The world's online business Guan Lidan
In recent years, the blazer with sports underwear and the upper body business bottom legging (leggings) have become popular Internet celebrities.
Established in 2014, the new sports brand "Lolita of the Runaway", as a former Tao girl, founder Chen Nunyang has transformed core fans into seed users by virtue of his influence effect inside and outside tao, and in just one year, the brand's sales on Tmall and other platforms have exceeded 100 million. By 2021, the cumulative sales of "Runaway Lolita" will exceed 16 million pieces, becoming the leader among the new domestic products.
How to predict market trends in advance? Chen Nuanyang discovered new business opportunities.
This summer, "Runaway Lori" set out to develop a casual apparel category. Different from the past, this leisure series called "Exquisite Lazy Three Kilometers", from design to mass production, new product development is completely based on digital guidance, Tmall TMIC (Tmall New Product Innovation Center) and Rhino Zhizuo are the behind-the-scenes supporters of this new product series.
"The biggest pain point of apparel brands is the grasp and stocking of the current trend trend, with the advantage of Tmall TMIC in trend data, and rhinoceros in the supply chain 'fast reaction', we have completed an excellent new product test." "Runaway Lori," Fang said.
"Runaway Lori" is 6 years old, it started from a small shop of Internet celebrity Chen Nunyang, completed the brand power and supply chain construction in a short period of time, and has become a small-scale cutting-edge clothing brand on Tmall, and has won the first place in the list of Internet women's sports brands for many years. The small entrepreneurial team of two or three people has expanded to more than 100 people, and the suppliers they have cooperated with have gradually grown.
In 2013, Chen Nunyang, who was still studying in the dance department of Hangzhou Normal University, became popular on the Internet because of his fitness photos. In the process of communicating with fans, a thought is getting stronger and stronger in Chen Nunyang's mind: the existing women's fitness clothes are more monotonous and boring, can you design some good-looking fitness clothes so that more people can enjoy fitness?
In 2014, "Runaway Lolita" opened a Taobao store, in 2015 into Tmall, began to go to the Internet celebrity, the main brand, Chen Nunyang tried to fill the "design of women's gym clothes" this market gap, "Runaway Lolita" locked the price segment within 300 yuan, "fashion" and "cost-effective" integration, quickly absorbed a group of young fans, the scale continues to grow.
By the end of 2020, "Lolita of the Runaway" has successfully opened up the situation in the Tmall sneakers and apparel category, and the total number of users on the whole network is currently about 12 million.
Chen Nunyang, the founder of "Runaway Lolita"
"Runaway Lolita" has a "three-step" ten-year strategy: taking advantage of Tmall and other e-commerce companies, and strive to be the first in the sales volume of the whole network; brand upgrading, and strive to become a national brand; advanced manufacturing, and strive to achieve international quality.
In order to achieve this goal, since the beginning of this year, "Lolita of the Runaway" has launched the "Aurora" series representing high quality, the "no size" series that is more in line with the market trend, and the IP cooperation model with the Yin and Yang Division. Through the experimentation of different styles and types, we strive to reach a wider consumer group.
In May this year, "Runaway Lolita" also officially announced a new brand spokesperson - THE9-Yu Shuxin, using the "rice circle economy" to attract young female users.
Yu Shuxin poster
However, in the process of going up, "Runaway Lolita" has always faced the common pain points of small and medium-sized clothing brands.
One is design. "Runaway Lolita" started from the vertical powder suction market of women's sportswear, and if you want to go from a niche to the public, you must pursue a larger user group, which means a wider range of categories and a more relevant clothing design that is more in line with the public's preferences.
The second is stocking. Users are pursuing more and more personalization, and the replacement cycle of apparel products is getting shorter and shorter, which means that brands need more stockpiling and faster turnover, and the supply chain must inevitably change from the traditional production mode of long production cycle to the fast reverse mode.
This summer, "Lolita the Runaway" began its first attempt to expand the category.
Based on the prediction of the consumption trend of leisure and sports mixing, "Lolita of The Runaway" launched the "Exquisite Lazy Three Kilometers" leisure series.
They found Tmall TMIC.
According to Tmall TMIC Xiao Er Ming, after learning about the appeal of "Runaway Lolita" hoping to accelerate the development and innovation of new products, Tmall TMIC quickly took action, first through the consumer co-creation platform "Tmall Creation Planet" to collect Tmall users' demand for "exquisite lazy three kilometers", and received more than 20,000 consumer ideas within 3 days.
Based on consumer demand and creative input, "Runaway Lolita" and Tmall TMIC jointly created and designed 11 products, and then through Tmall TMIC testing, selected the first 8 models with high public demand, and finally entered the production process, which was completed by Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Relay.
From creative collection to final rapid reaction production, Tmall TMIC and the rampaging Lori took only 15 days.
"In the past, we designed new products, basically based on the designer's experience and the team's prediction of the market." Li Jianfeng, head of the marketing department of "Runaway Lolita", said that not only that, but before the brand considered the fine consideration of the version, a new product had to go through more than many times to finalize the version, which often required a long time period.
"Exquisite Lazy Three Kilometers" new series
At the beginning of the cooperation, Li Jianfeng had doubts about the styles that consumers "chose" themselves, but still decided to gamble.
The "exquisite lazy three kilometers" series was officially launched at the Tmall 99 promotion, and the unit price of the customer was about 200 yuan, which was dozens of yuan higher than the average unit price of the brand. What Li Jianfeng did not expect was that this fledgling, "unknown and expensive" new series actually sold well.
"Before we did not have the mind of the leisure home category, in the case of higher unit prices and no promotion resources, the product can still sell, proving to be a successful attempt." Li Jianfeng said that especially when the brand is in urgent need of new products, cooperation with Tmall TMIC is often more effective.
Not just support for accurate trend data. Li Jianfeng revealed that Tmall TMIC also links rhino intelligent manufacturing, not only to give guidance on stockpiling, but also to adjust the production plan at any time according to real-time sales data, saving energy and resources.
"A piece of clothing, 4 colors and 4 yards, is 16 SKUs (inventory units), how to stock for different SKUs, the brand is actually difficult to predict." But Tmall TMIC can predict the trend and give guidance on stocking data, which is very helpful to us. ”
Research and development, testing with the help of Tmall TMIC, in the production end, "Runaway Lolita" and Alibaba's "Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing" hand in hand. Previously, the two sides had jointly developed a number of sportswear using new fabrics.
"Liquid Lycra" exercise pants developed in conjunction with Rhino Smart Manufacturing
Making a dress is not as simple as "pulling a piece of cloth and finding a tailor" in the eyes of the public. With the continuous innovation of clothing fabrics, zippers, buttons, fillings and other divisions of labor continue to refine, brands want to complete the manufacture of a piece of clothing independently, often need months or even longer to prepare. Through the efficient supply chain of Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing, "Lolita" completed the manufacture of the first batch of products in only ten days.
In addition, through trend collection and prediction, Tmall TMIC also links up with Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing to carry out small batch production and rapid iteration to resolve the inventory risk and out-of-stock risk of the brand side.
"This new product test can be successful, tmall TMIC design support and rhino intelligent manufacturing fast response capabilities are indispensable."
Now, the cumulative sales of "Runaway Lolita" have exceeded 16 million pieces, and Li Jianfeng said that he will continue to try this cooperation model in other styles in the future.
More and more cutting-edge brands like "Runaway Lolita" are constantly emerging on Tmall. Compared with large brands, they are more flexible and react more quickly to new trends in the market, but they also face shortcomings in supply chain response speed and trend prediction.
Since last year, Tmall TMIC has officially launched the "Dark Horse Factory" in conjunction with Tmall industries, Taobao University and various marketing IPs in the Alibaba ecosystem, so that more small and medium-sized brands on Tmall can use "digital new" and enjoy the five major services of the whole link, including trend mining, track selection, knowledge system, tool assistance and marketing strategy. The Dark Horse factory has also become a booster for the rapid growth of cutting-edge brands.
Since March this year, Tmall TMIC's positioning has been upgraded to a "new supply intelligence engine" to support the whole process of brand from design, production to sales. At the same time, Tmall TMIC also cooperates with Ali ecological forces such as Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing and Ali Damo Academy to solve the most difficult trend prediction, raw material preparation, flexible production and other issues for merchants, and solve the pain points of merchants with technological innovation, so that small and medium-sized brands can also focus on core business objectives such as innovation, operation and sales.
Taking this year's Double 11 as an example, the dark horse brand cooperating with Tmall TMIC has developed a total of 1450 new products, basically covering 45 high-growth trend tracks in the whole industry such as Tmall beauty, washing, and food, and the total transaction volume of these new products reached 540 million, an increase of 440% year-on-year.
Among them, the overseas brand Kelan Li's "Antioxidant No. 1 VC Essence" double 11 transaction exceeded 10 million, ranking top 4 in the Tmall International Supernova Commodity List. After cooperating with Tmall TMIC, the two sides locked in the high growth demand of "dull skin", took "prototype live VC" as the main ingredient of the new product, and cooperated with independent packaging designs such as secondary throwing, so that the new products could become explosives on the market.
The new brand Ubras cloud sizeless underwear new product double 11 sold 48 million yuan, becoming the industry's first transaction. Behind this, Tmall TMIC, together with the brand, excavated the high-growth demand track of "underwear soft support", refined the core selling points, optimized and adjusted the search keywords and pricing strategies, not only to achieve the outbreak of new products, but also to achieve cross-category new growth through double 11 and other big promotion nodes.
TianQi, head of Tmall TMIC, said that innovation and exploration have never stopped. For example, for non-standard categories such as clothing, how to effectively solve the inventory problem through digital newness; how to more effectively predict the popularity of subdivisions and niche trends; how to more effectively combine the characteristic styles of small and medium-sized brands to design and co-create; how to help small and medium-sized businesses find the optimal solution for continuous operation on Tmall through Ali ecological power... These are the core topics of Tmall TMIC.
Edited by Wang Shiqi