Beast's 15th Birthday Is a Mirror Maze Filled With Watermelons and Hidden Perfume

Fifteen years ago, Beast (野兽派) was just a flower shop on Weibo — no storefront, no catalog, just an account that took orders through DMs and wrote a story for every bouquet. Fast forward to summer 2026, and the brand is celebrating its anniversary by doing what it's always done best: making people stop and feel something.

For its 15th birthday, Beast took over a plaza at Shanghai's Rockbund with "The Mirror" (寻香花镜), a full-scale botanical installation built in collaboration with Singapore-based botanical design studio This Humid House. It's part mirror maze, part living garden — and entirely unlike what you'd expect from a brand that now sells everything from silk pajamas to scented candles.

Shanghai's plum rain season turned out to be a feature, not a bug. The team leaned into it, using local seasonal flora — wildflowers, climbing vines, summer vegetation — planted inside mirrored structures to create a labyrinth where plants and reflections kept multiplying. Then there's the produce: watermelons, winter melons, and other everyday summer crops growing right alongside the blooms, treated not as props but as equals. The message is unsubtle but earned: beauty isn't just roses in cellophane.

The real hook, though, is what's hidden inside. Beast tucked all eight fragrances from its new "The Mirror" perfume line into the installation, each one embedded into a different point along the pathway. You don't browse them — you stumble into them, walking through humidity and greenery until a scent finds you around a corner. The structure becomes the discovery mechanism.

The concept is genuinely thoughtful for a brand activation: every fragrance is a mirror, and every visitor is looking for a scent that reflects something back at them. Corny on paper, but inside a rain-damp mirrored labyrinth with watermelon vines brushing your shoulder, it probably lands.

At the opening, Beast's youth ambassador Li Gengxi (李庚希), actor Wang Yantong (王彦桐), and several brand friends didn't just show up for photos — they helped the florists build parts of the installation and sealed their chosen scents into the structure. It turns what could've been a standard celebrity drop-by into something closer to a collective gesture.

"The Mirror" ran from June 26 to July 5, functioning as both a standalone experience and the prelude to the fragrance line's wider launch. For a brand that built its reputation on the idea that flowers carry emotional weight, circling back to a physical garden — but one built around scent, reflection, and getting slightly lost — feels less like nostalgia and more like a statement: Beast still knows its way around a flower, even when that flower is growing next to a冬瓜 in a hall of mirrors.