NPC Beijing

NPC — short for New Project Center — was founded in 2009 by Chinese actor and TV presenter Li Chen (李晨) and Taiwanese-American musician Will Pan (潘玮柏), as a celebrity-fronted streetwear multi-brand store. The first NPC opened in Shanghai, with the Beijing flagship arriving shortly after at 3.3 Plaza on Sanlitun North Street, in the same retail corridor as Sanlitun Taikoo Li and the city's dense streetwear cluster. A second Beijing store later opened in Nali Patio. NPC was one of the first stores in mainland China to package international sneaker and streetwear inventory together with celebrity-led marketing and its own in-house labels, and the model proved durable: by 2020 the chain operated roughly twenty-five stores across China. The NPC brand mix has always been triangulated between three things: international streetwear and sneaker partners (Nike, Casio G-Shock, MICHAEL LAU figurines and various global hype drops), Li Chen's own in-house label MLGB (Make Life Get Better), and the kinds of Asian-streetwear and limited-collaboration product that the founders' personal networks could access. The combination — celebrity owner-operators, Sanlitun real estate, sneaker hype, in-house apparel — made NPC a defining piece of the late-2000s and 2010s mainland streetwear story, and the store became a pilgrimage point for Beijing's first generation of post-2008 hypebeasts. Fifteen years on, NPC's relevance is more historical than at-the-front-of-the-pack — the Nali Patio location has been affected by the area's redevelopment and the Chinese streetwear scene has moved past celebrity-curated retail toward designer-led shops like DOE and Innersect. But the Sanlitun store remains operating and the chain continues to function as both a celebrity merchandising arm and a streetwear multi-brand store with national distribution.