HAYDON raised $100M at a $1B valuation — then went from 19 stores to 2

HAYDON (黑洞) launched in November 2020 as a premium beauty collection store chain, the creation of founder and CEO Judy. Its first store opened on December 31, 2020 in Wuhan's Chuhe Han Street, backed by an angel round from Tencent and Hillhouse Ventures. The model was familiar in China's beauty retail boom: warehouse-style flagship stores carrying 350+ brands, using luxury-brand samples (小样) sold cheap as a traffic draw while niche brands carried the margin. By August 2021 it had raised a $100 million A+ round at a $1 billion valuation.

The expansion was aggressive but fragile. HAYDON opened 19 stores across Wuhan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Harbin, Xi'an and other cities, often in 1,000-square-metre flagship spaces with heavy fit-out costs. But customers came to photograph the interiors rather than buy, and the sample-led model sat in a legal grey area — the products were marked 'not for resale', creating compliance risk with every transaction. By mid-2022, four stores in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Harbin had already closed or paused operations.

The closures accelerated through 2023 and 2024. HAYDON's Wuhan flagship — its first and most famous store — ran a two-fire-sale clearance in June 2023 and closed. Its social media accounts went silent in late 2022; its mini-program stopped working in February 2023. By mid-2026 only two of the original 19 stores remained, and the brand was effectively finished as a retail chain. Industry observers noted that a business built on raising capital rather than retail fundamentals had no defence when the funding stopped.