The era of home appliance "beauty" has come.
Text/Jiang Xuefen
Editor/Fan Tingting
Once upon a time, the refrigerator, as one of the "three major pieces of white goods", was a necessity for starting a small family. Today, refrigerators are saturated with more than 100 units per 100 households.
The growth of major appliances is flat, especially the refrigerator is not easy to break, and it is not a problem to use it for ten years. Over the years, refrigerator brands have always carried out iterative upgrades around the dimensions of "preservation, capacity, and intelligence", and the technical field has been attacking the city, but it is difficult to give birth to the motivation for people to "buy a second refrigerator" in the consumption scene.
In essence, the refrigerator is a kind of "low temperature container", in the traditional concept, it is mainly used to hoard food, but with the change of people's living scenes and consumption habits, hoarding foreign wine, beauty, mother and baby products that have higher requirements for the storage environment, the refrigerator at home is gradually stretched.
Moreover, it is a bit aggrieved to put thousands of skin care products next to overnight dishes; the 82-year-old Lafite of "temperature 16-22 ° and humidity 70% is best preserved" is placed next to Coca-Cola, and indeed buried in famous wine; the baby's rations are placed next to a pile of pigs, beef and mutton, how to look not very hygienic.
As a result, the era of fine storage of refrigerators has quietly opened.
Refrigerators have entered the era of fine storage
Data from CBNData shows that in 2021, refrigerators with beauty, mother and baby functions will increase by more than 100% year-on-year. Behind the growth, people's demand for refrigerator use scenarios is moving towards storage, and more and more subdivided storage needs are promoting the refrigerator industry to open up more use scenarios.
In fact, such a consumption trend, in foreign countries have long been hinted at, to the wine cabinet as an example, European and American families will basically be equipped with wine cabinets, because sparkling wine, whiskey or dry white, dry red, have the best storage temperature and humidity; but in the domestic market, on the one hand, because the drinking culture is not popular, and Chinese love to drink liquor is not particularly particular about storage and other reasons, the wine cabinet has been a niche demand, China's production of ice bar wine cabinets and other products are mainly sold overseas.
However, in the past two years, with the development of the domestic liquor market, more and more young people have begun to contact foreign wine, beer has become a resident guest of the refrigerator, and micro-drunkenness has become a popular state for contemporary girls. The change in consumption habits has also made the wine cabinet gradually enter the Chinese family.
In addition to the replication of foreign consumption scenarios, domestic consumption patterns are also spawning new refrigerator use scenarios.
Encountering the peak of beauty products such as double 11, it is not uncommon to hoard for two years at a time, but the problem that follows is that skin care products often contain active ingredients, low temperature storage is more conducive to product preservation, and after opening, skin care products, as easy to contact with external bacteria as food, constant temperature drying and preservation is more hygienic.
According to Tmall backstage data, from September 2018 to March 2019, the search popularity of cosmetic refrigerators on Tmall has tripled, and the market size of beauty refrigerators in 2019 has reached 10 million.
At the same time, traditional brands and new brands have begun to lay out fine storage refrigerators: Midea and Haier quietly entered the game, dividing the storage areas of mothers and babies, fruits and vegetables, beauty and other storage areas in the traditional refrigerators, and launched cosmetic refrigerators; overseas retro refrigerator brands Huskies launched ice bars, and with the help of supply chain capabilities, online beauty refrigerators, mother and baby refrigerators, pharmaceutical cooler cabinets, etc.; domestic new brand Bintu focused on beauty refrigerators, and completed 7 million sales in half a year on the line; Xiao Ji, who started from washing machines, quickly went out of the circle through beauty refrigerators...
What does the second refrigerator look like
The rapid realization of various products is inseparable from the rapid response of the supply chain behind it.
As a Finnish brand with a history of more than 50 years, since entering the Chinese market in 2014, Husky has always been a selling point for its retro appearance. With the rising demand for ice bars in the Chinese market, Husky made localization improvements to the wine cabinet last year.
Husky China CEO Liu Yaxue told the "Seller" reporter that European customers often have a single demand for ice bars, such as red wine cabinets and beverage cabinets; and the Chinese market is a composite demand, consumers hope that ice bars can put wine, drinks, yogurt, tea, each functional area configuration is different, but also need to be able to automatically adjust the temperature and humidity. Based on the insight of the market, Husky launched a three-layer ice bar with a wide temperature adjustment of 0-22 °, the capacity of 115L will not be too large, positioning the high-end crowd, and the price is controlled at about 2000 yuan to meet the needs of Chinese families for a second refrigerator.
This ice bar, husky from design to launch, only took less than two months, "at that time in the 99 big promotion before the new, into the head anchor of the live broadcast room, quickly became tmall retro ice bar category first, double 11 period, our retro refrigerator, ice bar sales increased by 300% year-on-year, is still the first category." ”
Beauty, mother and baby refrigerators and traditional refrigerators are also different. The traditional refrigerator is large in size and loud, and the beauty refrigerator is generally placed on the dresser, which needs to be small and silent; and the internal environment of the beauty refrigerator needs to be dry, and there can be no condensation, so most of them do not have a compressor, but use air-cooling technology; the internal area division also needs to meet the specifications of beauty products, and when marketing for the consumer side, the number of essences, masks, lipsticks, etc. that can be quantified can be quantified.
Previously, Li Qi, the founder of Bintu, said in the face of the media that the beauty refrigerator is not a refrigerator in the traditional sense, "because its keywords are temperature, dryness, storage, noise, there are dressers, and women aged 25-40 are our target groups." ”
On the other hand, sensing the new needs of consumers, Tmall is also constantly trying to shorten the purchase path of consumers, after searching for the keyword "refrigerator", the navigation bar will appear "retro refrigerator", "beauty refrigerator", "ice bar" and other hot words to guide, the more accurate traffic to the hot word strong related products.
To be functional, but also to be beautiful
In the American drama "Bankruptcy Sisters", although the two sisters are poor, they do not change the pursuit of taste, and the Smeg retro refrigerator at home is Italy's top kitchen appliance brand, retro and fashionable.
The new generation of consumers believe that what kind of refrigerator they choose is what kind of lifestyle they choose. Consumers who have the ability to buy a second refrigerator at home generally have higher requirements for the quality of life, and they have a higher pursuit of the appearance design in addition to the functional appeal of the refrigerator.
This makes the husky that has been walking retro style have the innate advantage of going out of the circle, "the essence of retro lies in the curvature of the refrigerator", do not underestimate this arc, most of the traditional refrigerators on the market use the corners of the right angle, the visual presentation is relatively flat and not three-dimensional, the husky uses an integrated molding method to do the refrigerator, with "80 degrees golden arc angle" highlighting the beauty. In order to meet the new requirements in the Chinese market, Husky has set up a design department in China, and has also opened up an assembly line to design patterns and quickly customize the appearance of refrigerators.
Bintu, which specializes in beauty refrigerators, is backed by the national industrial design agency Ruide, and has made sufficient efforts in the appearance of the product, after all, it is filled with big-name skin care products, and the corresponding consumer groups are "face control".
In addition to its own sense of design, the refrigerator brand has changed the advertising language system that was keen on showing preservation technology in the past, and began to reach more people with more Internet-based marketing methods. In addition to cooperating with live broadcasters, planting grass and draining outside the station to attract new customers, it also achieves fan penetration between different IPs through cross-border joint marketing.
In September 2021, Tmall held the New York Fashion Trend Show. At this fashion trend carnival, Husky is the only electrical brand, it and the designers co-branded blue and white earth theme exhibition, and then launched a limited edition of 200 green earth theme refrigerator products, soon sold out.
Before the double 11 promotion, husky learned through Tmall data that the brand consumer group is more sensual, more women, and the audience of the "Little Prince" IP has a high degree of overlap, and they like retro elements and pursue exquisite aesthetics. So the launch of a joint model, and for this group of delivery, in different channels for drainage, "the final natural entry of the crowd churn rate is very small, the order rate is also high." ”
Just as when the beauty refrigerator first came out, many people questioned that this was a pseudo-demand, but the annual growth of the beauty refrigerator market in 2020 exceeded 200%, which has surpassed the growth rate of traditional refrigerators, and the market is still a blue ocean. There is still a lot of room for imagination in the use of refrigerators. For example, pharmaceutical refrigerators, mother and baby refrigerators, etc. Xiao Er revealed that more and more traditional brands have begun to face up to the fine storage track and plan new products.
As the segmentation needs are dug up further, more new entrants will find cuts in the "second refrigerator" on this track.