Chow Tai Fook's Hua Collection: Disruptive Branding in a Commoditized Market

China's gold jewelry market was for a long time very homogenous: brands all offered very similar products and provided discounts to gain a competitive advantage. For many years, even Chow Tai Fook (hereinafter 'CTF'), an industry leader that boasted superior product design and craftsmanship, suffered from low profit margins and sluggish sales growth. Furthermore, CTF's competitors constantly tried to mimic its pricing and sales strategies to seize market share. It was against this backdrop of fierce competition that CTF launched the HUá Collection in September 2017. The new collection targeted the high-end market and was a resounding success, as well as an industry game-changer. However, as the HUá Collection gained market share and production scaled up, this gave rise to new challenges: How could CTF disrupt the homogeneous gold jewelry market through brand innovation? How could it maintain HUá's brand value while scaling up production? Moreover, how could it respond to an endless stream of imitation products and plagiarism?