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Common Gathering is a creative market that gathers
arts, coffee and concrete jungle residents, where they invite
local coffee shops to participate and share their understand-
ing of a “good cup of coffee” with the community. Holding
their first event outdoors, the co-founders noticed that many
brands try to focus on outdoors consumption: “We realized
there are more brands that are pushing and promoting their
own coffee tumbler or to-go cups. Trying to be more envi-
ronmentally conscious and friendly has been a common
incentive for a lot of those brands.”
With the growth of online retail in China, coffee was also
a good to sell during the economy turbulent time: without a
doubt, take away options or online food delivery services have
helped a lot during the pandemic, but dining in and enjoying
a cup of coffee in a cafe will always be an irreplaceable expe-
rience. “I think it’s nice to have an outdoor seating area for
coffee shops, and people definitely appreciate it too because
it’s usually pet friendly as well! However, since Shanghai’s
weather is so unpredictable, it might seem like a waste of space
Vivian Sze
Co-founder of Common Rare. for the coffee shop owners,” shared Vivian.

As we all know China is now a big player in coffee mar-
ket (or any other market, really). Habitual coffee drinkers in
China’s big cities consume an annual average of 300 cups,
within a whisker of the figure (329) in the United States, ac-
cording to a report by Deloitte China in collaboration with
MM Capital, though per capita annual consumption lags far
behind at nine cups on Chinese mainland.
“I can clearly recall back in 2005 when I first moved to
Shanghai, all I remember is going to Starbucks and that was about
it,” shares Vivian. And now Shanghai surprisingly operates the
most coffee shops in the world. In the 1800s Shanghai was the
first Chinese city to introduce coffee to the masses and today,
there are around 6,000 coffeehouses (triple the amount of cof-
feehouses in New York). “Especially these couple of years you
really do see a lot of indie cafés popping up around town. I feel
like people are adapting to the whole “grab a coffee to go” lifestyle
now. I guess its the whole “fast pace” lifestyle that everyone
seems be adapted to or one other reason could be that a lot of
them tend to take those pictures where they would hold up their
to-go cups and share them on their social media.” People in
Shanghai drink coffee for any occasion: a casual date, meeting
or get together with friends, going for work or just walking around
– coffee is a drink to go.
Exactly because of coffee being such a hot take-anywhere
product the Common Gathering was created: “The first Com-
mon Gathering was back in October last year, and it happened
to be our very first outdoor creative market. We normally
don’t do outdoor events due to Shanghai’s incredibly unpre-
dictable weather, but we decided to follow through with that
idea because we were kind of still in the midst of a pandemic
and we did not think it was suitable to do it indoors. Plus, the
whole “urban outdoor lifestyle” was a hit as well.”

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