AINEWS
Why Laifen Built Its Own 500M RMB Factory
When suppliers refused Laifen's premium spec orders, the 7 year old Chinese hair dryer brand became its own manufacturer. Shavers are now monthly profitable; the 2027 Dongguan move is the next test.
When suppliers refused Laifen's premium spec orders, the 7 year old Chinese hair dryer brand became its own manufacturer. Shavers are now monthly profitable; the 2027 Dongguan move is the next test.
When contract manufacturers refused to handle its premium-spec orders, Laifen didn't compromise. The 7-year-old Chinese brand, best known for high-speed hair dryers in the same tier as Dyson, chose to build the factory itself: a 500 million RMB site in Zhuhai's Doumen district, more than 200,000 square meters and 4,000 employees, designed to run the company's next product lines, and eventually its hair-dryer business too, entirely in-house.
Laifen's electric shaver, launched in May 2025, has now sold 1.3 million units cumulatively through June 2026, ranking first among domestic brands in China's 500-yuan-and-up price band during both the November 2025 "Double 11" and June 2026 "618" shopping festivals, according to a 36Kr factory-tour report. 618 2026 shaver sales reached roughly 120 million RMB, more than triple the prior year, and the unit became monthly-profitable starting January 2026, the company told reporters.
Laifen's i2 sonic toothbrush has generated more than 250 million RMB in cumulative GMV (gross merchandise value) since launch, per the same report. Premium SKUs, the transparent display model and an aluminum variant, account for 60% of sales. 618 2026 toothbrush revenue ran 1.2 times the prior-year festival. Together, shavers and toothbrushes have moved the brand from a single-product hair-dryer company into a "personal care trio."
Operational since August 2025, the Zhuhai factory houses a 3,000-square-meter reliability lab and four motor types Laifen says it developed and produces in-house: three-phase brushless, servo, high-speed linear, and axial-flux motors. Annual output capacity runs around 10 million units, the factory's general manager told 36Kr. Some lines are already fully automated: the toothbrush brush-head line runs in a Class 1000 cleanroom without operators, and spray-painting operates at Class 100,000 with the spray booth at Class 10,000, per a factory walkthrough. Beyond the trio, Laifen added a smart curling iron, a smart makeup mirror, an eye-care floor lamp, and a handheld folding fan in May 2026, with Zhuhai set to produce them as well.
Why own the factory at all? Laifen's leadership has been explicit: outside manufacturers wouldn't accept the high-spec orders the brand wanted to place, particularly for motor-driven personal-care products, so Laifen took the work in-house rather than redesign products to fit supplier tooling. That mechanism, contract refusal as a forcing function for vertical integration, inverts the more familiar Chinese consumer-brand story of outsourced manufacturing and price competition.
Laifen plans to migrate part of its Dongguan production to Zhuhai by 2027, citing lower logistics costs, consolidated component sourcing, and tighter R&D-manufacturing collaboration. The company hasn't disclosed how many lines or workers will move, the transfer budget, or how it will manage capacity during cutover, gaps a Zhihu industry write-up flagged as the near-term execution risks. The Zhuhai footprint itself is also narrower than originally planned: a July 2024 strategic agreement between the Zhuhai government, Da Hengqin Group, and Laifen's corporate entity envisioned more than 400,000 square meters of phased development, while the company now cites more than 200,000 square meters as built.
The 2027 Dongguan-to-Zhuhai migration is the next test. If Laifen can move production cleanly while keeping shavers and toothbrushes monthly-profitable, the in-house factory will look like a deliberate vertical-integration play rather than a costly detour.