ILLUSTRATION: KURT WOERPEL FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When Shanghai university student Milky Guan buys cosmetics, she isn’t impressed by beauty stores and big name brands. Instead, the 20-year-old relies on a Chinese social media shopping website called Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book, to figure out what’s hot and what’s not. On Xiaohongshu—a startup that’s part e-commerce portal and part social media platform—Guan follows a popular online beauty influencer ...