Reality television star and lifestyle mogul Kim Kardashian has her sights set on the Chinese market with plans to open a pop-up store, state media reported last Friday.
Kardashian, whose rapper husband Kanye West briefly lived in China as a child, recently launched her makeup brand KKW Beauty and told China’s official news agency about her plans to do business in the world’s second largest economy.
But with a fraction of the followers on local social media platforms compared to her Instagram fans, she has a long way to go.
“China has the best make-up, and I would love to explore more of it,” she said from Los Angeles in the interview published Friday.
Having “great interest in Chinese culture”, Kardashian said she would like to film part of her reality TV show in the country.
The mother of three has even set up accounts on Chinese social media sites Weibo and Little Red Book.
But she has just 162,000 followers on the Twitter-like Weibo — a figure dwarfed by her presence on Instagram, where her 121 million fans make her the seventh most followed account on the platform.
On the Pinterest-like Little Red Book, Kardashian shares makeup tips and snippets of her life with some 120,000 followers.
Most Chinese celebrities have tens of millions of followers on social media.
Several western celebrities have made attempts at breaking into the lucrative Chinese market.
US wrestling star John Cena, who has nearly half a million followers on Weibo, posts videos of himself speaking Chinese on the site, including an ode to Lao Ganma — a spicy Chinese chilli sauce — that lit up the internet earlier this year.
But the Chinese market is a double-edged sword, with Italian fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana getting its products pulled from Chinese e-commerce platforms after getting embroiled in a row over racially offensive social media posts.
West came to China when he was 10 with his mother, Donda West, who taught English for a year at Nanjing University in eastern Jiangsu province. – AFP
