After entering the Chinese market for many years, spas are likely to usher in a concentrated outbreak in the next few years.
There are two points that underpin this conclusion:
The first is that the consumer trend is about to achieve a transformation from existence to excellence, from material satisfaction to spiritual satisfaction, in the beauty industry, some of the body, mind and soul treatments that return to the basics will be valued to meet the needs of consumers for spiritual healing and introspection.
The second is that the continuous spread of the epidemic has subtly changed the consumer market's perception of beauty and health, and spa has built a reciprocal relationship with health and health care, and will become a consumption choice for people seeking to relax their bodies and empty their minds in the future.
In fact, there has indeed been a boom in the spa industry over the past few years. Enterprise investigation data shows that less than 50 new companies with brand names including "Spa" have been added in 2017, reaching 94 in 2019, and after the outbreak of the epidemic, there are also 54 and 50 in 2020 and 2021.
In the past three years, he has led the team to incubate more than 50 brands such as 8Spa, USpa, Yispa, This Shore, Chengdu Jiji, etc.; to help traditional brands such as Chongqing Yinianmei to upgrade their brands.
As the founder of Chisher Consulting, Yan Dong positioned himself as a spa brand incubator, and the company was a "runner from 0 to 1".
Runners from 0 to 1
Guan Zong, the founder of USpa, was previously engaged in the bird's nest business, and in 2019, she saw the development potential of the spa market and planned to enter this market.
Joining or creating a brand is a problem faced by all beauty industry operators, and Guan Zong is no exception.
Joining is undoubtedly the most worry-free and labor-saving choice, it can ensure the rapid opening of stores, but franchisees generally lack management and operation capabilities, stores in the later stage of operation is difficult, after completing the mission of brand expansion, franchisees have closed down in large numbers. Self-created brands can achieve full control of the brand, and the autonomy and flexibility of operation are high, but brand registration, store location selection, product design, recruitment and training all require entrepreneurs to do it themselves, and they still cannot solve the shortcomings of management and operation.
After repeated measurement, Guan Zong still chose to create his own brand.
Although optimistic about the development of spa and a certain plan for store design, there are still many doubts about the recruitment of employees, customer acquisition and other operational details. After several turns, she found Yan Dong and entrusted the latter to turn the store in her mind into reality.
"The actual implementation is not difficult", Yan Dong's experience is that it only takes 3 months to open a store, first of all, brand positioning, site selection and design, after entering the decoration stage, gradually start recruitment, selection, training, management and other content.
Yan Dong said that the most difficult thing is to solve people's problems, especially the founder's cognition of business.
One type of person feels that opening a spa shop makes money, so they seek cooperation with a quick success mentality; the other person earns money in other industries, hoping to satisfy feelings outside the business by making a spa brand.
"One lacks basic reverence for business, and the other treats hobbies as business, both of which are difficult to succeed and are not suitable for cooperation." In the past three years, more than 1,000 people have discussed cooperation with Yan Dong, but only more than 50 people have really reached cooperation after in-depth screening.
The task of Chisher Consulting is to run from 0 to 1, opening a store is just a start, and the more important job is to help the store get on the right track of operation and run through the business model.
In business, the founders' cognition is extremely critical - how they look at the financial model, how they look at the profit and loss relationship, how they look at the value of the service, all directly determine the business situation.
After achieving cognitive synchronization, The operational services of Chisher Consulting will be more in-depth.
It is understood that the team of Chisher Consulting has more than 40 people, set up departments such as product research, traffic operation, project coordination and other departments, and each department performs its own duties to help stores solve recruitment, training, selection, management, operation and other issues in 1 year, and push the brand from the growth period to the fission period of 1 to 100.
USpa store opened
In 2019, USpa opened its first store in Shijiazhuang, and with the assistance of Chisher Consulting, the store quickly became profitable, and now it has opened 3 stores.
Puyue SPA is a brand incubated by Chishe Consulting in August 2021, with a revenue of more than 430,000 yuan in the first month of opening the store, and is now the first place in the beauty/SPA hot list of Guomao/Jianwai region on the Meituan platform.
So far, the average tipping rate of more than 50 brands hatched by Chisher Consulting has reached 3 to 4.5 times.
From super brands to super individuals
In the nearly ten years of career, "opening a store" and "spa" have always been the two key words around Yan Dong. His identities include: deep lover of body, mind and soul SPA, initiator of healing SPA, spa practitioner, but Yan Dong told Meiye New Latitude that opening a store is the only thing he loves.
Yan Dong
Many years ago, Yan Dong opened his own hair salon, and then after contacting the spa, he plunged into it. However, at that stage, spas were still relatively narrow formats, and stores were generally concentrated in resorts and golf clubs, and the design and operation were carried out around a small number of high-net-worth individuals.
iSpa may be the brand that broke that. Since its inception in 2005, iSpa has targeted the traveling crowd, opening stores to five-star hotels such as Hilton and Marriott that are closer to consumers, while rapidly promoting and popularizing spa culture.
Yan Dong admired the brand concept of iSpa, so he joined iSpa and began working as a store manager in a loss-making store. A few months later, the store turned a profit and Yan Dong became the director of operations for the northern region of iSpa.
"iSpa has a very perfect operating system, especially the five-star service system is worth learning from all stores." Yan Dong said that the three figurative tools currently used by Chisher Consulting are a further extension of the five-star service system.
iSpa stores
After leaving iSpa, Yan Dong joined another well-known brand, 8Spa, as co-founder and COO. Founded in 2018, the brand focuses on the positioning of "healing spa", actively introducing traditional spa culture for localization and innovation, the service is not limited to body care, but also helps users find concentration and return to a balanced rhythm.
Unfortunately, Yan Dong and the founding team had different pursuits in the development rhythm of the brand, and eventually parted ways.
Yan Dong's goal is to build a high-quality, large-scale spa brand, but the two identities of professional managers and partners have not achieved this goal.
In fact, in today's continuous deconstruction and collectivization of the Internet, achieving a super brand itself is a difficult task, on the contrary, it is easier for super individuals to achieve something.
In the book "The Rise of the Individual: The Law of Future Survival", it is written: "In the Internet age, the organizational structure of society is undergoing great changes, the individual economy will begin to shine, and the basic unit of the future social economy will no longer be the enterprise, but the individual." ”
Li Jiaqi single-handedly impacted the entire e-commerce retail industry, symbolizing the birth of super individuals.
The word "brand incubator" flashed in his mind, and Yan Dong suddenly thought about whether he could help more brands develop as a brand incubator, and then promote the progress of the entire spa industry.
After meeting Peng Yan, the founder of Beiai Technology, the two hit it off immediately, one is familiar with the development path of the spa industry, knows how to open stores and operate, and the other has been engaged in the comprehensive traffic operation of digital assets in the beauty industry for a long time, and is familiar with the mechanism of various online platforms, which can quickly expand traffic for stores and improve conversion efficiency.
In line with the work concept of "perseverance and concentration", the two founded Chisher Consulting. Yan Dong said that the meaning of the brand is: to give up, only for the city benchmark SPA brand; there is a way to choose, advocating tacit cooperation.
To be a brand is to be an experience at every moment
After the franchise model became synonymous with "cutting leeks", brand incubation was pushed to the forefront to help entrepreneurs who wanted to create brands but lacked professional capabilities.
But too many brand incubation teams have two problems: the first is that they do not open all the links, usually only for products or traffic counseling, and eventually become a company that sells products or operates on behalf of the brand, becoming a brand middleman. The second is to do the so-called whole store output, this model is usually similar to joining, it is difficult to form a word of mouth and brand through strong supervision and operation.
Yan Dong believes that Chishe Consulting is based on brand incubation as the starting point, and the other identity is a knowledge service provider that fills in the information gap, as well as a full-process runner with industry experience, "working with entrepreneurs to create a spa brand with a clear profit model and cultural characteristics.".
Many people believe that the biggest difficulty in incubating dozens of brands at the same time lies in how to differentiate the brand.
But Yan Dong believes that this is not the difficulty of the work. The reason why bosses bypass joining is because they have their own ideas about the design and operation of the brand, so their preferences and needs are the driving force for building brand differentiation.
For example, when cooperating with a spa brand in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, at the request of the boss, the local silk was selected in terms of bedding, and a local herbal ball was also made for guests to use to maximize the local characteristics.
Becoming a spa brand incubator means revisiting the brand.
"In the past, people's perception of the brand was that there were more stores and the brand name was known by more people. But it's not really like that, even if you have 50 stores, today the consumer goes to one of them and the experience is not good, he will think that this is not a good brand. Yan Dong told the new latitude of the beauty industry that after the Internet has built enough information channels, the value of the brand is not defined by quantity, but by the experience of every moment.
"As long as you integrate good factors into the store, continue to deliver a good experience to customers, combined with appropriate marketing, and do word of mouth and popularity, even a single store will become a successful brand." In the process of accompanying the store, Yan Dong repeatedly emphasized that doing every little thing well to ensure the experience of customers at every moment is the core of the operation.
Since 2019, Chisher Consulting has incubated more than 50 spa brands in more than 20 cities across the country, most of which can recover costs in 6 to 18 months, and after the first store opened 2 years later, many brands began to expand 2 to 5 branches.
"This achievement can show that our incubation model is effective, and we have even invested in several stores, from partners to shareholders." In addition to the excitement, Yan Dong also expressed the current difficulty: how to raise the cultural potential?
Different from the life beauty brand, Spa also carries the mission of meeting the spiritual needs of consumers, although the Internet can create a fun and interesting experience, but in order to promote spa to more consumers, it is also necessary to let consumers really get a beautiful experience of body, mind and soul through cultural micro-innovation.
As the marginal effect of material needs on satisfaction diminishes, the pursuit of the mind and the inner gain more and more attention.
Over the past decade, Thai spas and European aromatherapy have educated the market, giving Chinese consumers a new understanding of spa culture and relaxation. "Now is the time for Chinese spa brands to stand up, they have the ability and opportunity to meet the needs of young people to relax and relax in a way that young people like to hear."