To Summer Yunnan campaign: Key takeaways
- To Summer explores Yunnan food traditions through a publication featuring a flavour map and home fermentation recipes
- The project builds on earlier visits to Jingmai Mountain, which have informed its fragrances, films and publishing
- Store collection and partner venues bring the campaign offline, giving customers more ways to encounter the brand
Chinese fragrance brand To Summer (观夏) just published a book that’s not part of their usual repertoire. Yunnan Fermentation Notes (云南发酵手记), explores the food, people and traditions behind the province’s fermented flavours. There are recipes, too, should readers fancy trying their hand at fermentation.
The publication follows six months of visits to places including Dehong (德宏) and Qujing (曲靖). It forms part of the brand’s Nosepaper series, with a Yunnan fermentation flavour map among the features helping readers find their way around the subject.
But what does fermented food have to do with any of this?
To Summer have also brought businesses in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou into the project, alongside offline experiences themed around a fermentation tea house. But what does fermented food have to do with any of this?
Back to the tea mountains
It might seem a roundabout way to sell fragrance, but Yunnan is familiar ground for To Summer. This isn’t the first time the province has found its way into their bottles. Nor is it the first time for food.
Take Triple Tea (三重茶), launched in 2021. The fragrance drew on visits to Jingmai and Yiwu tea mountains, and the memories of drinking tea there. Mint tea, green tea and rock tea are all present in the fragrance.
Then came Seeking tea in Jingmai (景迈寻茶), a 2023 film following Bulang tea practitioner Su Yumu (苏玉亩) through picking, making and drinking tea. It also introduced the brand’s Eastern fragrance ingredient sourcing initiative (东方香料归源计划), and builds in the wider story of the people who work with them.
Yunnan Fermentation Notes offers that something extra to discover
To Summer returned to Jingmai in 2024 to pair fragrance releases with another Nosepaper edition about the mountain and its communities. There’s a pattern: a place supplies material for products, for storytelling and – when it works at its best – something further to discover.
Something to take home
Yunnan Fermentation Notes offers that something extra to discover. It also gives customers a few more ways to engage with the campaign. They can read about fermentation and learn to make fermented food themselves. They can visit offline venues to pick up a book, venues where To Summer fragrance will be on sale. They can stop by the fermentation tea house.
The Dao view: To Summer are following their nose in with this Yunnan campaign
Back to the obvious question: what does fermented food have to do with any of this? There are no fermented food notes on recent To Summer fragrances. Tea fragrances help explain the Yunnan interest, but readers still need to understand what the wider fermentation research adds to their experience of the brand.
All this work should make their positioning easier to understand
All this work should make their positioning easier to understand. They’re an as an Eastern fragrance brand and that’s a term that covers a lot – not always clearly. Set places, the food, Yunnan work toward giving customers something more concrete to connect with.
Customers can follow an interest through fragrances to films and successive publications. With that outlook, the latest project fits. Will we see fermented food as a perfume note? Probably not, but it gives To Summer an interesting way to explain themselves to customers.
