Shanghai Designer Mark Gong’s Million-Dollar Moment

Reported by Vogue.

On February 24, 2025, at exactly 3pm, Shanghai-based designer Mark Gong watched his business transform in real time. The catalyst: a photo of Jennie from Blackpink wearing his dachshund-print T-shirt — six pearl-necklaced dogs on cotton — going viral. His team panic-ordered 500 units before he'd even left the barbershop. By the time he got back, they were gone. He scaled to 2,000. Then kept going. Thirty thousand dog T-shirts later, the 28-year-old founder of Markgong has a million-dollar brand on his hands, according to Vogue.

The numbers are real and specific: annual revenue sits around $1 million, with direct-to-consumer accounting for 60–70% of sales, and T-shirts alone driving roughly 35% of the business. Gong — a Parsons graduate who launched the label in New York in 2018 before relocating to China during the pandemic — now runs a 17-person full-time team plus six freelancers, handling everything from embroidery to supply chain. "If you're a designer here in China, you're not just a designer, you're a business person," he says. "You have to be a boss."

The Gong Girl Playbook

None of this happened accidentally. Celebrity placement has been a deliberate growth engine from the start — not magazine editorials, which Gong says don't move sales, but paparazzi shots and personal Instagram posts that make a garment feel real and coveted. His method: start with stage costumes to build trust with talent and their stylists, then work toward everyday dressing, where the commercial payoff actually lives. Beyond the Jennie moment, he dressed Blackpink's Lisa in a tuxedo dress for the 2025 Oscars. Korean celebrities, he notes, carry particular influence across Asia and further — a ripple effect that shapes shopping behavior at scale.

This season's collection, titled Limerence — named after that obsessive early-crush fixation — arrives with T-shirts printed with deadpan definitions and lines like "You barely know him, but you already got the baby name." It's the brand's signature register: funny, sharp, grounded in the kind of emotions women actually have. His inspirations have included Samantha Jones and his own dating life. The clothes are meant to be understood immediately, not decoded through show notes referencing obscure paintings. "You've got 10 minutes to put on a show," he says. "How can you make people inspired?"

Expansion is structured and intentional. Markgong holds 60 wholesale accounts in China — a number Gong intends to hold steady — and has opened its first flagship at Shanghai's IAMP Mall alongside a Tmall storefront, both designed to showcase the higher-end pieces that don't sell themselves online: the sequin-loaded looks, the pastel puff dresses. He's signed with Purple PR in the US, expanded his SKU count from 160 to 260 to appeal to Western buyers and stylists, and has his sights clearly set on the American and European markets. His Shanghai runway shows run around $30,000 — a fraction of comparable European productions — giving him room to invest rather than just survive. The West is next, but for now: "Here, people see us. And we can shine."

Mark Gong's rise is a masterclass in knowing exactly which levers to pull — and pulling them before anyone tells you it's too soon.

Read the original at Vogue.