Panel Discussion: As Globalization Accelerates, How Can Brands Move Beyond Boundaries?

[Ebrun Original] On September 17, 2026, the Accelerate 2026 China Cross-Border Ecosystem Acceleration Conference was held in Shenzhen, with the theme of "Borderless Brands".

During the morning panel session titled "Practice and Reflection on Brands' Transition from Bounded to Borderless Operations", Liu Chen, Co-founder of Ebrun and CEO of Mati Community, served as the moderator and shared his interpretation of "borderless". He argued that "borderless" refers to globalization, acting more as an asymptotic limit rather than a final destination — it represents a process of continuous evolution and perpetual advancement. No brand is inherently "borderless"; all "borderless" status is achieved by repeatedly breaking down existing boundaries. While brands may aim to operate without limits, the process of getting there is always bounded by tangible constraints.

Gao Haiyan, Co-founder of SmallRig under SmallRig Innovation, Shao Huaqiang, Vice President of Rokid Group and General Manager of its International Business, and Huang Zhijin, General Manager of the Business Division at Bear Electric Appliance, each shared their insights from hands-on operational experience. This discussion did not aim to provide universal answers, but rather to spark inspiration, leaving every founder with a critical question: What boundary are you facing right now, and how will you cross it?

(This article is an initial draft of the panel transcript, featuring excerpts of key discussions, edited and compiled by Ebrun without altering the original intent.)

01 The Starting Point of Crossing Boundaries: Users, Technology and Product Categories

Liu Chen: Every company has its own starting origin — some rooted in users, some in product categories, and others in technology. That origin is what supports a company to take its first step. Could each of you share what the origin of your respective brand is?

Huang Zhijin: Bear Electric Appliance is a well-established brand in the Chinese domestic market, having built solid commercial results by continuously expanding our product categories. We are now pursuing overseas expansion, aiming to bring our creative small home appliances to global markets, serve more users, and achieve commercial success by capturing and addressing user needs.

Liu Chen: So creative small home appliances are Bear's origin, which ultimately comes down to user demand at its core. What is Rokid's origin?

Shao Huaqiang: Rokid produces AI glasses with displays, and we rank first globally in this category. We will continue to double down on this track, this new product category. I am actually wearing our glasses right now. You may have seen Rokid's ads during the World Cup.

Rokid's origin traces back to our founder Misa. More than a decade ago, he foresaw the transformation of computing paradigms. Human-computer interaction evolved from desktop computing, powered by PCs and mice, to mobile computing, powered by smartphones and touch controls — what will the next wave of computing, the next interactive terminal, look like? Our vision is to move from bounded to borderless operations, and advance toward spatial computing. The world you see becomes the carrier of computing, and the information you need is presented seamlessly in the physical world without boundaries. We look forward to realizing this vision soon, and building, creating, and sharing this future together with all of you.

Liu Chen: So Rokid's origin can be summarized as founder Misa's judgment more than a decade ago on the evolution of computing waves and human-computer interaction: that the next generation of computing terminals will move toward spatial computing. What about SmallRig under SmallRig Innovation?

Gao Haiyan: Going back to our brand's origin, it is very simple — just two words: "users". Before entering the photography and videography equipment space 13 years ago, we were a company manufacturing consumer automotive electronics and automotive aftermarket electronic products.

One day, a user came to us with a need: he wanted to connect an on-board monitor to a camera, but there was no suitable connector on the market. The device also required continuous power during use, and the power bank had to be strapped to the camera tripod, which was extremely inconvenient. After receiving his request, we built a custom connector for him. He was so satisfied with it that he posted about it on BBS forums and online media, praising our work, which brought in a flood of similar requests. That is how we pivoted into the photography and videography sector.

After that, we focused on developing in this field, continuously drawing insights from user needs, co-creating with users as we addressed those needs, and gradually expanding our product portfolio. In fact, we are very willing to, and take great enjoyment in, operating as a company that provides manufacturing services and creates value for users. So for SmallRig, it is not the brand that decides where we go — users decide where we go. That is probably the core origin that allows us to cross and break down boundaries.

Liu Chen: The three companies represented here are highly representative. Bear Electric Appliance is a well-known domestic brand attempting to expand from the Chinese market to overseas markets, backed by category expansion and user insight; Rokid is driven by forward-looking technology, anchored in spatial computing, and carving out the new category of AI glasses with displays; SmallRig is inherently built on co-creation with users — I often joke that this company has no product managers, because the product managers are all the users. Different corporate genes and starting points mean different paths and paces for global expansion.

02 Diverse Approaches to Crossing Boundaries: User Co-Creation, Technology Roadmap, and Market Selection

Liu Chen: Given your different starting points, what unique approaches have each of you taken to cross boundaries?

Gao Haiyan: Our approach is simply "co-creation with users". Today, we have tens of millions of users across 160 countries worldwide. It is user demand and co-creation that drive us to develop more products and advance deeper into global markets.

Liu Chen: Could you give an example of how you turn a user idea into a finished product?

Gao Haiyan: Users submit requests or leave product feedback in the communities we have built, and we use all of that input to continuously optimize, upgrade, and innovate our products. We have an internal demand management system, and an external user insight system. Before insights enter that pipeline, we have a broad screening funnel built around a multi-matrix user community structure.

For example, we have a professional community with around 20,000 professional users, who must pass an assessment to gain access. This community has no marketing or sales functions — no coupons or promotional content are allowed. It exists solely for discussing products, reviewing products, and proposing product ideas (many users even submit detailed professional design drawings). We then identify viable ideas from these submissions and turn them into leads for product R&D.

Before this stage, we also run a public welfare-focused program called DreamRig, for user customization: users submit custom product requests, and we fulfill them where possible.

Liu Chen: Do you fulfill every custom request?

Gao Haiyan: Of course not. We evaluate custom requests against three criteria. First, it must be a real demand for a real use scenario. Second, the product does not exist in our existing portfolio, nor do our competitors offer it (if competitors have it, we recommend users purchase it from them; if we already have it, we simply send it to the user for free). Third, the product falls within our manufacturing and R&D capabilities. As long as these three conditions are met, we use a light decision-making process to produce one unit for the user first.

Liu Chen: Do users have to pay for it?

Gao Haiyan: No, the product is provided to them for free. Over the years, among users familiar with SmallRig, we have been known as a company that "will make even just one unit of a product". We currently treat fulfilling user custom requests as a public welfare initiative.

Of course, once user insight and co-creation are established as a product innovation mechanism, the next challenge is making it regularized, scalable, and sustainable. Without proper mechanisms and models, it is very hard to sustain long-term.

We use this public welfare mechanism to guarantee we make even single units, and the community mechanism to facilitate interaction. The community cannot be a marketing group; it must be an infrastructure for user exchange and co-creation. Internally, our community team operates as a cost center, not a conversion or profit center.

We also need an agile, flexible supply chain mechanism. Delivering fast for orders of one unit or ten units is something traditional mass production systems cannot support. So we upgraded our original sample workshops and pilot test bases into a small-batch production system, integrating sample production, small-batch manufacturing, and pilot testing into one entity, dedicated to fulfilling user custom requests and co-created products.

There is also a profit-sharing model. Some users provide clear, complete ideas, even partially finished design drawings. When such a product is eventually launched to the global market, we share revenue with the co-creating user at an agreed ratio based on sales performance. For many professional users, we are not just a company that provides them products, but also a company that helps them earn income. That is a key source of our ability to sustainably generate large volumes of product innovation over the long term (we currently launch 2.5 new products per day, and that pace is accelerating).

Extending further, we also need a set of digital systems. Front-end demand collection, product R&D, production, and fulfillment and delivery need to be connected via a highly agile digital system. Without such a system, it is very hard to scale, run parallel processes, and manage so many links, nodes, and pieces of information.

Liu Chen: SmallRig has turned user co-creation into a full set of mechanisms covering community building, demand evaluation, supply chain, profit sharing, and digitalization. Mr. Shao, what is Rokid's pace and approach?

Shao Huaqiang: Rokid is a hard technology company. After years of development, China has reached the stage where it is moving up to higher-value segments of the industrial chain. The first generation of human-computer interaction was defined by the Wintel alliance in the United States; the second generation was arguably defined by the iPhone and Android systems. I believe the third human-computer interaction revolution in the AI era is very likely to take place in China, and Rokid is fortunate to be part of it and contribute our share.

I will share a few core principles. First, from day one, we were "born global" — a global company. But every company has a different entry point and approach to crossing borders. While we aspire to be a global company, Rokid chose to start in the Chinese market first, because China offers more rich application scenarios.

In China, we have developed To B industrial AR solutions, and our products have even been used on the space station; we also run cultural tourism business, with our AR solutions deployed in many top-tier museums across the country; at the same time, we have defined the current category of AI glasses with displays for the To C consumer market. Hard technology products generally follow a development path: first entering high-barrier professional fields, then commercial applications, and finally the consumer mass market. We have basically validated this rollout rhythm.

Second, when expanding internationally, we are exploring uncharted territory, with very little existing reference to draw on, so we have to define what the product and market should look like ourselves. Under these circumstances, there will inevitably be trial-and-error costs, which are necessary to pay.

Liu Chen: Could you tell us more about those trial-and-error costs?

Shao Huaqiang: We do our best to avoid unnecessary detours. There are crowdfunding platforms, such as Kickstarter in the US, Makuake in Japan, and Zeczec in Taiwan, China. We have run campaigns on all these platforms, and even broken platform records. For new products with little market reference, crowdfunding helps companies quickly validate demand and pricing, reducing trial-and-error costs.

In addition, partnering with platforms like Pattern also accelerates the globalization process. I look forward to more discussions on this going forward.

Huang Zhijin: After listening to Mr. Gao and Mr. Shao, I think Bear Electric may resonate more with the business owners and founders in the audience. Both of their businesses are inherently borderless — their user bases are borderless, and their technology is borderless. But Bear operates in the small home appliance sector. In European and American markets, traditional small home appliances are generally viewed as a very mature, ubiquitous product category. We cannot say we have a successful track record in overseas expansion yet; we can only share some of our experience.

Bear has its own manufacturing system and strong user insight capabilities, but these capabilities were built over more than a decade of deep cultivation in the domestic market. When we started expanding overseas, it was not like we were fully prepared and actively choosing where to go on a set timeline; it felt more like we were pushed forward by market dynamics. Looking at our capability set, Southeast Asia is the market where user habits are closest to domestic users, so that was our first stop for overseas expansion. Starting with a more familiar market did prove easier to gain initial traction. Currently, our sales on TikTok in Southeast Asia are doing fairly well, with some solid results in certain categories, but we have also encountered significant boundaries in the process.

Traditional kitchen appliances and household appliances are closely tied to people's daily lives, so overseas expansion cannot avoid the issue of user habits — users in every country and region have both similarities and stark differences, which is exactly the biggest challenge for our creative small home appliances. Unlike SmallRig, which can get direct input from users, it is very difficult for us to collect user feedback overseas. Based on our experience, my advice for companies going global is to lock in your most important target market in the early stage, and maintain strong strategic resolve. Compared to the fast, short-cycle dynamics of the domestic market, overseas expansion has a much longer cycle, which is the real tangible boundary companies face.

Liu Chen: Many brands that have built large scale in the domestic market still encounter many hurdles when expanding outward. Bear Electric's partnership with Pattern — is that still focused on Southeast Asia? Why did you choose to partner with them, and what have the results been?

Huang Zhijin: Bear Electric did OEM exports in its early days, and we have about four to five years of experience in proprietary brand overseas expansion. Last year, we came into contact with Pattern by chance. We run domestic e-commerce, so we naturally have a deep understanding of the Chinese market, but when doing overseas business, we invariably face two pain points: first, how to achieve localization, and second, how to gain insight into overseas users. Pattern can help us address both of these problems to a certain extent.

In addition, overseas expansion also brings challenges like regulatory compliance. Small home appliances are part of traditional manufacturing, usually with large production batches, and local compliance requirements are quite high. It is not appropriate for a company to make huge upfront investments right out the gate. So we hit it off immediately with Pattern, starting our partnership at the end of last year focused on the US market. They use an outright buyout model, starting with one product as an initial pilot.

Liu Chen: Have you received payment for that yet?

Huang Zhijin: After the last conference, many peers added me on WeChat, particularly curious about whether we had received payment. The first payment was due after three months, and we have already received that first installment, so everyone can rest easy.

Liu Chen: Companies really do have different entry points for globalization. For SmallRig, which serves global users directly, user operations are not the biggest headache — the main challenge is the approach to crossing boundaries; when Bear Electric expanded outward, it chose to start with the more familiar neighboring Southeast Asian market; while Rokid was born global, its globalization still follows a measured rhythm, rather than rolling out everywhere at once — it started in China and expanded outward step by step.

03 Challenges of Crossing Boundaries: Ecosystems, Cognitive Gaps, and Blockbuster Product Strategy

Liu Chen: SmallRig is not only making products now, but also building an ecosystem, which is a major and challenging leap. What is the biggest challenge you are currently facing?

Gao Haiyan: We are a company that embraces "stubborn persistence and steady, unglamorous grind" — we do not decide what to make on our own; users tell us what to make. That has made us a company that responds to users with high agility.

But to respond to user demand from 160 countries and regions, with vastly different environments, lifestyles, and application scenarios, while maintaining high agility in the face of such a large demand pool, we had to move toward a multi-category, full-scene industrial ecosystem. If we were a product manufacturing company in the past, today we actually define ourselves as a scenario-based ecosystem company.

We have built ecosystems for smartphone shooting, camera shooting, action camera shooting, imaging power solutions, imaging microphones, and imaging lighting, with nearly 1,400 SKUs on sale. But when we look back at the user demand pool, that is still not enough products. In this sense, as we build products around core devices and user scenarios, we still need to be more agile, which pushes us to become a value ecosystem provider for end-to-end scenarios.

The biggest challenge this brings is a test of our capabilities and resources. Relying solely on internal capabilities, internal management systems, and resource allocation to respond to user demand is far from enough. So we need to open up our scenarios, supply chain systems, and market systems, combining internal and external resources to form a more efficient "co-creation ecosystem".

The value creation logic is completely different when you stand on the user side versus the product side; moving from making products to building an ecosystem requires a systematic, "mountain-climbing" style cross-over;

in the past we "co-created with users", and now on that basis, we want to co-create with the industry, with the broader industrial chain, and with all creators. Anyone who is willing to deliver value to users in imaging and shooting scenarios is welcome to co-create with us.

After opening up our systems, a company needs to evolve from internal organization to external networked organization, which brings challenges to processes, models, mechanisms, and culture.

After opening up all operational ports, we will also open up access to capital. Some innovators are excellent, but their capabilities and products are not yet fully developed. Beyond giving them orders and industrial empowerment, we can also provide capital support. Through our commercial systems, industrial systems, investment ecosystem, and market ecosystem, we will co-create with all partners at a broader scale.

In short, stand on the side of users, create value for users, and co-create with all creators. That is our key word for crossing boundaries: co-creation.

Liu Chen: The core of Mr. Gao's point is that existing capabilities are insufficient to meet growing user demand, so the company must open up its internal capabilities. Mr. Huang previously mentioned cognitive challenges. For creative small home appliances, a traditional and highly competitive category, what is the biggest challenge Bear faces during its cross-border expansion? Beyond the partnership with Pattern, what other approaches are you using to address these challenges?

Huang Zhijin: For companies of a certain scale, the first obstacle to overseas expansion is actually internal cognitive change. Early on, we assumed we had strong capabilities, which turned out to be a pitfall.

We were likely to apply domestic playbooks — developing three-year strategies, conducting strategic insight and pain point identification, pulling full sets of market data — that was the first pitfall we stepped in. That was an expensive lesson, because the company simply did not have the capability for overseas insight and demand analysis. Even after investing money in that research, a founder might see an interesting scenario and set a revenue target arbitrarily. The team would take that target, develop products, find customers, sign distributors to push inventory, or operate directly using domestic logic, only to run into all kinds of problems in the process.

Our initial thinking was simply to sell domestic products overseas, since we already had over a thousand SKUs and over a thousand sets of molds in China. But there is one hard-earned lesson: if you want to achieve meaningful scale in globalization and meet group expectations, localization is indispensable. Even standardized products like some 3C digital items are heavily shaped by local usage habits. We did not have that awareness early on, which was a major pitfall. And when you step into a pit in overseas markets, it takes much longer to climb out than it does in the domestic market.

Liu Chen: Mr. Shao, what is your view on the challenges companies face in crossing boundaries?

Shao Huaqiang: We are a bit different from the other two. Science and technology innovation companies cannot start out with a large number of SKUs; we essentially can only focus on one SKU at the beginning. Why do we define products by the baseline of our technology? Because our fault tolerance is very low — if that one product fails, the company may fail entirely. So hard tech companies should raise as much capital as possible, otherwise, after one failure, the team may disband before you get to test a viable product.

Hard tech companies need a blockbuster product strategy. We pre-research a lot of technologies, but when bringing products to market, we strive for the highest possible product-market fit. But before the product is built, no one knows the outcome, because the technology is so cutting-edge. So you have to avoid putting out filler products.

Any team, whether you have thousands of SKUs, dozens of SKUs, or just one SKU, always has limited resources. When running tests, I advise everyone to concentrate resources on a single point of breakthrough. You can target the US market, or the Asia-Pacific market, but at the entry point you choose, you should commit sufficient resources. Otherwise, you may fail before you get valid test results, and not even understand why you failed, which is a real shame.

Some companies run Kickstarter campaigns but are unwilling to invest in KOLs — that is simply unrealistic. Expecting organic traffic to carry you all the way is also unrealistic; that is just how the market has changed.

In addition, the AI industry now faces major compliance challenges. Due to geopolitical impacts, governments around the world are becoming more conservative, requiring companies to provide extensive compliance documentation, and we also need to carry out large-scale localized data deployment. It is equally unrealistic for a company to build all of that on its own for every single market. That is another area where platforms like Pattern can deliver value.

Liu Chen: Our three guests come from different types of companies and face very different problems. Companies cannot blindly copy their experiences. For example, hard tech companies emphasize concentrating resources on a single point, but for some categories, only offering one SKU will lead to quick failure; conversely, if a hard tech company tries to launch hundreds of SKUs like other businesses, it may run out of runway before the core product is fully functional. All experiences can only serve as reference.

04 Insights from Crossing Boundaries: Choice Matters More Than Effort

Liu Chen: Finally, I would like to ask each of you to leave the founders in the audience with one takeaway.

Shao Huaqiang: I think we may be living in both the best of times and the worst of times. If we all work together for win-win outcomes and co-creation, opportunities are earned through collective effort and collaboration.

Huang Zhijin: Overseas markets bring crises, but they also bring opportunities.

Gao Haiyan: I pay close attention to the issue of ROI. As products, innovation, operations, and business become increasingly complex, it is truly no longer possible to measure everything by ROI. For example, the public welfare-focused user customization program we discussed earlier cannot have its ROI calculated; building user communities as core infrastructure also cannot have its ROI calculated; many things we do for the industry and for users also cannot be measured by ROI.

If you only do things that can be measured by ROI, many of the initiatives we talked about today would never happen. I want to leave everyone with one sentence: If a lack of ROI means business failure, then focusing solely on ROI can easily lead to strategic myopia.

Liu Chen: Brand globalization is a difficult but correct path. If you keep fighting a downward spiral of cutthroat competition, the road will get narrower and narrower; growing upward is the better way out.

The biggest difference between today and the past is that more and more outstanding local partners overseas are moving in the same direction as Chinese brands, making many things easier. One founder summed up Pattern's capabilities as "one-stop access to global markets", which I think is a perfect summary. Sometimes, choice matters more than effort.

Finally, I will leave everyone with a question: Where is your company's origin? What is your pace? What boundary are you facing today, and how will you cross it? Because every boundary you cross brings you one step closer to true globalization. Thank you all!

This article was first published on the official website of Ebrun.