Chen Ning, who'd spent more than a decade in bespoke menswear, founded Pane in China in 2022 with a small team of collaborators, building the brand around a reworked take on the German Army Trainer silhouette. The debut Light Training NO-GI sneaker's deconstructed look caught on fast, pulling in audiences across Japan, Bangkok and the US within a few years of launch. The brand has kept expanding deliberately slowly since, opening a flagship in Beijing's Taikoo Li South and eyeing further stores in Europe and America rather than scaling all at once.