In late November 2025, Shenzhen Futian Galaxy COCO Park became home to Laifen’s first national flagship store.

For this internet-famous brand—which surged online with the “Dyson alternative” label and achieved annual sales exceeding 4 billion yuan in just six years—Laifen’s formal transition from virtual shelves to brick-and-mortar spaces represents far more than simply adding another sales channel. It marks a strategic pivot toward deeper brand engagement.

Currently, as traffic platforms mature beyond their initial frenetic growth phase, Laifen inevitably requires a more substantive brand narrative to meet increasingly complex consumer demands.

According to Laifen’s expansion plan, the company aims to cover 20 core cities and open 300 stores by 2026. This signals Laifen’s official acceleration in transforming from an “online hit player” to an “omnichannel brand,” blending digital and physical presence.

Meanwhile, 2026 is internally regarded at Laifen as the “year of new products,” with the company stating it will launch more new products than any year since its founding, extending its product line from personal care to lifestyle categories such as lighting and cleaning.

On one hand, there’s the heavy asset investment in offline layout (physical presence, a term retained for context); on the other, aggressive category expansion. When these two moves occur simultaneously, they send a clear signal: as industry growth peaks, Laifen—which once thrived on a single hair dryer—urgently needs new breakthroughs to navigate an increasingly complex battlefield.

I. The Founding Weapon, The Upward Shackle

In 2022, a video titled “Why Can’t the Hair Dryer That Outperforms Dyson Grow Bigger” garnered hundreds of millions of views.

Faced with investor Wang Cen’s pointed question, “Where do you surpass Dyson?” Laifen founder Ye Hongxin bluntly replied, “We surpass them comprehensively—greater wind force, lower noise, and a cheaper price.”

Reviewing Ye Hongxin’s entrepreneurial journey reveals a somewhat legendary tale.

Born in Lishui, Zhejiang, in 1986, he dropped out of school early and worked on factory assembly lines in Guangzhou. During his family’s most difficult times, he even scavenged for trash with his father.

However, poverty did not extinguish Ye’s childhood passion for motors. At age 8, he connected spent batteries from his father’s fish tank flashlight to create light bulb filaments; in middle school, his skills in modifying radio-controlled cars far surpassed those of his peers.

As an adult, Ye earned his first fortune—10 million yuan—amid the Taobao e-commerce boom. This money became the seed capital for his “flying dream,” which he invested entirely in developing manned aircraft. Although this dream ended in disappointment due to difficulties in commercialization, the experience laid the groundwork for his later venture into hair dryers.

During a chance encounter, while standing beneath an aircraft and feeling its powerful gusts, a thought flashed through Ye’s mind: “Could this motor be placed inside a hair dryer?”

At the time, Dyson had already redefined the hair dryer category with its high-speed models, firmly occupying the premium market at 3,000 yuan.

After extensive research, Ye discovered that while Dyson was indeed the optimal solution, “it was just too expensive.” This phrase later became the starting point for all of Laifen’s stories—“bringing Dyson’s prices down.”

In 2019, Laifen was founded to develop high-speed brushless motors independently. By 2021, Laifen’s first high-speed hair dryer hit the market, boasting 115,000 RPM—on par with Dyson.

In terms of product design, Laifen adopted a minimalist “Apple-esque” aesthetic, striving to match Dyson’s user experience while pricing its products at just one-fifth of Dyson’s, with the lowest model priced under 600 yuan.

This “technological democratization” positioning struck a chord in the era of consumption tiering: consumers wanted high-end performance without paying excessive brand premiums.

From 2021 to 2024, Laifen’s annual sales soared from 150 million yuan to 4.1 billion yuan, creating a growth miracle among new consumer brands. Under the “Dyson alternative” label, Laifen not only capitalized on the traffic dividends of content e-commerce platforms like Douyin but also built a winning combination of “high performance + low pricing.”

However, while the “Dyson alternative” label brought Laifen rapid growth, being an alternative is inherently a parasitic positioning.

Dyson spent over a decade convincing consumers that “a high-speed hair dryer is worth 3,000 yuan,” while Laifen’s success, to some extent, was built on differentiating from Dyson’s established perception and offering a cheaper option.

While this strategy helped Laifen quickly penetrate the market early on, it also left the brand struggling to define its own value independently from birth.

On the other hand, as a “Dyson alternative,” although Laifen independently broke through in motor technology, its product design’s strong resemblance to Dyson’s has kept the brand embroiled in “copycat” controversies.

According to reports, at the 2024 Berlin International Consumer Electronics Show, German local courts, at Dyson’s request, confiscated Laifen’s samples for infringement.

This incident led Ye Hongxin to state in a subsequent interview, “I want to prove that we can be more than just a cheap alternative—we have innovative capabilities.”

This desire for brand upgrading is not just Ye’s personal aspiration but a necessary evolution for Laifen to respond to market changes.

In reality, long-term reliance on the “alternative” label directly limits Laifen’s ability to command premium pricing. Reports claim that Laifen founder Ye Hongxin once revealed that, thanks to its self-built factories, the gross profit margin of its hair dryers once reached 60%. While this figure far exceeds many consumer electronics brands (such as Xiaomi ecosystem companies), it still lags behind Dyson.

More notably, Dyson’s high gross profit margins stem primarily from its brand premium and premium market positioning, whereas Laifen’s 60% margin is attributable to extreme cost control and economies of scale.

To shed its “alternative” image, Laifen has launched higher-priced premium models, such as the Swift 4 and LF03 series, attempting to elevate its brand positioning.

However, the path to “de-alternativization” is not easy. Once consumers accept Laifen’s “affordable” positioning, the brand struggles to gain traction when introducing higher-priced products due to cognitive inertia.

According to the 2025 China Personal Care Appliance Consumption White Paper, 68% of consumers now believe that “alternative products lack consistent quality,” while 52% explicitly state they “will not pay extra for alternative products.”

Meanwhile, as Laifen attempts to move upmarket, the emergence of more “Laifen alternatives” has created a counter-siege against the brand.

Data shows that in the first three quarters of 2024, the under-300-yuan segment became the dominant price range for online hair dryer sales, with its market share increasing by nearly 11 percentage points year-on-year and sales volume growing by 76.8%.

Among these, the Dreame G10, priced at 199 yuan, features an 110,000 RPM motor; Xiaomi ecosystem companies have driven prices down to the 100-150 yuan range; and Flyco’s entry-level models cost just 30-100 yuan. In contrast, most of Laifen’s hair dryers are priced above 399 yuan, with only two models under 300 yuan.

Under these pressures, market competition has intensified, and Laifen’s growth momentum has begun to wane. The August 2025 hair dryer bestseller list showed that while Laifen maintained its top spot with a 26.5% market share, this represented a 5.9-percentage-point decline year-on-year.

Ironically, during the 2025 Double 11 shopping festival, Laifen achieved 710 million yuan in total domain sales, up nearly 30% year-on-year, but the statistical scope shifted from “across all platforms” to “total domain.”

II. Laifen’s Boundary Explorations

Facing intensifying competition in the hair dryer market, Laifen has attempted to open new growth spaces through cross-border explorations. However, its new category pilots have failed to replicate the success of its hair dryers.

In 2023, Laifen launched its oscillating-rotating electric toothbrush, which Ye Hongxin considered his “pride and joy.” Its pioneering oscillating-rotating mode did bring technical innovation, but market feedback was underwhelming. According to Jiemian News, Laifen’s toothbrush product line incurred a net loss of 80 million yuan in 2024.

During the 2025 618 shopping festival, Laifen’s electric toothbrush sales on Tmall dropped to fifth place, surpassed by brands like Usmile and Philips.

Ye Hongxin lamented on social media, “At a 299-yuan price point, our gross margin is less than 40%, while competitors with around 70% margins are crushing us. This category is extremely dysfunctional—bad money drives out good.”

In May 2025, Laifen unveiled its shaver, four years in the making and costing over 100 million yuan in R&D, which Ye Hongxin called “Laifen’s masterpiece.”

This product boasts several technical highlights. For example, the T1 Pro features a self-developed linear motor using flat-wire windings and 0.2mm ultra-thin silicon steel sheets—technologies typically found in new energy vehicles—to achieve 12,000 reciprocating cuts per minute, making it the first shaver to incorporate linear motor technology from maglev trains in a lightweight form.

The P3 Pro innovatively uses a dual-motor design, with two motors placed side by side and moving in opposite directions, not only delivering double the power but also canceling out vibrations, significantly improving comfort. In blade net craftsmanship, Laifen became the second company globally to master “stainless steel mesh stamping technology.”

However, problems soon arose. The pursuit of ultimate refinement through CNC machining resulted in extremely low production capacity, with just 2,000 units produced in the T1 Pro’s initial batch. Moreover, these hardcore technological innovations failed to translate into clear user benefits, with many users complaining about issues like “ineffective shaving,” “loud noise,” and “short battery life.” The single-blade net design was criticized as a fundamental flaw.

Additionally, some netizens pointed out that Laifen’s T1 Pro shaver bears a strong resemblance to Panasonic’s Air TM20 in design. Although Laifen responded that its patents were filed in 2022, Panasonic’s earlier release forced Laifen into a hasty response, with the initial batch of just 2,000 units suffering from severe capacity constraints.

Later, Ye Hongxin admitted at the shaver launch event, “Our gross margins are actually very low. After crunching the numbers, we expect the shaver to incur losses this year—probably 100%.”

While Laifen’s expansion from hair dryers to electric toothbrushes and then to shavers may seem logical—all being motor-driven, falling under personal care, and targeting the same quality-conscious consumer base—the inherent resistance in this pathway appears to have left Laifen persistently passive in category expansion.

First is the difference in category attributes.

As a function-oriented tool, consumers are willing to pay for hair dryers as long as they dry hair quickly and offer good value. However, electric toothbrushes and shavers are high-frequency, experience-driven products involving subjective factors like oral comfort and facial fit, requiring long-term technological accumulation and user insights.

In reality, shaver consumers are predominantly male, with greater focus on blade net fit and vibration control, creating a significant divergence from the female-dominated preferences in hair dryers.

This is also why Laifen is eager to establish an offline presence—when users cannot intuitively experience a shaver’s grip and shaving effectiveness online, offline trials become an essential trust-building step.

However, offline layout (physical presence) entails higher operational costs, more complex inventory management, and heavier asset structures, requiring Laifen—a brand accustomed to asset-light models—to adapt to entirely different rules of the game.

Second is the difference in competitive landscapes.

When Laifen entered the hair dryer market, high-speed models were virtually Dyson’s exclusive domain, representing a blue ocean opportunity. Meanwhile, the macro environment of rationalizing consumption provided Laifen with narrative space to promote “affordable refinement.”

However, Laifen’s electric toothbrushes and shavers have not enjoyed such dividends.

Philips, Panasonic, Braun, Flyco, and Usmile have deep roots in these categories, with highly stabilized market structures and brand hierarchies. The shaver market, in particular, has seen visible stagnation in technological iteration: neither rotary nor reciprocating shaving technologies have seen substantial breakthroughs in over a decade.

In such a mature market, consumers exhibit strong inertia toward established brands, making it nearly impossible for new entrants to disrupt the status quo.

III. Ye Hongxin: Defining Laifen’s Future

Laifen’s development trajectory bears the deep imprint of founder Ye Hongxin’s personality.

Ye once stated in an interview, “I enjoy making products, not running a company.” While this may have been seen as idealistic in the company’s early stages, for the leader of a business with over 4 billion yuan in annual revenue and 4,000 employees, “not enjoying running a company” could become a double-edged sword.

In 2024, during a public livestream addressing design flaws in the first-generation electric toothbrush, Ye Hongxin made a high-profile promise to “send a new unit to every affected user.”

However, from 2024 to the end of 2025, after over a year, Laifen’s official website has neither launched a dedicated compensation program nor explained this impulsive promise to users.

According to People’s Daily Online Shenzhen sentiment monitoring data, since 2025, 21.28% of online discussions about Laifen have been negative, while only 1.63% have been positive.

In light of these evolving brand reputation trends, Ye Hongxin has adopted an approach imbued with a "product manager-esque" idealism. He brought on board executives from renowned companies such as Apple, Midea, and Gree, aiming to revamp the management landscape with insights gleaned from "big company experience." The appointment of Luo Mingbo at the close of 2025 was widely seen as a clear indication that Laifen needed to solidify its management fundamentals and "catch up" in this crucial area.

In 2026, Laifen is embarking on a trajectory that mirrors the journey of numerous Chinese brands—transitioning from a reliance on single-product successes to fostering multi-category growth, pivoting from a focus on online traffic to cultivating omnichannel depth, and evolving from offering cost-effective alternatives to establishing a technology-driven brand identity.

The lingering question is whether Laifen will ultimately ascend to the ranks of lifestyle brands akin to Dyson or find itself adrift in the cutthroat competition of the red ocean, much like many other brands that have attempted similar expansions. The answer to this pivotal query will gradually unfold in the years to come.