To Summer and the Fragrance of Memory

On an afternoon in 2017, Elvis Liu, Shen Li, and Seokhoon “Khoon” Choi, the three founding members of To Summer, sat in a corridor of the Lingering Garden in Suzhou — four hundred years of rockeries, ponds, and covered walkways built for the slow pleasure of looking — and watched the summer framed in an octagonal lattice window.

The name came from that afternoon: 观夏, guān xià, “to watch summer,” and in English, To Summer. The octagon remained as well: the window’s shape became the cap on every bottle.

They made an unlikely trio. Elvis had spent years in the churn of China’s internet economy. Shen Li had spent hers inside the glossy world of fashion magazines and had just left her editor’s post at the Chinese edition of Harper’s Bazaar. Khoon was a Korean designer trained at Yale. Among the three there was a feel for commerce, for storytelling, and for beauty. Fragrance, the business they were about to enter, was new to them all.

They divided the work along the lines of what they knew. Elvis took operations, product, and development. Shen Li led the brand’s creative and marketing strategy. And Khoon built the brand’s visual identity.

What the three set out to make was a fragrance the perfume counter had never offered them: one drawn from Chinese memory — a feeling like the one in that window, the stillness of watching a season pass, held in a bottle.

The scent that wasn’t there

That gap was one Shen Li had felt firsthand.

The story she tells begins with an autumn walk in Beijing. Along the long walls of the Summer Palace, the scent of osmanthus reached her on the breeze and carried her back years — to the rice wine poured after the first cold of the season, and to the warmth that used to cling to her mother’s clothes.

“I caught a whiff of osmanthus on the breeze and was immediately transported,” she said of that walk.

That memory became the first fragrance the company would sell, Osmanthus, and the conviction the whole brand would be built on: that a scent could hold a memory and hand it back.

The noticing had begun years earlier, at her desk. Editing fashion columns at Harper’s Bazaar, Shen Li kept meeting a strange substitution: the perfumes filed under “Oriental” leaned on maté, a South American herbal tea. The teas, flowers, and woods she associated with Chinese scent culture rarely appeared. Western houses labeled fragrances “Eastern” and left out the thing itself: the materials that grew in China and lived in Chinese memory.

The omission reached beyond perfume. China’s relationship with scent runs back more than a thousand years; since the Tang and Song dynasties, incense and fragrance sat beside tea, calligraphy, and flower arranging among the refinements of a cultivated life. Much of that everyday fragrance culture faded from modern life, and the perfume counter filled the silence with someone else’s idea of the East.

What Shen Li wanted to bring back was a sensibility the brand would later call “the beauty of uselessness.” One Ming-era idiom describes roaming at night by candlelight: in the days before electric light, people carried lanterns into the dark to watch the night-blooming cereus, a flower that opens for only seconds.

The point was the looking, the ceremony around something with no use at all. She wanted perfume to work the same way: a small, deliberate pleasure that served as a vessel for feeling.

Against the current

To Summer opened to the public in early 2019, and almost everything about how it sold followed rules of its own.

It sold through a single WeChat account, bought no advertising, and stayed off the livestream circuits where many beauty brands were being made. New scents arrived on Thursday nights, in small batches that often sold out quickly. The first products were aromatherapy oils, each capped with a crystal and named for a feeling — love, solitude, sleep.

The writing did much of the selling. Each scent came wrapped in a long WeChat post that read like a short story or a diary entry. The posts traced the memory behind a fragrance — the search for one particular rose, say — and left room for readers to attach their own. Many wrote back, and the brand folded some of their language into its names and packaging. Word spread first through the founders’ circles, then through the people reading and sharing the posts.

Readers responded almost at once. The first post went up in January 2019, titled “After Two Years, We Are Finally Here…” By day’s end the brand had sold more than a thousand pieces, and the post drew more than 60,000 readers. When customers asked why To Summer stayed off the livestream economy that was minting other brands, Shen Li’s answer was simple: “we prefer the poetic, warm approach.”

By the autumn of 2019, the founders had refined the brand around three words — Eastern, natural, poetic — and committed To Summer to fragrances built from Chinese scent memory. Osmanthus made that strategy hard to dismiss: born from Shen Li’s walk by the Summer Palace, it sold out again and again, becoming the breakout that carried the brand beyond its first circle of readers.

One store, one story

For a company that started online, To Summer has put extraordinary weight on its physical places. It restores old buildings and turns each into a space that belongs to its city — what the brand calls “one store, one story.”

The Shanghai flagship sits inside a 1936 Spanish-style Colonial Revival villa on Hunan Road, in the former French Concession, once home to a Spanish painter and later a literary translator. To Summer spent a year on the restoration, bringing in craftspeople who had worked on the city’s landmark buildings — preserving the chandeliers and the fireplace, rebuilding the staircase so it kept its old creak — and reopened the house under the name Leisure Garden, its garden still planted with decades-old osmanthus and wintersweet.

In Beijing, the brand restored a Qing-dynasty courtyard on Guozijian Street, near the Confucius Temple, where visitors enter through a hand-cleansing ritual, past a century-old well and a jujube tree. In Chengdu, it moved into the former Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House.

Each store extends the same idea as the fragrances: place matters, memory matters, and the setting should carry both — old architecture, in Shen Li’s telling, holding the soul of a city. The stores read like essays — rooms to wander through, with tea tables, ingredient libraries, and reading nooks, where the selling stays quiet and the spaces double as venues for exhibitions and workshops.

From the soil up

Elvis has said he wants the scents to answer one question: “What makes the East, the East?”

Answering it has been patient work. The team tested close to a hundred versions of Osmanthus before approving one, working with trained perfumers — among them David Huang, the Beijing-based, Paris-trained chief perfumer of the French house Robertet, one of the world’s leading suppliers of natural fragrance ingredients — and carrying the formula between Beijing and the extraction rooms of Grasse, France.

Every autumn, the brand has fresh osmanthus hand-picked in Xianning, in Hubei, and Guilin, in Guangxi — regions Elvis calls two of the world’s finest — and shipped to France, where a thousand kilograms of blossoms yield a single kilogram of absolute. A magnolia scent began, in Elvis’ telling, with the memory of “a grandmother in old Shanghai pinning a magnolia blossom to a child’s lapel,” and took three years to get right.

In 2021, the question took Elvis to the soil itself. He set up an ingredient workshop on Yunnan’s Jingmai Mountain, working alongside the local farmers who tend the old tea trees, and began a long-term sourcing program with Robertet. The work has changed how Chinese ingredients are recorded by the global industry: in 2024, the brand extracted an absolute from Jingmai Pu’er tea and saw it added to the IFRA standard, the international framework governing fragrance ingredients — the first Chinese tea ever recognized — and in 2025 it did the same for the oil of Xinhui aged tangerine peel.

The vessels carry the same idea. To Summer runs its own porcelain workshop in Jingdezhen, reviving the pure white of the Ding kiln, and works with master glassmakers in Boshan — among them one of the last forty artisans in China still practicing the nearly lost craft of hand-carved and ground glass — on candles made by ancient liuli techniques.

For To Summer, the work reaches past extraction into culture. The company calls these milestones “cultural recoveries” — a way of bringing Chinese materials, and the people and places behind them, into a global craft that had long drawn on other traditions.

HSG led To Summer’s Series A in December 2020, as China’s first generation of high-end fragrance brands was beginning to take shape. The company was still young then — a short catalog, and a business model it was still proving.

“When we first got to know To Summer, what stood out was how specific they were willing to be,” said Ruodi Hu, a Partner at HSG. “They gave contemporary Eastern fragrance a language of its own, then built the stores, ingredients, and stories to make that language feel complete. There are very few companies that come to define an entire category. To Summer is one of them.”

In January 2024, a second kind of validation arrived: L’Oréal’s venture arm took a minority stake in the company. The group’s global growth chief counted it among L’Oréal’s most important investments in Asia that year.

In September 2025, To Summer opened its first store outside the Chinese mainland, on Yun Ping Road in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, inside a tenement building dating to 1958. To Summer built the store as a tribute to the women of the city’s 1960s manufacturing boom — the workers in the textile mills, plastics factories, and print shops who powered the city’s rise. It brought in the Hong Kong designer Alan Chan, and published a journal, Wandering Her City, mapping walking routes past the workshops of the city’s women.

That focus on women’s creation, and on the printed word, runs back years. To Summer’s Beijing flagship launched Nosepaper, a literary fragrance zine of poetry, essays, and artist interviews, and the company has since added Kunlun, an annual journal on Eastern aesthetics, and monographs on artists such as the ink painter Peng Wei. A newer Shanghai store, in a 1928 building on Yuanmingyuan Road, trades its shelves of product for nearly a hundred books by women writers, a reading room built as a study.

Each spring the brand runs a project it calls Freedom and Imagination: a writer’s study one year, a poetry collection made with eleven women writers the next, and in 2026 a meditation on breath and the small rhythms of a life.

Shen Li traces the thread to her magazine years, and to the women creators whose freedom and resilience stayed with her. That work has reached public life, too — a young-creators’ award run with Audi that drew more than 6,000 applicants and 3,000 works in its first edition, and an immersive installation of Peng Wei’s paintings on Shanghai’s West Bund.

The Hong Kong opening was the company’s first real test beyond its home market. Would the brand’s world resonate in a new city? The answer, Elvis has said, would tell them how far the brand could go.

The ambition now runs globally — across the rest of Asia, and eventually to New York, Paris, and beyond. Hong Kong gave the brand a reason to try: before it ever signed a lease there, some 35,000 people in the city were already buying To Summer, traveling to Shenzhen and Shanghai or ordering online.

The founders had circled this ambition since their earliest conversations, when they kept returning to Bauhaus — a design language born in one country that spread across the world — and hoped their own might travel the same way, free of the dragons and phoenixes long pinned to Chinese design. They talk now about a generation of Chinese brands confident enough to export culture on their own terms.

Nearly a decade on, the work is what it was on that afternoon in Suzhou: putting a remembered scent into a bottle, so someone else can remember too. “We want to let Eastern aesthetics flourish anew in contemporary life,” Shen Li says.

The osmanthus, it turns out, was only the beginning.