A small label from a big altitude.
YIMU began in 2019 as a notebook, not a company. It was the record of a herbalist's daughter trying to understand why the plants her mother harvested on the Yunnan highland were quietly outperforming the imported actives she had been taught to trust.
Cangshan foothills · late autumn · 2,200m
chapter 01
Where the wind first met the pine.
Our founding family has lived in the foothills of the Cangshan range, in western Yunnan, for four generations. The household practice was modest: a decoction of platycladus leaves for an itchy scalp, a slice of fresh ginger pressed against a stubborn follicle, a tea of wild chrysanthemum for a hot afternoon. These were not products. They were habits of attention.
When the second generation moved to a city for university, the habits were packed into suitcases — dried leaves, small tins of infused oil, handwritten instructions. They worked, where many commercial products did not. The first question was simple: why?
chapter 02
Reading the soil, before reading the market.
We spent three years reading the phytochemistry. Platycladus orientalis leaves, we learned, contain a particular set of flavonoids and diterpenes that have been studied since the 1980s for their effect on the microcirculation and the local inflammatory environment of the scalp.
Ginger rhizomes produce 6-gingerol and a family of pungent phenols that, in vitro, appear to modulate certain signalling pathways in dermal papilla cells. Adenosine, a molecule the body already makes, has been the subject of seven clinical trials in the context of female-pattern hair thinning.
None of this is proprietary. All of it is in the public literature. The task, we decided, was not to invent a molecule but to combine what is already known with a great deal of care.
chapter 03
The decision to be a quiet brand.
We did not want to build a brand that shouted. We did not want before-and-after photographs, influencer codes, or 9-ingredient miracle serums. We wanted a small label that wrote the way a researcher writes — slowly, with citations, with the assumption that the reader is intelligent.
YIMU is the result. It is direct-to-consumer because we want to spend the budget on raw material rather than packaging. It is a small team because we want every formula to be made by people whose names we know. It is a brand that ships with a printed page of references, because the science is the product.
We are still at the beginning of this. Thank you for reading this far.
chapter 04
How we source, and why altitude matters.
Not every platycladus tree is the same. The leaves we use are harvested between October and February, at elevations of 2,000 to 2,600 meters, in the eastern flank of the Cangshan range. Above this band, the plants grow slowly and the leaves concentrate their flavonoids; below it, the biomass is higher but the active content drops by an order of magnitude.
Ginger is sourced from a single cooperative in the Honghe prefecture, where the rhizomes are smaller and the 6-gingerol content is consistently above 1.4% of dry weight. We pay roughly twice the commodity price. We do not apologise for this.
Wherever possible, we cold-press and macerate on-site within 72 hours of harvest. This is the only way to keep the volatile fractions intact, and it is the reason our products have the smell they do — like wet pine, ginger, and rain, not the smell of a fragrance house.
a short list of commitments
What we will and will not do.
- We will not use the word 'miracle' on any label.
- We will not make medical claims about treating disease.
- We will publish every reference we cite, on every page where we cite it.
- We will reformulate when a better ingredient is found, even at a loss.
- We will not use fragrance to mask a poorly made formula.
- We will not chase trends that conflict with the underlying biology.
— the yimu team