LOEWE’s (罗意威) Lunar New Year campaign hits a little different in a noisy time for marketing: brands recruiting celebs as their new faces, short films rolled out one after another, products adapted, imagery turned zodiac-based. In luxury, this often creates tension: how do you stay visible without looking desperate for attention? And how do you reference culture without flattening it to decoration?
At the same time, consumer sentiment has shifted. Chinese shoppers are more selective and more sensitive to authenticity. Big gestures are easy to brush off. But that also means meaningful ones are hard to forget. It’s in this environment that LOEWE launched a smart campaign alongside its Lunar New Year drop.
LOEWE’s Lunar New Year aims
LOEWE’s was not chasing seasonal uplift. Instead, the brand focused on strengthening long-term engagement with its Chinese base. They did this by reinforcing what the brand stands for: craft, restraint, and cultural depth.
This is an important distinction. Many Lunar New Year campaigns aim to borrow the festival’s warmth and convert it into short-term attention. LOEWE instead used the moment to clarify who it is – and just as importantly, who it is not.
Craft as a shared language
Craft is central to LOEWE’s identity, but craft only travels well when it is translated properly. In China, that means moving beyond surface symbolism and engaging with local traditions on their own terms.
The campaign drew on two such traditions: Chinese classical animation and Qinhuai lantern-making. Both are rooted in patience, repetition, and accumulated knowledge. They value process as much as outcome. By working with these forms, LOEWE framed craft not as a European luxury value, but as a principle native across both cultures.
Building depth through restraint
The campaign unfolded across several spaces. In Nanjing, LOEWE staged a Lanterns of the New Year experience at Yuyuan Garden. Animated imagery inspired by The Little Horse Crosses the River was translated into six lantern installations, with water-screen projections appearing at dusk. The environment was calm, intentionally. There was little product presence and no pressure to consume. The setting encourages attention rather than extraction.
In Shanghai, a limited installation at the Jing’an Kerry Centre extended the campaign into a commercial district without changing its tone. The same visual language – animals, lanterns, landscapes – carried across but scaled for foot traffic in an urban shopping environment.
Crucially, the campaign anchored itself in real expertise. Lu Min, a recognised inheritor of Qinhuai lantern craftsmanship, provided continuity and authority. Online, LOEWE’s Chinese podcast added another layer, placing the animation within the wider story of Chinese visual culture and framing courage as a creative throughline between past and future. Each element stood alone, but together they formed a coherent narrative.
LOEWE’s Lunar New Year campaign: Key takeaway
The campaign did not aim for spectacle, and it did not need to. Its impact lay in how clearly it reinforced LOEWEW’s cultural posture: confident, patient and uninterested in chasing attention for its own sake.
For audiences, this doesn’t look like a brand latching on to the Lunar New Year for its own commercial interests, but a brand that’s willing to slow down and listen. That distinction is important. It’s how a brand can move from recognition to respect.
LOEWE’s Lunar New Year campaign is a reminder that in a crowded cultural moment, subtraction can be strategy. By choosing specificity and subtlety over scale and depth over immediacy, the brand invested in a form of value that compounds. LOEWE wasn’t trying to dominate the moment, but invest in relevance that lasts.
