Laopu Gold priced jewelry by the piece, not the gram, and outgrew every gold giant

Chinese gold jewellery has run for decades on per-gram pricing: shops quote the daily gold price plus a small labour charge, margins stay thin, and brands wage visible discount wars. Laopu Gold (老铺黄金), listed in Hong Kong in 2024, runs only a few dozen self-operated stores, each in a top luxury mall, and quotes a single price per piece. A Sing Tao reporter visiting its Shenzhen store in April 2025 found queues, staff in Chinese dress, a five-item purchase limit, and pieces above 1,400 yuan per gram — over 50 percent above Hong Kong's 999.9 gold price.

The craft story is load-bearing. Laopu positions itself as 'ancient-method gold' (古法黄金), using hand techniques such as filigree inlay (花丝镶嵌), which was added to China's national intangible cultural heritage list in 2008. It deliberately uses 999 gold rather than 999.9 because the lower purity gives filigree wire the hardness and texture the technique needs. Stores are fitted as Chinese studies, packaging comes in Hermès-style orange bags, and observers noted the company spent nothing on advertising while celebrities from Yang Mi to Angelababy were photographed carrying its bags.

The discipline shows in the details and the numbers. Chairman Xu Gaoming said the chain sets no sales quotas for store staff, rare in the industry, and denied hiring paid queuers. By August 2026 Laopu ran 45 stores in 16 cities, and first-half results showed revenue of 19.81 billion yuan, up 60.3 percent, net profit of 4.27 billion yuan, up 88.2 percent, and gross margin up 3.2 points to 41.3 percent, helped by low-cost inventory and a February 2026 price rise. About 70 percent of customers are ethnic Chinese; a quarter come from Southeast Asia via Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore stores.

Sell craft, not grams: fixed price turns gold into luxury

Per-gram pricing turns jewellery into a commodity where the only lever is a labour-fee discount; fixed pricing removes the comparison table entirely.

Documented heritage craft gives the fixed price a story a customer can repeat, which is what converts a markup into a brand.

Deliberately choosing 999 over 999.9 purity for hardness puts engineering intent behind the craft claim rather than behind a purity-number arms race.

Owning every store in top malls keeps presentation and price discipline intact, the way luxury houses protect an image that franchises would dilute.

Staff without sales quotas protect the unhurried service that premium pricing depends on; the queues do the advertising.

When an industry sells by a unit everyone can price-check, change the unit. Fixed pricing works only if something visible justifies the premium; heritage craft and scarcity did the advertising.

By April 2025 the company had 36 stores yet a market value of about HK$115.3 billion, overtaking Chow Tai Fook, whose 7,000-plus stores defined the industry. Growth continued into 2026 despite a 30 percent fall in China's gold-jewellery consumption and a sharp gold-price correction; the chain still averaged about 200 million yuan of profit a month that quarter. Online sales grew 171.9 percent in the first half of 2026 to 4.4 billion yuan, and a 2027 push into the US, Canada, France and Britain is planned.