Practice · both directions

What you may claim decides where you may sell.

In dermocosmetics, cosmetics and food supplements the regulatory question and the channel question are one question. The claim determines the filing route, the filing route determines the channel, and the channel determines which distributor will carry you — and at what margin. We work the three together, in both directions of the corridor.

Discuss your category Read the dermatologist study

90Dermatologists interviewed face-to-face and on WeChat for a European active-cosmetic brand, across ten cities

2Routes to market — general trade import and cross-border e-commerce — with different filings, margins and reversibility

0Candidates who paid to be on your shortlist. How we are paid is written into the Scope of Work before the work starts

What has changed

Three shifts that moved this category out of pure marketing.

Channel

Pharma distributors want your category

Volume-based procurement has compressed pharmaceutical margins hard enough that established Chinese distributors — including the tier-one groups — are actively building nutraceutical and cosmetic portfolios. For a European brand this is new: partners with hospital and pharmacy reach, compliance discipline and real balance sheets are now available to a category that used to be handled by trading companies.

Trust

Verifiable European production is worth money

A run of scandals involving domestic products dressed as foreign brands has made provenance a purchase criterion rather than a packaging detail. Documented European manufacturing, a real registered address and an auditable supply chain now convert — provided the claim is made in the form Chinese regulation allows.

Assortment

A hero product, carried by a portfolio

China rewards a single hero SKU with a clear functional story, but a distributor will not build a team around one reference. The commercial design question is which portfolio sits behind the hero, and whether you can supply it before the hero's own momentum decays.

The finding that reframes the category

In dermocosmetics, the doctor is a channel — and the doctor has to try it first.

Across ninety dermatologist interviews in Class III hospitals, the sequence that produces a recommendation was consistent and it did not start with advertising. Clinical collaboration earns the doctor's attention; a sample earns their own experience of the product; the patient trial follows; recommendation follows that. Brands that skipped to the end bought visibility and no recommendations. Local competitors that were nowhere five years ago now hold ground through professor-endorsed consensus papers and a visible hospital presence — not through media weight.

The full case study

Where entries go wrong

Choosing the channel before the claim, then discovering the claim will not survive the filing.
Treating cross-border e-commerce as a permanent model rather than as a test that has to be exited.
Appointing the first willing distributor, who is often the one with the least to lose.
Buying reach in a category where trust is built by dermatologists and pharmacists.
Registering the brand name in China too late, or in the wrong classes.

What we do

Claims and category strategy under Chinese cosmetic and health-food regulation
Ingredient screening against the prohibited, restricted and new-ingredient lists
Filing route decision: general trade registration or filing, versus cross-border
Primary research with dermatologists, pharmacists and buyers — run by our own team in Chinese
Distributor and agent identification, qualification and reference-checking
Pricing architecture across hospital, pharmacy, retail and platform
Europe for Chinese brands: EU cosmetic regulation, Responsible Person, CPNP notification, supplement classification

How the two routes compare

Recent work in the category

Dermocosmetics · primary research

How do Chinese dermatologists actually recommend?

Ninety interviews across ten cities for a European active-cosmetic brand: sampling behaviour, academic visibility, digital learning and the public-hospital entry route.

Read the case → Supplements · route to market

Cross-border, or the long way round?

The two import routes for a food-supplement portfolio, what each one costs in time and reversibility, and how the distributor shortlist changes depending on the answer.

The offer →

“Jumo supports us on the Chinese market. Thanks to them we have built a long-term relationship with our distributor.”

Sumire Hirot · Marketing & Sales Leader

What you can engage us for here

A sector practice is not a separate service.

It is the evidence that we have run these services before in consumer health — the regulatory particularities, the buyers, the failure patterns and the published work. The engagement itself is one of these.

Scoped engagement