The Team · Who Answers

On the ground in China's consumer market

ChinaTMCheck is run by consumer-goods consultants based in China. Our day job is market research, category strategy, and private-brand development for retailers and consumer brands — work that lives or dies on reading Chinese-language sources correctly, the kind offshore databases don't index and machine translation doesn't parse.

The founder

E

Echo C.

Founder · 14+ years in China's consumer industry

Echo has spent 14+ years working inside China's consumer industry — not visiting it, operating in it. The path runs from brand and category management at Henkel China, through regional and e-commerce marketing at Mead Johnson and L'Oréal China, to leading product development and category strategy today at Daymon International, the global retail private-brand consultancy. Nearly six of those years were spent inside the China operations of three Western multinationals — firsthand experience of how Western brands win, and lose, on local execution.

Highlight: Echo's team helped a retail client become the No. 1 retailer by private-label market share in China's FMCG channel in 2020 — the kind of outcome that only comes from knowing the Chinese market from the inside.

Echo holds an M.A. in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from East China Normal University, along with CATTI Level-2 Translation certification (China's national translator credential) and the Shanghai Advanced Interpretation certificate — the formal language credentials behind every plain-English report we ship.

The team

Scans and research are delivered by a small senior team, not junior analysts.

J

Jennifer Li

Lead Consultant · 12 years in consumer-brand marketing

Personal care and food & beverage, across brand building from zero to scale:

  • Brand building from zero to scale — 0-to-1 brand development, full 4P strategy, omnichannel operations, and content marketing for consumer goods.
  • Marketing leadership inside global FMCG — marketing roles at Nu Skin, Johnson & Johnson, and Kraft Heinz, covering personal-care and food & beverage product lines.
  • Proven private-label track record at Yonghui Superstores — over three years of client work there: 800+ SKUs developed, and USONG, the private-label home brand she built, became Yonghui's No. 1 home brand with sales passing ¥1B RMB (≈ $140M) — 4× growth — including a ¥100M-level hit product.

What this means for your scan: the hands on your report have launched real products in China's retail channels, priced against real competitors, and read the market the way brand owners do — not just the registry.

Why we built this service

China operates a first-to-file trademark system: the first person to file a name owns it, no matter who built the brand. For a North American brand, that means a stranger can register your name in China before you ever sell there — and use it to block exports or demand a buyout.

We're not trademark lawyers, and we don't pretend to be. But answering "is my brand name already taken in China?" is, at its core, a research task: a native Chinese reader searching the CNIPA registry, then judging what they find the way a local professional would. That is exactly what we've done every day for 14 years — for category decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We pointed that capability at one specific question so the answer costs $149 and 72 hours, instead of becoming a five-figure problem later.

How a scan is actually done

China
Registry
Searched

Every scan is run personally by a consultant in China — a native Chinese reader with a consumer-industry background, not an offshore call center. The process:

  1. We search the CNIPA registry for your exact name and common transliterations, across the classes relevant to your category.
  2. Every hit gets read the way a local professional reads it — who filed, what else they've filed, whether the pattern looks like a bad-faith filing or an innocent coincidence.
  3. You get a plain-English PDF: what we found, a risk grade (Clear / Watch / Act Now), and the options from here. If a filing is needed, we hand you to a licensed agent — with costs stated up front.

See a full sample report →

What we're not

We're not a law firm and we don't give legal advice. Our scan is research — extremely thorough, on-the-ground research. For filings, oppositions, and litigation, we work with licensed China trademark agents and we'll tell you plainly when you need one.

Talk to us

hello@cntrademarkcheck.com — we answer within one business day. Or go straight to checking your brand name.