Shen Yun Shop: Unique Gifts with Chinese Soul. Carrying the Tradition

Weichu Shen, an IT Manager, shares the background and the story of the gift shop store inspired by the Shen Yun Performing Art

Short brand story

The Shen Yun Shop is an independent outgrowth of Shen Yun Performing Arts, which is a nonprofit performing arts organization.
The mission of the organization is to revive genuine classical Chinese dance and authentic classical culture, which is the culture before communism. A lot of authentic Chinese cultural values have already been lost since the Cultural Revolution in the 1960-1970s. Ten years totally destroyed the aesthetic underpinnings and ancient relics, resulting in the essence of the traditional culture being lost. Shen Yun’s mission is to revive that great culture that is connected to Heaven.

Shen Yun Performing Art presents new choreography and new performances every year. They feature elaborate dancing and a live orchestra.

The Shen Yun Shop, we bring all the beautiful products inspired by the Shen Yun to our audience. Designed in-house in New York, we wish to share the best moment and the rich story, such as benevolence, preservation… all these great essences behind each piece of the Shen Yun show to our audience. My job is to find the best way of presenting our products on the website, we eventually choose the MBC bundle to present nicely of our best gift set idea.

How did the idea of using bundles come up?

We gather together a variety of products that we think to make sense for customers, and we bundle them with the MBC Bundles App. We started from the gift store because we were hoping to provide our customers with the best choices and the best deals. Also, we wanted to upsell our customers, letting them experience related products they wouldn’t have normally bought.

From the beginning, we figured out that it’s a good idea to come up with gift sets and present them to our customers. So, the need to use a bundling app came up very quickly, but we were surprised that Shopify doesn’t have the native functionality for that. And we started looking for a third-party bundling app.

Did the MBC Bundles meet your needs?

Compared to what we had before, MBC Bundles is really… I feel like it’s revolutionary — so much better than the older bundling apps that we used before. We had tried three different bundling apps.
Frankly, each time they were painful to use but we just had to use them because Shopify doesn’t provide native bundle functionalities, so we were stuck with choosing one of the third-party applications for that functionality.

When I tried the MBC Bundles App, your company’s solution, it felt like “Wow”! It really saves us tons of time for our operators to maintain our bundles.
So, even though it may be a little bit different from the business model that the MBC Bundle is using compared to ours, we are still happy to switch to your company’s solution.

I think the user experience designer and the other people behind the scenes at MBC Bundles, you and your team are very sharp, really taking care of our users. That is something that I have always admired.

What are the brand’s plans for the future?

We do have consignment partners that are working with us for different kinds of distribution channels in different areas. We have partners in Europe, Korea, Taiwan, Canada, and Australia. They basically represent us there locally and online. And we’re hoping to have more channels in the future so that it can expand our reach to other areas and in different languages and different regions.

We don’t want to limit ourselves just to the shoppers here in the United States.

Updated on: 01/06/2022