Avène and Manner Team Up So You Can Get a Serum With Your Latte
Your next Manner order just got a lot more French.
Your next Manner order just got a lot more French. On August 20, the Shanghai-born coffee chain launched a limited-time pop-up with Avène — the French "dermocosmetic" skincare brand — built around one simple idea: coffee wakes your senses up, skincare calms your skin down.
The mechanic is frictionless, which is exactly the point. Order one of two co-branded sets and the samples come with it: a 20 RMB single-drink combo gets you an Avène "cell energy" trial pack (a sheet mask plus a serum), while the 40 RMB two-drink version throws in a co-branded makeup pouch. You're not shopping for skincare; you're just getting coffee, and the skincare shows up anyway.
The products in the rotation are genuinely new — a PDRN "connective-tissue" serum and a "super-repair" mask that Avène recently reformulated to target sensitivity, sagging, and redness. The brand even tapped longtime livestream heavyweight Li Jiaqi to promo the line, signalling it's pushing these as hero products, not drawer-filler samples.
Why coffee and serum? The pairing looks random until you map it onto the actual pain point. Urban workers in China are endlessly negotiating two deficits at once — "not enough energy" (solved, temporarily, by caffeine) and "tired-looking skin" (targeted by the reformulation). Manner, with its rapid-fire store count and near-daily customer frequency, gives Avène a high-traffic distribution point where trying a sample costs nothing and fits naturally into an existing habit.
For a "functional skincare" brand — a category that can feel clinical, low-stakes, and hard to sample — parking itself inside a 20 RMB coffee run is a clever way to lower the trial threshold. No counter, no consultant pitch, no commitment. Just a mask tucked next to your latte.
Whether anyone actually converts from a free sheet mask to a full serum regimen is another question. But for one limited window, the morning coffee run became a wellness starter kit — one where the only decision is tall or grande.
