Over the past year, the restaurant industry has been trapped in a competitive dilemma characterized by difficulties in menu innovation and brand homogenization. From store design to menu offerings, from marketing tactics to service processes, restaurants have increasingly imitated each other, making it challenging to establish distinctive brand advantages. A silent but fierce industry-wide reshuffle is underway.
Data shows that the wave of nearly three million restaurant closures in 2024 has not yet subsided, and the "closure trend" continues into 2025. In October 2025, Wei Wei, General Manager of Meituan's In-Store Dining Business Unit, shared data at the Meituan Catering Conference: For new single-location, full-service restaurants (brands with fewer than 10 stores), the closure rate within three months of opening rose from 27% to 34% over one year, with approximately 50% closing within six months. For chain brand outlets (brands with 10 or more stores), a quarter close within three months, and nearly 40% close within six months.
In 2025, Malaoji charted a unique path to break through this stagnation. From a collaboration with Beibingyang that reawakened collective memories of old Beijing, to a partnership with Zhu Bingren Copper integrating intangible cultural heritage craftsmanship, from an IP collaboration with the Xu Beihong Art Gallery incorporating traditional Chinese aesthetics, to a co-branded meal set with the Z-generation-focused IP, Capybara TATA.
Malaoji employed a strategy of "high-frequency and high-quality" IP partnerships, transforming from a brand that merely provides taste experiences into a lifestyle symbol carrying cultural depth and emotional value. This approach carved out a distinct growth path amidst the homogeneous competition in the dining sector.
Malaoji's "High-Frequency, High-Quality" IP Collaboration Strategy If one were to identify the "cutest" crossover collaboration in the restaurant industry in 2025, Malaoji's partnership with Capybara TATA was undoubtedly a phenomenon. Capybara TATA itself is a top-tier IP in the hearts of contemporary young professionals.
In fast-paced urban life, the combination of a bowl of hot, spicy, and flavorful Sichuan cuisine with an adorable, emotionally stable creature joined forces as two forms of "small happiness" that heal fatigue. This partnership precisely targeted the Z generation's need for emotional comfort, quickly igniting social media buzz. Offline, the collaborative meal sets sold over 30,000 units, generating over ten million RMB in revenue and stimulating additional consumer spending. Online, the collaborative sour spicy noodle product sold over 100,000 buckets in a single day during Malaoji's fifth-anniversary live stream event. This not only demonstrated the viability of long-term local IP operations and bridged the gap between IP and corporate online/offline business but also set a benchmark for Z-generation emotional consumption.
Beyond just chasing viral reach, Malaoji delved deeper into cultural heritage and lifestyle aesthetics, building a bridge of value between everyday life and humanistic culture. Before the Lunar New Year of the Year of the Horse, Malaoji partnered with the Xu Beihong Art Gallery to launch a limited edition New Year gift box, blending signature Sichuan flavors with artistic elegance into the festive atmosphere. Malaoji founder Wang Xiaofei and Xu Beihong Art Gallery director Xu Xiaoyang held a joint live stream on Laba Festival, with related content garnering over a million views online. The first batch of 10,000 gift boxes sold out within two weeks of launch, with orders continuously being replenished, vividly illustrating the conversion of cultural value into commercial momentum.
More notably, Malaoji leveraged local culture and intangible cultural heritage IPs to build a closed-loop growth model: "cultural empowerment — breaking through traditional scenarios — traffic conversion — revenue growth." This model opened a differentiated growth path in the homogenous restaurant competition.
The collaboration with Beibingyang not only reawakened old Beijing taste memories but also created a consumption scenario symbol of "spicy food + orange juice popsicles." The co-branded popsicles were launched simultaneously in all 16 Beijing stores, with 200,000 units sold in the second half of 2025 alone. A series of offline pop-up activities were also launched, with the activity at the Chaoyang Joy City store increasing single-day revenue by 15%, generating over 400,000 social media impressions, and achieving a 39% voucher redemption rate for pop-up menu items, creating a positive cycle of buzz, customer traffic, and revenue.
During the 2025 Mid-Autumn Festival, Malaoji also partnered with the century-old copper craftsmanship brand Zhu Bingren Copper. This collaboration connected intangible cultural heritage copper art with the craftsmanship of Sichuan cuisine, marking an upgrade from "necessity-driven" to "value-driven" partnerships. Over 20,000 Mid-Autumn gift sets were sold, boosting monthly repeat customer rates and revenue by 10% year-on-year in some stores, validating the long-term value of the "intangible cultural heritage + dining" model and opening a differentiated path in the competitive landscape.
The Second Half of Competition: Seeking Viral Hits and Embracing Long-Termism A growing consensus among new Chinese consumer brands is that in the latter stage of competition, the real barrier is not a single hit product, but a cultural symbol system capable of continuously attracting attention and embodying brand values.
Malaoji is building its unique brand moat through an integrated online and offline business strategy.
Online, centered on IP collaborations, Malaoji creates shareable, interactive content and continuously launches cultural and creative hit products. From the artistic spirit of Xu Beihong to the comforting philosophy of Capybara, from the time-honored brand Beibingyang to the intangible cultural heritage craftsmanship of Zhu Bingren Copper, the brand has constructed a "Malaoji IP Universe" by consistently producing high-quality IP content. This content not only generates momentum across the internet but also fosters deep emotional connections with users through e-commerce platforms and content communities, driving sustained growth in online retail.
Offline, Malaoji has reinvented its stores as carriers of cultural experience. IP collaborations extend beyond visual elements to deeply integrate into space design, service processes, and consumption scenarios. Whether it's posters, stickers, and environmental decor featuring Capybara elements, or the exclusive product experience created with Beibingyang, the physical space becomes an extension of the IP narrative. This transforms stores from mere dining venues into integrated platforms for cultural display, community interaction, and experiential consumption.
Between online and offline, Malaoji achieves two-way empowerment through a closed-loop model of "content driving traffic, scenarios fostering engagement, and retail completing the conversion." This not only successfully expands the perception of Sichuan cuisine from a singular "taste experience" to a multi-dimensional "cultural experience" but also elevates the brand beyond a place for food into a cultural node connecting tradition and modernity, art and life, locality and trends.
This broadening of perspective not only unlocks the brand's potential in both capital and consumer markets but also deeply restructures the relationship between the brand and its users. When consumers visit not just to "eat a meal" but to "experience a certain cultural atmosphere" or "express a certain lifestyle attitude," the brand achieves a genuine value breakthrough, thereby further raising the ceiling for its valuation and long-term growth.
In recent years, brand collaborations have become a common strategy in the consumer market. From Luckin Coffee partnering with Duolingo to launch "study-persuasion coffee," to Heytea's comforting breakout with Chiikawa, and Lao Fengxiang Jewelry's crossover with the mobile game Eggy Party, the heat of collaboration economy continues to rise. Research data indicates that the collaboration economy market size grew to 300 billion RMB in 2025.
In this new consumption era of "collaboration free-for-all," where many brand partnerships fail to make a lasting impact, why has Malaoji managed to consistently stand out?
Firstly, Malaoji's collaborations are not merely marketing tactics. Through a high-frequency collaboration rhythm, they serve as a business strategy that drives multiple facets of Malaoji's operations. From restaurant outlets to retail products, centered around the four core dimensions of "local relevance, craftsmanship, culture, and emotion," Malaoji's IP collaborations connect various life scenarios for customers—including offline dining, holiday occasions, and daily home life—thereby establishing strong brand relevance across these contexts.
Secondly, in IP selection, Malaoji adheres to a logic of mutual empowerment between craftsmanship and spiritual premium, rejecting partnerships purely for fleeting traffic. It prioritizes IPs related to intangible cultural heritage and traditional crafts that align with its philosophy of "adherence to traditional methods." Its collaboration with Zhu Bingren Copper, which echoes the artisan heart of traditional Sichuan cuisine with century-old copper artistry, not only elevates product and brand tonality but also drives brand value enhancement.
Through these cross-border practices, Malaoji has gradually established a clear brand upgrade logic: using IP as an emotional link to help Sichuan cuisine culture break through geographical and dining table boundaries, infiltrate daily life scenarios, and solidify into brand assets with cultural depth and emotional stickiness. This achieves a long-term value transformation from "attracting traffic" to "retaining hearts and minds."
In the harsh winter of the restaurant industry, stories of failure are abundant, but examples of enduring through cycles are always scarce. When the tide recedes, the survival code for brands that thrive against the trend is never reliant on temporary trends or traffic frenzies, but on a return to the most fundamental business principles: establishing a foundation on value, building an identity on the brand, and holding onto hearts and minds through long-termism. Malaoji's evolutionary path provides a vivid case study for this logic and charts a course for breaking through the impasse for an industry navigating uncertainty.
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