Coffee Culture: Xiaoshenxian Teahouse Leaves Wuhan After Three Years

Cha Yan Yue Se's sub-brand Xiaoshenxian Teahouse has closed its two remaining Wuhan stores, both shutting on January 19. The brand entered the city in 2023 with plans for several locations, but slow weekday foot traffic and consumer preference for quick tea service undermined the Chinese-style slow teahouse concept. Earlier closures in 2024 signaled the retreat, and the parent company is also adjusting the sub-brand's footprint in Changsha, its home base.

The Wuhan exit highlights a broader tension in China's beverage market. Customers increasingly favor fast, convenient tea drinking, while the slow teahouse format depends on steady foot traffic that proved hard to sustain. Xiaoshenxian's withdrawal follows a pattern seen among specialty coffee and tea brands that expand quickly before refining their store networks. The company described earlier closures as normal optimization, but the full Wuhan departure confirms the model's difficulty in that market.

Cha Yan Yue Se's sub-brand Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse has recently officially bid farewell to the Wuhan market, with its two remaining stores closing simultaneously on January 19. From its high-profile entry in 2023 to its full withdrawal now, the three-year journey of this sub-brand, which focuses on the concept of a Chinese-style slow teahouse, is lamentable. The contradiction between consumers' pursuit of fast and convenient tea drinking habits and the slow-paced teahouse experience, as well as the operating pressure brought by insufficient foot traffic on weekdays, jointly contributed to this outcome. Meanwhile, Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse in its Changsha home base is also contracting and adjusting, and the brand's optimization of the sub-brand's store scale was already expected.

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Recently, a Wuhan netizen posted on a social platform, revealing that two stores of Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse, a sub-brand under Cha Yan Yue Se, in the urban area of Wuhan have successively ceased operation.

According to local residents, the two Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse stores closed this time are located on Lihuangpi Road and Laotongcheng respectively, and were among the earliest stores opened when Cha Yan Yue Se introduced the sub-brand to Wuhan in 2023. Some loyal customers recall that after Cha Yan Yue Se opened its first Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse in Wuhan MixC, it had highly publicized that it would open four more stores within 2023.

However, actual progress did not go as the brand had wished. Among the first batch of Xiao Shen Xian Teahouses in Wuhan, apart from the Lihuangpi Road store, the Laotongcheng store, and the first MixC store, the remaining stores still in the preparation stage all quietly had their plans suspended. In June 2024, due to continuously low customer flow, the Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse MixC store officially closed because its performance fell short of expectations.

Although Cha Yan Yue Se explained at the time that the closure of the first Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse store in Wuhan "belongs to normal store optimization," in the eyes of outsiders, this signal may have been a precursor to the sub-brand's contraction. Now, the only two remaining Xiao Shen Xian Teahouses in Wuhan's urban area both permanently closed on January 19, which undoubtedly confirms previous outside speculation and also means that this sub-brand under Cha Yan Yue Se, positioned as a "Chinese-style slow teahouse," has completely withdrawn from the Wuhan market.

Seeing the teahouse that accompanied them for three years disappear from the official mini-program, many fans in Wuhan were both surprised and regretful. In their impression, both teahouses are located in popular cultural tourism districts, with an endless stream of people going there to check in and take photos, and on weekends and holidays the stores were especially lively, so business did not look too bad.

However, nearby residents revealed that the two stores mainly rely on tourist traffic, and once a weekday comes, business is deserted. With one factor ebbing and the other rising, they guess that both stores should be in a loss-making state, which was why the brand had to close them and cut losses in time.

On the other hand, today's tea beverage consumers pursue "fast and convenient," and leaving right after buying is the true life portrayal of most users. But when Cha Yan Yue Se originally created "Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse," it featured hand-brewed tea drinks, cakes, and desserts, allowing consumers to slow down and sit in the store to experience Chinese tea culture and the teahouse atmosphere, which in the view of many netizens is actually not quite in line with current tea beverage consumption demand.

At the same time, they pointed out that apart from Wuhan, Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse's survival situation in Cha Yan Yue Se's Changsha home base is actually not very good either. It is understood that entering 2025, Changsha's Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse began to reduce recruitment, and its number of stores gradually shrank from a peak of 10 to 3 concentrated in core urban commercial districts with customer flow.

Therefore, in the view of some netizens, Xiao Shen Xian Teahouse's business model is "not acclimatized" to the current needs of tea beverage consumers. Considering the actual situation such as brand operating costs, Cha Yan Yue Se's contraction and adjustment of the sub-brand's store scale is also reasonable.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.