Written | Wu Xianzhi
Edit the | Wang Pan
A paper inquiry will push the domestic mattress brand Mousse, which is in the critical period of the IPO, to the cusp of the storm.
A month ago, the CSRC threw out 59 questions at a time in the inquiry letter, of which the biggest question was "who is the old man" - this domestic brand from the "French royal family" has repeatedly used a foreign old man dressed in white, glasses and a white beard in various posters to create its high-end "foreign brand" image.
The Mousse incident has made the "fake foreign brand", an almost open collective secret of the domestic brand, reappear in the world. For a long time in the past, the killer skill of the majority of domestic brands to create brands was almost only counterfeit foreign brands.
The fiercely competitive and rapid iteration of the clothing category is one of the hardest hit areas.
After all, the urgent pursuit of brands is particularly enthusiastic in the apparel industry. "This year, GUCCI is a sweater, and the pattern alone can catch fire." In the process of communicating with us, a person in the clothing industry inadvertently revealed his envy for well-known foreign brands.
High brand recognition means more sales and higher profit margins, for clothing merchants, building a highly recognized brand is almost their common dream.
To this end, many domestic clothing brands in the early years in order to quickly establish a brand, have moved the crooked mind of counterfeit foreign brands, registered trademarks abroad, technology or raw materials imported from abroad, or imitated similar foreign products in design, various methods emerge in an endless stream, just to confuse consumers.
However, with the rapid development of the industry in recent years, information asymmetry is gradually alleviating, and such shortcuts are also being blocked step by step. However, when fake foreign cards became a dead end, the low-cost explosive gameplay advocating traffic theory once became popular.
But this does not seem to make the brand dream of clothing merchants shine too much from ideal to reality.
Traffic alone can't save businesses, let alone brands
Whenever the times change, the textile industry will rush to the forefront.
In the process of modernization, the textile industry has provoked the girder of national industry; since the 1980s, the development of individual industry and commerce has rarely formed a considerable number of regional distribution centers with different characteristics like the garment industry. From Hangzhou Four Seasons Green to Chengdu Lotus Pond, from Zhengzhou Railway Station to Guangzhou Thirteen Lines, each season of tide cards is from those merchants and endless customers flow to the whole country.
However, with the beginning of young people joining the consumer group in recent years, the speed of trend change has been accelerating, and the cycle of the clothing industry has also changed sharply. The explosive gameplay of the time and the times has made more and more merchants start to be helpless.
"There are too many uncertainties in each link of product selection, shipment, and payment collection." Li Ming, a second batch of merchants in the middle of the industrial chain, used a speaking style similar to Boss Xu to summarize the characteristics of the garment industry as "fast, fast, big and big". Due to inventory backlogs, payment collection problems and sporadic epidemics, he has been in a state of anxiety in the past two years.
Because the second batch of merchants are mainly heavy channel ideas, there is often a lack of cognition of trends, brands, etc., making the second batch and its downstream become the first batch of people affected by this round of industrial change.
In 2020, he relied on the "big name equalization" road, and the book looks still stable and rising. By 2021, "I don't know if I bet on the wrong treasure, or the environment has changed, it is more difficult to explode, and the profit cannot cover the cost of the warehouse."
The explosive style of play is not only a problem with the sale of goods, but also the use of this idea to make a brand may be the opposite.
In Haining Leather City, according to the theory, the third quarter is the peak sales season for fur and fur down, but it is a pity that Liu Yuan's factory direct sales store is cold in front of the door. A piece of fur or fur down, no matter how good the workmanship, materials, and styles, the price of thousands of dollars still makes many people just look at it and not buy it. "We have a good reputation, but the outside world does not know this brand, customers are satisfied with trying on it, and they hesitate to inquire about it."
The increasing diversification of the consumer market has made traditional merchants like Liu Yuan begin to feel uncomfortable. Three months ago, he thought of enhancing brand awareness through live broadcasting, looking for an MCN agency to bring goods, spending more than 100,000 yuan, and several times down to make him regret not being the beginning.
Liu Yuan recalled that there was a live broadcast that made him very speechless, it took a few minutes to introduce the product, but only slightly mentioned the brand twice, "the anchor said that we are not famous, the name is awkward, and it is useless to mention it." He prepared more than 200,000 goods, sold more than 100,000 heads, if deducted and then returned nearly 60,000 yuan in pieces, the return of the capital will become a problem.
He told Photon Planet that live broadcasting may not be suitable for brands, and there is almost no difference between small brands entering the live broadcast room and white cards.
"If it sells well, it is due to the aura of the anchor, and it has nothing to do with your brand."
Clothing brands cannot be made into FMCG
The slippage of the explosive aura has made the fat phenomenon of some clothing industry appear in its original form. In the view of many people in the industry, whether it is a foreign brand quick success, or a high-priced sale, the false prosperity caused by the "fast" play method is difficult to sustain, and attaching importance to internal strength and refined operation is the only way for merchants to establish a moat and establish a brand.
Through the analysis of La Chapelle, JORYA and Jinhong Group (TEENIEWEENIE), the three more representative enterprises in the listed companies, Photon Planet found that the brand adopts different operating models and will produce huge development differences.
Just looking at the revenue and growth rate in the last five quarters, it can be found that the revenue of the three companies is different in the case of the same online and offline channels. La Chapelle is deteriorating and is now wearing a star hat. Xinhe shares grew steadily, while Jinhong Group had the highest growth rate and volume.
An interesting phenomenon is that the number of three brands is negatively correlated with the scale of revenue. La Chapelle, which has the lowest revenue and slowest growth, has more than 20 brands; Xinhe Shares, which is growing faster and has a middle revenue, has 7 sub-brands; and Jinhong Group, which has the fastest growth rate and the largest volume, has only 3 brands.
Once upon a time, La Chapelle was once famous as China's "ZARA", but now it is mired in the mire. A brokerage apparel industry analyst said that La Chapelle has laid a good online foundation, has omni-channels, and commodities, traffic, marketing, and membership have been opened. The problem is that manufacturers lack continuous unique design, the style is becoming more and more single, and consumers are less and less buying; and the management's understanding of online is also in its infancy, without refined operation of fans, and the brand positioning is not clear.
In simple terms, the brand does not grasp the trend well, the brand mind has not precipitated, in this case, blindly increasing the brand, and has not produced a positive effect.
It is understood that in terms of brand operation, La Chapelle extended more than ten "burning letters" brand matrix, and the real market recognition is La Chapelle's - Chinese name.
La Chapelle (mid to high end women's wear), La Chapelle SPORT (sports), Candies (girl), 7.Modifier (low-end), La Babite (25-35 years old Japanese and Korean), Office Lady (professional women's wear), Laetia by La Chapelle (ladies), La Chapelle Mini, Puella (Italian style little women), Ulifestyle (fast fashion)... This kind of "foreign brand" fission even Mu Si has to call out professionally.
A woman's wear industry insider told Photon Planet that the above nine brands seem to be clearly positioned, but there is overlap with each other, and the price and style are different and gradually fall into mediocrity. "The management pursues scale and blind expansion offline; pursues traffic online and plays the marketing card, resulting in an increase in inventory, coupled with the impact of the epidemic on offline stores, which has become the last straw that crushes the camel."
The performance of the same clothing brand, Xinhe Shares and Jinhong Group has steadily climbed this year. The aforementioned apparel industry analysts believe that multi-brand operations are very common in the industry, the more the number of differentiation, the more difficult it is to do, often the parent brand has a clearer positioning and fine operation.
"Many people think that a wave of advertising can make the brand, and in the case of not knowing the tone of the platform, any investment is useless." A consumer investor told Photon Planet that some new consumer brands blindly pursue traffic and sales, and then take the data to find investors for financing, the cycle is reciprocating, enjoying it, and does not take the time to think about who the target group is, how to design it, and how to launch it.
"Make to C into to VC, make the brand into FMCG."
Practicing "internal skills" is not fast
Obviously, more and more people are realizing the importance of branding, and people are beginning to rethink the relationship between traffic and branding.
One practitioner believes that the traffic model has many similarities with the past second-hand merchants, limited by low gross profit, so it is very dependent on the explosion and quantity to obtain the scale effect, and then the anti-risk ability is extremely poor. "Traffic will not make people remember your brand, only let you remember a certain style, a certain anchor, rely on traffic to sell goods, and finally become a slave to traffic."
This logic ignores that clothing consumption is a highly personalized consumption, and the pattern that inherently determines the outbreak of single products is unlikely to meet most needs. For example, in recent years, making clothing through video and live broadcasting has its advantages, but there are also inevitable limitations, and it is easy to fall into homogeneous competition when a single product is exploded.
The explosion of a single product may produce a certain scale effect, but as a non-standard industry, the problem caused by the excessive concentration of SKU has made the apparel industry fall into a strange circle: painstakingly creating low-priced explosive models, not only can not be channeled to the brand through the single product and then produce brand mentality, but also can not meet the increasingly diverse long-tail needs of consumers, and it is impossible to become the core competitiveness of merchants.
Merchants should give up their illusions and return to the right path of cultivating internal skills.
For merchants, the brand is not the result of traffic accumulation, but a collection of all-round capabilities from grasping the trend to production to refined operation. If you want to do a good brand, you must first grasp the trend and launch a product that is hard enough - this is completely different from the previous style of playing in the world.
The vagaries of the tide are both challenges and opportunities. Take Jinhong Group's academic brand TEENIEWEENIE, for example, the new brand tried to digitalize its style for the first time in 2021, and with the help of Tmall digital products, established a new model of capturing fashion trends.
The data shows that the brand, which eats digital crabs, successfully doubled its sales year-on-year during 2021 618.
On the basis of launching high-quality products, further combining public domain and private domain, turning "traffic" into "retention", establishing private domains and precipitating brands will be the same key step.
At this point, the ability to select the right channel to precipitate the supply side and the operation side becomes critical. In fact, only a mature platform like Taoshi can have a more complete ecology and support the long-term growth of clothing brands.
An industry insider told Photon Planet that the apparel industry chain is long, the difficulty of mental precipitation is high, and the overall ability requirements of merchants are also high. Only by grasping the trend, pushing new landings, operating private domains and other links in depth and thoroughly, can we not be eliminated by the unpredictable industry environment.
This also makes Taobao Tmall the main business position that clothing brands cannot bypass. Nowadays, multi-platform operations have become the norm, but it is Taobao Tmall that leads the fashion and style and enables new merchants to achieve continuous advancement from 0 to 1, from 1 to 100.
Although compared with the traffic model, it will be much slower to cultivate brand internal strength on platforms such as Taoshi, but when the brand has independent design capabilities, accurate market positioning, perfect supply chain and mature operating logic, at least it has a deeper moat.