White Rabbit turned a 1959 milk candy into a lifestyle brand via 2019 collabs

White Rabbit creamy candy, launched in Shanghai in 1959, was the national candy of China for generations and traveled with the diaspora worldwide. But the brand lived on memory, and its owner, Guanshengyuan Group, set out to make the 60-year-old name matter to consumers who buy lifestyle products, not just sweets. The vehicle it chose was not a new factory line but a series of cross-brand collaborations.

In 2018 it put the rabbit on a lip balm with local cosmetics brand MAXAM. In May 2019 it worked with Scent Library on a White Rabbit perfume, shower gel and hand cream. Then, on May 29, 2019, it opened a pop-up milk tea shop with drinks chain Happy Lemon at Shanghai's LuOne Mall, selling six candy-flavored drinks at 19 to 25 yuan. The shop sold more than 1,000 cups on opening day, drew waits of up to four hours, and ran until mid-August. The same year, a White Rabbit flavor made by Los Angeles's Wanderlust Creamery for Lunar New Year went viral online and became a permanent item.

The collaborations reframed the brand: White Rabbit stopped being a nostalgia candy and became a lifestyle name with its own design language. The company's playbook — keep the product, rent the wrapper — let partners in cosmetics, drinks and ice cream carry the manufacturing and distribution risk while the rabbit supplied seven decades of brand equity.

Pop-up milk tea with Happy Lemon sold 1,000+ cups on opening day with 4-hour queues; the rabbit now spans perfume, lip balm, ice cream and a Shanghai flagship store.

The collabs put the wrapper, not the factory, to work: partners in cosmetics and drinks handled production while White Rabbit supplied the brand equity.

Scarcity and social media did the advertising — 1,000-plus cups on day one and four-hour queues became the story.

Each collab hit a different audience: scent and lip balm for young women, milk tea for students, ice cream for the diaspora.

When a heritage product itself cannot grow, rent its nostalgia to categories that can: cross-brand collabs turn an old wrapper into a lifestyle brand without retooling the factory.

Guanshengyuan kept extending the rabbit. By 2022 the brand had a futuristic flagship store in Shanghai's JKS Arts and Cultural Center that CNN described as looking more like a playground than a candy shop, and the White Rabbit flavor remained a permanent, regularly sold-out item at Wanderlust Creamery in Los Angeles. A brand that once lived in Chinese New Year gift boxes now sells fragrance, drinks collaborations and merchandise to a generation that mostly knows the candy from its parents.