I still don’t understand that for a store specializing in high-end Hanfu on Taobao, the most eye-catching position on the main page is Yangcheng Lake. Hairy crabs...
I thought this was weird enough, but then, an even weirder fact surfaced Izumi:
This Taobao Hanfu store named "Rongmei" did not do any promotion during Double 11!
Let alone doing activities , I searched this store for a long time, but I couldn't find a word related to "Double 11". In the common situation where various stores are crazy about marketing for Double 11, this kind of thing is as ordinary as water. The way we operate is going to be terrible!
However, another shocking fact is that this store not only has more than 5.6 million fans, but also has recently been successful On the market!
Backed by the Internet platform, using traffic to go public It’s not easy. Many well-known Taobao Hanfu stores, such as Handu Yishe, Ribo, Huimei (its brands Chuyu, Yinman), etc., have all failed in their IPOs. Rongmei is not the first to rush to the capital market. But it has truly become a "Hanfu shopping mall"Baodian's first share".
Double 11 has never lacked excitement, but this strange and seemingly contradictory fact makes it difficult to tell for a moment what the excitement is. Whose is it...
01
In order to run a Taobao store,
the boss lady went to Tsinghua University to study for an MBA
What to say This store does have quite a story.
In 2006, it was 25 years old. The 20-year-old Wendy, now the boss of Rongmei, was still working a 9-to-5 job at Suzhou Telecom. The ample time gave her the idea of starting a side job.
The Yangtze River Delta is one of the two major origin-based foreign trade clothing wholesale markets in my country, especially Changshu, Jiangsu. As a representative, this is the place where Wendy grew up.
He has been exposed to it since childhood, coupled with the unique blessing. The geographical advantage made Wendy quickly choose the direction of the clothing industry.
After some research, Taobao became the largest shopping website in Asia in just three years after its establishment. Naturally it became Wendy’s first choice.
Not long after, a Taobao Hanfu store called "Rongmei" began to operate. The clothing was positioned as "the last foreign trade order of Japanese Hanfu".Why did you choose this direction?
Since the late 1980s, a large number of factories have sprung up in Changshu, specifically for Japanese clothing brands provide foreign trade garment processing, including Japan Sanyang Chamber of Commerce, ONWORD, Tokyo Fashion and other big Japanese brands. As a result, the Changshu area has accumulated quite mature processing experience.
"Japanese Hanfu foreign trade last order" is the legacy of Japanese clothing brands in domestic foundries surplus goods. The characteristic of this kind of last-order goods is that the quantity is not guaranteed and the quantity is often very small. However, because these clothes are of good quality and cheap, they have the property of "picking up leaks" and are very popular among consumers. Therefore, many products will be snapped up as soon as they are new, and demand is basically in short supply.
This inspired Wendy. In the early days of establishing the store, she seized on the scarcity of last orders.Use
"Flash sale, low inventory, not participating in Taobao activities, new customers mainly rely on word-of-mouth marketing"Waiting for hunger marketing, it accumulated a group of original customers. From then on, Wendy's Rongmei got the nickname "Taobao Divine Store".
In fact, on Taobao, "original order" and "last order" are used as If you search for keywords, you will find that this is a large market, but in terms of volume, most of it is very small. If you carefully look through the reviews of these stores, you will find that there are many fake last-minute stores that "sell dog meat over sheep's heads".
For customers who like to shop for late-order clothing, whether there are reliable and stable supply channels has almost become a measure of a late-order store. The most important criterion.
Wendy’s store does just that.
Benefit from its location
Changshu, Jiangsu’s innate advantages make it easier to establish long-term cooperative relationships with suppliers, which makes Wendy’s
"Rongmei" stands out among many last-order stores.
However, Wendy's ambitions obviously don't stop there. In an interview a few years ago, she said, "Every woman has the heart to open a shop, but I have never thought about starting a small business."
In order to take the store's operation to a higher level, this woman went to Tsinghua University to study for a period of time, and in June 2009, she successfully won the MBA from Tsinghua University.
After graduating from Tsinghua University, Wendy also officially quit her job at Suzhou Telecom and became a full-time Started running her Taobao store.
2
For some people , Crisis is opportunity
Wendy and her husband Guo Jian are high school classmates, and they can be called youngPlum bamboo horse.
Guo Jian is also an academic master. He studied at Peking University as an undergraduate and studied in 2008. After getting an MBA from Tsinghua University, strictly speaking, my wife Wendy should call her husband Guo Jian "senior brother". This kind of love is truly enviable.
Getting back to the subject, before officially deciding to start a business with Wendy’s, Guo Jian had his own stable Work and earn an annual salary of up to one million. He once served as the project manager of Changshu Daqing Petrochemical Products Sales Co., Ltd., also worked as a professional oil futures investor in BP Group, and also worked as a trader in the famous American multinational group Cargill. His work resume is very dazzling.
What made Guo Jian decide to give up his million-dollar annual salary and start this business with his wife? A Taobao store that grew from grassroots?
On the one hand,
Guo Jian’s reasons are consistent with his wife’s original choice. The rapid growth of the Taobao platform in China is obvious to all. Founded in 2003, Taobao became Asia's largest online retail district within a few years, subverting people's previous cognitive logic of the Internet.
On the other hand,
The clothing field chosen by my wife is a huge category in e-commerce sales, and Hanfu occupies a huge market in this category.
The imagination of the future value of the Taobao platform and the value judgment of the Hanfu track finally made Guo Jian make up his mind to give up his annual salary of one million and start a business with his wife.
A Tsinghua top student plus another Tsinghua top student. Although we don’t know the specific content of the story yet, such top-level configuration seems to have predicted a good direction for the story. And that's exactly what happened.
In 2012, after 6 years of operation, the "Rongmei" brand took over the company the path to operationalization.
The two have their first company, and the couple also have a clear understanding division of responsibilities. Guo Jian is mainly responsible for e-commerce operations, brand promotion and supplier network, while Wendy is responsible for the company's planning and design related work.
Around 2014, it was the period of depression for Japanese clothing brands, and orders from domestic OEMs The volume began to decrease significantly, which is a big problem that threatens the survival of stores that specialize in last orders
But it was also in this year that Wendy andGuo Jian took advantage of this opportunity to complete an important transformation in the company's development.
They turned the foundries they had cooperated with for a long time into their own foundries, and began to place orders with fixed cooperative factories and operate Products designed by myself. After turning Rongmei into a major customer of the foundry, the couple was relieved.
That's it,
from a small Taobao store that only sells Japanese-style tail orders, it has transformed into a company focusing on the design, production and sales of Japanese high-end Hanfu, "Rongmei" successfully transformed under the planning of the couple.
One year after the transformation, the store’s turnover exceeded 100 million yuan. “Rongmei” became the number one Chinese clothing brand on Taobao in 2015. Wendy also worked with her husband to realize her original ambition.
Quality is the foundation that helped "Rongmei" attract fans in the first place.
After the company's transformation, the couple The company's clothing has also been positioned on high-end boutique Hanfu. The pricing of "Rongmei" is slightly higher than that of common fast-selling brands, but due to its excellent quality and simple design style, it has accurately captured the favor of a large group of consumers. .
The speed of introducing new technologies is a major factor that the couple summed up in the early stages of entrepreneurship. Operation strategy.
In the period of last-order products, Wendy's successfully accumulated a group of fans through the speed of new products. Since then, the company has maintained a frequency of new products three times a week to cater to consumers' needs for a variety of clothing styles.
However, high-frequency update is easy to say but difficult to do. It is even the key reason why many Taobao stores are restricted in their development. The reason why Wendy Guo Jian can do this lies in long-term relationships with suppliers. During the cooperation, a “supply chain system characterized by small batches, customization and rapid response” was formed. ”
In 2019, Rongmei’s inventory turnover rate reached 3.66, which is 3 times the industry average
Under efficient operation, Rongmei has gradually cultivated consumers' purchasing habits, and user stickiness has become increasingly high. The stronger. At this time, Rongmei has grown into a large team with more than 100 people.
On the one hand, relying on the strong manufacturing capacity of the Yangtze River Delta in my country, on the other hand, it is accompanied byWith the explosive growth of the Taobao platform, Guo Jian and Wendy not only made "Rongmei" the leading online retail company in Changshu City, but also brought it into the capital market.
From the prospectus, Guo Jianwendi and his wife hold about 73.68% of the company's shares. Calculated based on the market value of "Rongmei" of 6 billion after listing, the two people His net worth is as high as 4.5 billion.
Guo Jian
The decision to give up one million annual salary in this context It turned out to be the wisest choice.
03
A double family 11 Taobao stores that also offer discounts
The "Rongmei" Taobao store run by Guo Jian and Wendy, a couple, On the platform, it can be called a strange flower. Let’s list a few:
One phenomenon is that when most clothing While stores are putting a lot of effort into selecting models and display backgrounds, most of Rongmei's product detail pages still maintain the simple display style of the last-order period, with a clean white background and bare product displays. Doesn't look trendy or fashionable
Another strange phenomenon is,
<p data-from-paste="1" data-diagnose-id "f5d7478f3e965bfcbc54fdc188d367de" 11. As a common cognitionby the public
At the moment of acceptance, "Rongmei" is holding high the banner of no discounts throughout the year
This directly leads to annual " During the "Tmall 618" and "Taobao Double 11" periods, "Rongmei" was nowhere to be found in the sales list of the Hanfu category.
<p data-from-paste Regarding this fact, an industry insider A top shopping brand person said: "'Double 11' focuses on promotions, while Rongmei rarely does activities. They have always been self-operated and do not particularly cooperate with the platform."
Perhaps this is not important to the couple, because the annual sales performance of "Rongmei" is very impressive, not even worse than those two days.
The strange phenomenon also includes the couple selling local Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs in their own shop...
<p data-from-paste="1" data-diagnosAll this shows that the couple is running the business Strategically, it has its own distinctive features.
This feature is actually based on Guo Jianwendi’s approach to his own store clear understanding.
The target group of "Rongmei" is the "quality group" and the trend Stylish product page display is not the main focus of this consumer group.
They have the ability to appreciate and pursue quality. The pricing is cheaper than similar products at the counter, which just meets their needs. Therefore, even if the price of "Rongmei" is higher than that of well-known fast-selling brands such as Zara, Uniqlo, and UR, they will buy it willingly.
No discounts throughout the year, in fact, it is essentially a marketing strategy.
Consumer groups that pursue quality will prefer products with higher brand tonality. Wendy Guo Jian and his wife are just that Capture this.
<p data-from-paste="1" data-diagnose-id"Rongmei" has a high customer price and a strong premium capability. An advantage is that it also has a large number of loyal old customers, and its repurchase rate is much higher than that of its general peers.
Therefore, even if the store never does any activities, every time it launches a new product, it will spontaneously form an explosion.
Save marketing costs, why not?
Perhaps, Duan Yongping’s two famous sayings, It is just right to apply it to Guo Jian and Wendy Guo.
"If a consumer goods company pays too much attention to marketing and not to products, it will have no future; if it takes the cost-effective route, it will not have a good future."
Of course in development, Wendy Guo Jian also wantsFace some practical problems.
For the company, more than 90% of the revenue All come from the sales revenue of Taobao store "Rongmei High-end Hanfu". The high reliance on third-party platforms means that any changes in the platform will directly affect the company. Although there are currently no relevant agreements or restrictions between "Rongmei" and the platform, independent expansion of other sales channels in the future may bring more possibilities to "Rongmei".
In addition, for a clothing company, Rongmei’s original clothing design accounts for only 30%, which is far lower than the industry average. Historical data shows that Rongmei’s annual investment in R&D is usually less than 10% of its revenue in the same period.
The lack of original design will inevitably lead to frequent plagiarism and transfer problems. According to Tianyan's investigation, Rongmei has multiple records of being sued by other companies for the same reason, which are basically infringement disputes.
Faced with external competition, Guo Jian and Wendy’s IPO road It is very successful, but only by long-term supply, ensuring credibility and insisting on development can we go further.
As the “No. 1 Taobao brand Hanfu stock”, I hope “Rongmei” can improve its internal skills and tell better stories in the capital market.Author: Uncle Hang
