Huang Jinfeng (黄锦峰, David)
Founder & CEO
Huang Jinfeng (黄锦峰) spent years at P&G learning how multinational beauty giants operated—then used that knowledge to beat them at their own game. His Perfect Diary became China's first publicly traded beauty brand with a $4B peak valuation, proving that emerging market founders could compete on innovation and digital sophistication, not just price.
The Journey #
Huang Jinfeng (黄锦峰)’s years at Procter & Gamble provided a master class in how multinational beauty companies operated—department store distribution, television advertising, magazine campaigns, celebrity endorsements. He understood their playbook intimately. But he also recognized where these giants were fundamentally blind: they misunderstood how Chinese consumers discovered, evaluated, and purchased beauty products in 2017’s digital-native landscape.
While L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, and Shiseido controlled 78% of China’s $60 billion beauty market through traditional strategies, Huang saw that the market wasn’t shifting from offline to online—it had already shifted. Legacy advantages in retail distribution and traditional media meant nothing when consumers made purchasing decisions based on Xiaohongshu (小红书) reviews, Douyin (抖音) livestreams, and KOL recommendations rather than magazine advertisements.
Perfect Diary’s 2017 launch strategy would have seemed insane to traditional beauty executives: zero traditional advertising spend. No magazine spreads. No television commercials. No celebrity endorsement contracts. Instead, Huang built relationships with thousands of Key Opinion Leaders across every major Chinese social platform—not paid sponsorships where influencers read scripts, but authentic partnerships where beauty enthusiasts genuinely tested and recommended products.
When Austin Li (李佳琦, China’s “Lipstick King”) sold 15,000 lipsticks in five minutes during a livestream, it validated Huang’s contrarian bet: building trust networks faster than traditional advertising could build brand awareness, and doing it at a fraction of the cost. The breakthrough came during 2019’s Double 11 shopping festival when Perfect Diary became the first Chinese brand to break ¥100 million ($14M) in Tmall (天猫) sales in a single day.
Not through discounting—through demand generated entirely by digital community engagement. When Gen Z consumers told Tmall that Perfect Diary was their second-favorite domestic brand after Huawei (华为), it proved that Chinese consumers were ready to embrace domestic brands based on quality and cultural relevance, not national pride or patriotic obligation.
Huang’s November 2020 NYSE listing at $4B peak valuation wasn’t just Perfect Diary going public—it was China’s entire beauty industry announcing its arrival on the global stage, catalyzing a wave of innovation that would grow Chinese brands’ domestic market share from 22% to 56% within six years.