Image source @ Visual China
Text | Narrow broadcast, the author | Zhang Yitong
For many new domestic brands that are opening stores offline, the B1 floor of the mall and other negative floors are often their first stop.
In July 2020, the first offline store with mixed oral care brands on the B2 floor of Hangzhou Hubin Yintai in77 was officially opened for business. The domestic brand, which was founded in 2018, has only been selling its products through online channels.
In the summer of the same year, Hubin Yintai in77 also introduced a series of new brands in the category such as Perfect Diary, Twelve Lightyears, THE COLORIST Colorist, etc., and almost all the new stores of these domestic consumer brands were opened in the underground space of the mall.
In 2021, the new stores in Banana and TOPTOY opened in Intime in77, which was also placed on the B1 floor.
In 2021, Chao play brand 52TOYS has opened new stores in Shanghai iapm, Hangzhou in77, Beijing INDIGO and other shopping malls, almost all of which are located on the B1 and B2 floors of the mall.
The gathering of new brands on the B1 floor is the result of the joint promotion of commercial real estate and brand parties.
On the one hand, squeezed by the double squeeze of e-commerce and offline competition, commercial real estate has become more and more urgent in attracting new content in terms of investment promotion, and hopes to attract young customers as much as possible, and they show more interest in new brands.
The B1 floor is regarded as the "popular magnet" of the shopping mall, and the property owner often places the most drainage effect here. Previously, the B1 floor of shopping malls was mainly dominated by young brands, which were similar to new domestic brands in terms of consumer customer base, brand tone, and customer unit price.
On the other hand, most new brands have indeed accelerated their offline expansion in the past two years, both to find new traffic entrances and to build a more experiential brand space. Close to the subway entrance, most of the time it is the floor with the largest traffic in the mall, and for the brand, the B1 floor is a cost-effective choice.
For many new brands, the favor for the B1 layer is mostly just a phased behavior. When brands reach a new stage, they often choose to leave the B1 floor for a better mall location.
But as long as it still has the core resources most needed by the new brand of traffic, the B1 layer still has an irreplaceable incubator role offline.
01 Retrofit
The renovation of the B1 floor of the shopping mall dates back to around 2017.
Prior to this, the B1 floor was mostly used as a supplement to other floors of the mall, and the format was mainly catering, and in order to distinguish it from the catering formats on other floors, most of them were affordable catering based on food courts or snack stalls.
The rapid development of e-commerce continues to squeeze offline business, in order to continue to retain young consumers, but also in order to create more differentiation in the increasingly fierce offline customer competition, in the format portfolio, brand investment and other dimensions, shopping malls began to more and more content innovation attempts, trying to establish more new contacts with young consumers.
Close to the subway and car park, the B1 floor is regarded as a "magnet for popularity" by shopping malls and is regarded as the most important innovative place to provide unique experiences that may attract more young consumers.
Therefore, shopping malls often open the most drainage effect formats underground.
One of the most representative is the BLOCK 21 of Beijing Chaoyang Hopson Hui. Despite its prime location on West Dawang Road and on the top of the interchange of two subway lines, Chaoyang Hopson Hui also faced huge competitive pressure at the beginning of its opening. In the similar area, SKP is the top high-end shopping mall in the country, and Chaoyang Joy City has a strong ability to attract young customers with content innovation.
What helped Chaoyang Hopson Hui gain a foothold was the opening of block 21. Connecting the B1 and B2 two-storey spaces, the theme space creation has been carried out, and a large number of Internet celebrity restaurants have been introduced, and block 21 block has attracted a large number of passengers for Chaoyang Hopson Hui. In 2019, the annual sales of Chaoyang Hopson Hui entered the top 50 in the country, with an average daily passenger flow of more than 150,000, of which BLOCK 21 is the first passenger flow in the shopping mall block.
Similarly, Harbin CapitaMall University has renovated the B1 floor. After the renovation, the rental income of the B1 floor increased by 23%, the efficiency of the flat increased by 52% in the same period, and the rent of a single square meter even exceeded the first floor, becoming the highest in the whole building.
In July 2021, Raffles City on the North Bund officially opened, and the city bazaar in the theme block located on the B2 floor immediately became a hit, and even had to restrict the flow of customers entering the block.
In an interview on the opening day of Raffles City North Bund, CapitaLand China, Chan Wing Ming, chief executive of Business Management of CapitaLand China, mentioned that in the era of stock business, commercial real estate must "start to think of something different".
The shopping mall's positioning of the "new" B1 floor coincides with the innovative path of the new brand in the past two years. The new brand provides a solution to the problem that is close to the effect of the shopping mall in addition to the overall block transformation, but also more cost-effective.
These brands either offer new category directions, such as the twelve light-years of positioning "three pits" clothing; or provide a new experience, such as a group of collection stores represented by KKV; some of them take care of both, such as gogoodgoods on the B1 floor of INDIGO in Beijing, selling artist cross-border products.
As the official partner of NetEase Yanxuan, Orange Home Smart Home Experience Hall is one of the earliest merchants to choose the B2 floor of Hopson Hui. In 2017, this experience hall that provides whole-house home customization services was almost the only place where netease strictly selected products could be purchased offline.
For shopping malls, the most irreplaceable value of new brands is the young consumers behind them.
In a speech at the event, Zhu Jing, assistant general manager of Hangzhou Hubin Yintai in77, stressed, "We do not represent fashion, because there are so many brands that young people like, we think that what young people like is fashion."
The new brand's diversion of the mall has been verified by some data. Since the end of 2019, Chaoyang Hopson Hui has begun to update existing merchants, and of the 183 brands recruited, domestic brands account for 30%. The relevant person in charge of Hopson Hui once said that after the adjustment, the passenger flow of shopping malls increased by 20% year-on-year.
02 Gather
The reasons for new brands looking for opportunities offline vary.
Online business has fallen into a growth bottleneck, and some brands are trying to obtain new traffic and growth space through offline stores, and then establish a brand mentality that goes beyond marketing, such as domestic beauty brands represented by Perfect Diary.
For some categories with strong channels, offline stores are a step that must be taken in the process of business promotion, such as 52TOYS plans to open 80 stores this year, and founder Chen Wei regards it as an important step to create an ecological closed loop.
Some brands need offline stores to provide customers with a better consumer experience, And Qian Yong, founder of Cat Galaxy, once mentioned that for categories such as "three pits" clothing that have high requirements for trying on and experiencing, offline scenes have significant advantages over online, and can also come with social functions.
Adjacent to the subway entrance, it is usually the floor with the largest flow of people in the mall, and the B1 floor has the most urgently needed traffic resources for new brands, so it has become one of their most favored floors.
Some categories have traditions on the B1 floor, such as tide play.
In December 2021, the new 52TOYS store opened on indigo's B1 floor, next to Bubble Mart. Including Cool Tide Play, TOP TOY, etc., major tide play brands will almost always choose the B1 floor when opening offline stores.
In the traditional shopping center layout, stores of similar categories are often arranged on the same floor as much as possible, which is convenient for consumers and can also extend their stay time.
"The fashionable shops have always been on the B1 floor, and the mall will be willing to put the same type of shops together as much as possible."
Under the same category, the gathering of different stores also means that brands can drain each other, especially for some new brands, opening stores near the head brand means a natural borrowing force.
"After they visit the shop next door, they may naturally walk into our shop and have a look."
Similar to Tide Play, there are also various collection stores. For example, on the B2 floor of Chaoyang Hopson Hui, in addition to comprehensive collection stores such as KKV, there are also jewelry-themed collection stores such as ba jewelry bureaus, and Nine Wood Miscellaneous Goods Club with stationery as the main content.
The B1 tier is not always the brand's first choice.
Affected by many factors such as brand tonality and drainage ability, in the struggle with different forces of the line, the landing of the new brand on the B1 floor sometimes shows the evaluation of commercial real estate from the side.
Underwear brand ubras's offline stores in Chaoyang Hopson Hui and Xidan Renewal Field are opened on the B2 floor of the mall, and Raffles City on the North Bund is on the B1 floor, but in the more traditional shopping malls like Century Jinyuan, which need new formats to enter, ubras has the opportunity to get a position on the first floor of the mall.
Similarly, as a domestic brand, the national flagship store inside and outside is opened on the B1 floor of Jing'an Kerry Center. For the inside and outside of the high-end positioning, the high-end positioning of the shopping center itself makes up for some shortcomings in the tone of the B1 layer.
Perfect Diary's first store in Shanghai opened on the B1 floor of Global Harbor. Most of its offline stores in Guangzhou and Shenzhen can win the position on the first floor of the mall, and the concept store in Chengdu is as high as 6 floors, which is the largest single-brand makeup offline store in the country. But as the shopping mall with the most first store attraction in Shanghai, Global Harbor clearly has greater brand potential offline.
03 Leave
The new brand's favor for the B1 layer is time-limited, or in other words, there is no new brand that wants to stay in the B1 layer forever.
In December 2021, at the intersection of the largest pedestrian street on Nanjing East Road in Shanghai, a huge bubble mart fence attracted the attention of passers-by. The three-story store, which originally belonged to South Korean beauty brand innisfree, will be built as Bubble Mart's first global flagship store.
Last year, more than 20 offline stores of Bubble Mart moved from their original bunks to better locations while the mall remained unchanged, and most of them were originally opened on the B1 floor of the mall.
Leaving the B1 floor means a lot to the brand: more open, playable storefront space, and if you're lucky enough to enter the ground floor, more displayable facades.
The most important point on top of these specific advantages is that leaving the B1 layer means that the brand is recognized to a higher standard in terms of brand tone and popularity.
In order to compete for a better position outside the B1 floor, brands tend to reach deeper cooperation with shopping malls outside of the lease, and exchange resources in a variety of ways.
For example, the collaboration between Bubble Mart and Wangfujing apm. In addition to opening a large flagship store on the first floor, Bubble Mart also held a number of art exhibitions in the atrium of Wangfujing apm and co-produced an offline art market.
For other new brands that emphasize tonality, the B1 layer, which looks a little cluttered, is out of their options at the start.
Guanxia opened its first offline store in a detached Western-style building on Wukang Road in Shanghai; Anfu Road is home to Fauvism, Sandan and Half, Cabana; Documents Wenxian's offline store on Middle Huaihai Road is adjacent to TX Huaihai, and it is the influence of the other party among high-net-worth consumers.
Some businesses with a fresher overall positioning are willing to leave more space outside the B1 layer to new brands.
Shanghai Metro City, which has become an important collection of Japanese brands, in addition to LOFT on the fourth floor, the store of the "Three Pits" brand Cat Galaxy is located on the second floor of the mall, and the first offline store of Bubble Mart's "Bao fun" is opened on the first floor.
But in the wider market, B1 remains an important channel for new brands to enter the offline and mass markets. After the B1 floor has become the first floor, the shopping mall has another new rental performance growth point, and one of the core increments is coming from the new brand.
Under different categories, the position left by the predecessor will be filled by the future generation. On New Year's Day this year, the online tide play platform suplay opened its first offline store on the B1 floor of Hopson Hui.
There is always a new story on the B1 floor.