.” This sensory continuity allows the brand to extend naturally into new categories – from restaurants to hotels, the first of which is being developed this year in an as-yet undisclosed location. Hotels, he says, “understand our vision for the aesthetic” and make a logical brand extension. Asia, underestimated Running through Sulger’s thinking is a broader critique of the luxury industry itself: Asians, he says, remain slightly underrepresented in managerial decision-making in the luxury sector. “There is this constant underestimation of how much the Asian market generally matters.” He points to post-Covid assumptions about China’s slowdown as evidence of a persistent blind spot. “Well, that is not true. The lesson should be that even in tough environments, customers like the sophistication, the intellectual challenge, the puzzle around appreciating the aesthetics.” Despite the momentum, Sulger remains cautious. “We try to grow up perfectly, but perfection is always impossible. Growing it 80 per cent perfectly is more important to us than growing it quickly.” That mindset – part discipline, part obsession – defines the current chapter of Shanghai Tang. Together with Mao, Sulger approaches the brand less as an acquisition and more as a creation. “We really consider ourselves founders…We think like founders in that we want to grow it. “Maybe a month before Christmas last year, I finally looked around and I said, ‘Holy shit, we did it.’ Now we have to show people we did it.” Returning forward Shanghai Tang’s story is often framed as a comeback. But that implies a return to something fixed – a past moment frozen in time, perhaps. What Sulger and his team are building is more complex. It is a return not to what Shanghai Tang was, but to what it was trying to be: an international expression of Asian identity, a brand rooted in culture, but not constrained by it, a luxury house that values depth over scale, and experience over display. “The great thing about Shanghai Tang is it is really unique.” Or, as Tang himself might have put it: quintessentially Chinese. This story first appeared in the May 2026 issue of Inside Retail Asia magazine.