Wen | Yang Yafei
Editor| Qiao Qian
Head image source 丨Visive China
"You've got to do something like Meland." When it comes to children's parent-child format, this is the first reaction of the research subjects to Lu Xue. As a category planner in a top shopping mall in Shenzhen, she intuitively felt the changes in this industry in recent years. In the eyes of that mother, the meland flagship store that went before was the "best look" of the parent-child format.
The Internet celebrity "Honey Country", which also takes a large-scale theme route and covers an area of tens of thousands of square meters, is the favorite of lisa, a workplace mother. After punching in the large-scale parent-child park in downtown Beijing, Lisa only locked in the honey country and took the baby three times a month.
Lisa told 36Kr, "They have a lot of attractions for me", such as distinguishing between large and small children, eliminating safety hazards, and early education courses, which can make children go to group classes, and then can help "bring babies", so that tired parents can relax for a moment.
Nearly 20 meters high, meland club Shenzhen Yifang city store
Since 2010, shopping malls have entered a golden period of development, and the number of shopping malls has increased by nearly 10 times in the past ten years, and the parent-child format has been stationed as a "standard" and has become a new place for parents to walk their babies. Under the aesthetic of the younger generation of mothers tending to be "picky", a number of parent-child paradises that take high-end routes, with an area ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of square meters and rich experience elements have sprung up. In addition to meland, Nairbao, which started in Shanghai and has high-end positioning, is widely known in the circle and is known as "Hermes of Children's Paradise".
Capital is already on the verge of moving. Since the end of 2020, amusement brands such as Wuyuan Culture, Nairbao, Mini Mars, and Le Culture (meland parent company) have completed a new round of financing. Among them, there are many institutions with rich backgrounds in the entertainment industry such as Tencent, China Resources, CMC, and CYTS "holding tickets" to enter. 36Kr learned from a number of investors that a new round of financing from Nairbao is on the way, and the culture of one of the star brands in the track, Le, has spread the news of preparing for the listing.
The new species in the indoor paradise have entered a period of rapid expansion. In 2021, Meland has accumulated more than 200 stores, including 25 high-end meland clubs; Nairbao has 16 stores nationwide, of which 10 stores will be newly opened in 2021; also from Shanghai's Mini Mars, there are also two new stores in 2021, and its founder and CEO Cheng Tingmao told 36Kr that in the next three years, they plan to increase the number of stores from the current 7 to 40.
In the lively market, there is no shortage of pessimistic voices. Compared with small parent-child parks, many consumer investors who have seen this format told 36Kr that large parks have large investment in the early stage, and their income depends on ticket contributions, heavy operations, and low return on investment, which will not be liked by financial investors.
This concern is not unfounded, and looking back, the indoor parent-child park track has learned from the past.
The most typical is Youyoutang, a star indoor parent-child play brand founded in 2010, which has attracted more than ten investors with a total of seven financings, and has opened more than 200 stores in 2014, with store areas ranging from hundreds of square meters to 2,000 square meters. But as the scale expanded, a series of operational problems gradually came to light, eventually dragging the project into the abyss.
Will large-scale theme parks be a definitive trend? After a series of interviews with new and existing brands, mall operators, suppliers, designers, and investors, we hope to discuss and try to answer the following questions in this article:
1. Compared with the previous generation of players such as Molly Fantasy, CartoonNey, Wanda Baby King, etc., what kind of story does the new brand tell?
2. Heavy investment, difficult site selection, long return cycle, is there a solution to the problem to be solved in the large indoor park?
3. The world's top ten parks Disney won eight seats, how far is the Chinese indoor parent-child park brand?
Make the park bigger
The huge area is the most prominent logo on the new batch of indoor park brands.
In July 2017, Naierbao landed in Shanghai's first store in the country, the area reached 5,000 square meters, which has shaken the industry at that time, and since then, the new store area has become larger and larger, and tens of thousands of square meters have been seen frequently; Mini Mars and meland's recent new stores have an area of 6,000-7,000 square meters; Beijing's new Internet celebrity "Honey Country" area directly exceeds 10,000 square meters.
Getting bigger almost means tearing down the traditional model and starting over.
As the representative brand of the previous generation of indoor parent-child parks, Aofei Happy World, Wanda Baby King, Aeon Fantasy High-end Children's Park "Phantom Beijia", and Cartoony Park, which positions the full-guest floor of the family, mostly covers an area of 1,000 to 2,000 square meters, and the largest is only 4,000 square meters.
Parent-child play itself has many common scenes, such as marine balls, slides, water play and other amusement projects, dancing machines, doll machines, racing and other video game projects, as well as shooting machines, climbing, pitching and other sports.
A small children's play project in a shopping mall in Beijing's Chaoyang District
But large parks don't just pile more rides together, they do their homework on "experiences."
Nairbao set up a 7-meter-high giant spiral slide in the newly opened Wenzhou Impression City MEGA store, and the Hangzhou Xingguang Store placed a three-dimensional maze scene in a three-story high; the newly opened Jinan Sunac MaoGuan of meland club, with an overall height of nearly 17 meters, set up a large indoor slide of about 14 meters high and composed of 5 aerial rotating slides; Longxiaohu Exploration Park, which was hatched by Longhu Tianjie and entered in 2021, also set up a bungee jumping and gas model castle with a height of 8 meters indoors.
Nairbao Shanghai Changtai store, picture from the official website
New theme sections are also constantly being filled in.
Mini Mars' Jing'an store opened in 2019 has the theme set as "the city under the feet"; Nairbao presents elements of urban life such as car repair factories, mini supermarkets, fire stations, music rooms, art galleries, theaters, porsche parks and other urban life elements in the store; meland club also creates various theme museums such as dinosaur museums, science and technology museums, and sports halls.
"There are many experience modules for parent-child parks, there are dozens of fixed large-scale scenes," Li Xiang, founder of Vista International, who has designed parent-child parks for Nairbao and Meland, told 36Kr that from the perspective of design companies, there is usually a concept of "simulated world", that is, to simulate a space into any small and figurative or abstract scene with a sense of story situation, and design experience modules according to customization needs.
Li wants to tell 36Kr that the reason why this format is "unknown" in the past is that the market lacks attention to design and space, and the sense of color and artistry for children is not enough, "children also have aesthetics, and we must respect the aesthetics of children."
When designing the first store for Nairbao, Li wanted to try to adjust the space packaging, the combination of play equipment, and the degree of color use, using hundreds of color combinations for each project.
For the amusement safety that bao moms value, new brands are also struggling. The first meland staircase was only a collision strip, to the second generation of stores, it began to carry out package protection, the third generation of store protection is thicker, Naierbao is also in the store to upgrade the soft package anti-bump design.
Leveraging commercial value with better design and experience is the consensus of this generation of indoor park operators.
New design elements and theme scenes add a lot of color to the park, why is it difficult to achieve the parent-child park of the previous generation?
Previously, small amusement projects such as "Naughty Castle" were the mainstream configuration of the industry, and operators were generally reluctant to "pay for" additional "money" to customize design and content. But there are indeed some "crab eaters", but the results are not ideal.
A common naughty castle in the mall, according to IC Photo
"Everyone's cost affordability is not high", Lu Haochuan, founder of indoor parent-child park service provider Xinjue Technology, told 36Kr that in the past, there were also customized parent-child park projects that took the high-end route, but many of them were down, the reason is that cool is cool, but it does not produce benefits, "Benchmarking stores can be customized, but each store is impossible." ”
The benefits of the set are obvious, "ready to use", and the cost is small, and the cost of amusement equipment is relatively fixed. The area of large-scale parent-child parks has risen, and the investment in single stores has risen by more than one order of magnitude, which is a typical "heavy asset investment".
"Our design, throughout the supply chain system, from the construction party to the raw materials is not the standard practice." Li wanted to tell 36Kr, "This custom design has been challenging the entire supply chain. ”
For operators, the loose pattern of the upstream industrial chain of amusement facilities cannot be avoided by anyone. According to the results of the previous survey of more than 3,000 amusement facility companies by the China Amusement Machine Amusement Park Association, small and micro enterprises accounted for 97% of the total, while medium and large enterprises accounted for only 2% and 1% respectively.
However, in Li Xiang's view, the supply chain is not standardized enough, but it provides a good creative space for designers, and the factory customization below the medium-sized volume is willing to cooperate with the willingness and flexibility is higher.
In addition to the cost of equipment, the amount of "aesthetic" expenditure is also considerable. "Meland spends a lot of money on aesthetic construction, regardless of the cost," one investor told 36Kr.
How much does it cost to open a new indoor park?
A shopping mall operator and 36Kr calculated an account, according to the area of 6,000 square meters, each square meter investment of 5,000 yuan, a store in the early stage of a one-time investment of up to 30 million yuan. "After the area becomes larger, some costs can be amortized, but there must be a boundary."
There is no doubt that this is a growing business and the reason why new brands are actively engaged with capital.
The time is right: shopping malls call for quality supply
"Nairbao must be high," Shen Zhuoran, who does commercial real estate investment, told 36Kr, which is a necessary condition for building a special scene such as climbing and slides, and Naierbao especially likes independent properties, from the first floor to the fourth floor.
For shopping malls, the height will directly sacrifice the leasable area. Not only that, due to the generally weak leasing capacity of the park format, shopping malls also need to reduce rent expectations. "Our internal rent indicators are very demanding, and they can't afford it." Shen Zhuoran told 36Kr that the large-scale park has to do a lot of pre-decoration investment, and the revenue depends on tickets, which is slowly recycled, and it belongs to the "lowest efficiency format" in the amusement format.
In the past, shopping malls had a cautious attitude and had great doubts about the establishment of this format and the size of the brand appeal. But now, malls are eagerly throwing olive branches at these brands. 36Kr understands that in 2021, Meland received more than 200 invitations to settle in.
The park is also very "pragmatic", usually choosing two kinds of shopping malls, one is that the brand power and operation ability of the mall itself are strong, and the other is that the mall is willing to provide decoration subsidies. Before the parent-child park, this policy would only target the experiential formats such as theaters and bookstores that could bring customers.
The reason why shopping malls are desperately needing the arrival of these brands is that shopping malls are becoming saturated.
According to the comprehensive industry data of the Mob Research Institute, the per capita shopping center area of Chinese cities in 2021 is between 0.8m -1.10m, which is roughly the level of the TOP4 of major developed countries in 2018. This means that the per capita shopping center area in China's first- and second-tier cities has even surpassed that of some developed countries.
Homogenization is an inevitable problem, especially in commercial real estate that is "positioned to live and die", and the competition for traffic is bloody. The focus of competition in the commercial real estate industry has also changed from "heavy assets" to "light assets" in the past. Compared with incubating IP yourself, introducing third-party brands has become the mainstream choice.
"Basically every real estate company has cultivated children's amusement parks, but there are not many successful cases," Zhang Lin, a director of CMC Capital who invested in Nairbao in the early days, told 36Kr, which is a high-threshold industry that requires comprehensive business capabilities from design to decoration, cost control, operating system, service level, and early education, catering, and retail.
"There is no shortage of supply now, there is a lack of good supply." Shen Zhuoran said. The head brand has thus become the focus of competition in shopping malls, for the simple reason that "one more first store has one more opportunity". For shopping malls, with this kind of traffic engine experience format, related retail brands will naturally follow.
"Stock adjustment is the next mainstream trend in first- and second-tier cities," Zhou Leiya, general manager of Ruiyide, a comprehensive commercial real estate service provider, told 36Kr. Beijing has recently introduced policies such as building an international consumption center city and urban renewal, which indicates that the supply of new commercial real estate will decline in the future, and more projects will be adjusted for the second time.
The shaping of the sense of space is an important exploration direction for the adjustment of shopping malls, which just creates conditions for the landing of large-scale indoor parks. "In fact, the engineering transformation of these, in the shopping mall operation end is not a big problem," Zhou Leiya said, the key is the previous decision-making end, why choose this brand, "in fact, it is for the needs of both sides." ”
"We operated a project before, the original parent-child format was a full layer, and then adjusted to choose a corner from the second and third floors to do a longitudinal children's parent-child collection." Zhou Leiya told 36Kr that if the flat flow of people gathered into the vertical scene, the experience would be better and the consumer stay longer. The area released after the adjustment is used to arrange high-yield formats such as supporting catering and children's retail.
The problem of scale - starting from the Yuyoutang
Scale expansion is another extension line for parent-child park brands.
Before Nairbao, meland, mini mars, etc., the indoor parent-child park was mainly for two types of players, one was a traditional indoor amusement operator, through independent development of IP or third-party authorization to operate theme parks, such as Aofei Happy World, Cartoonney Park, Trojan Kingdom, the whole is not much. According to the rough statistics of public information, the number of stores such as Cartoonney Paradise, Aofei Happy World and Trojan Kingdom is about 80, 30 and 25 respectively.
Katoni's newly launched National Tide Wind Paradise "Monster Village", according to the official picture
The other type is commercial real estate developers, represented by Wanda Baby King, Aeon Molly fantasy, backed by the advantages of commercial real estate resources, the number of stores in the forefront, are in the hundreds or so, but the geographical attributes are distinct.
However, in recent years, the chain development of traditional indoor park brands has not been smooth.
According to official data, as of October 31, 2021, AEON Molly fantasized that there were 195 stores nationwide, which is far from the previous official goal of "reaching 400 in 2020". In terms of Wanda Baby King, according to media reports, by 2020, there will be more than 300 Wanda Baby King Parks nationwide, but in the past 2021, some park stores have been reported to be closed.
The impact of the epidemic is understandable, but the rise of new brands may be unexpected by old players.
As one of the top brands of the previous generation of indoor parent-child parks, Youyoutang has not found the answer after paying 300 million to 400 million yuan in tuition fees. After the failure of exploration, founder Chen Xiaofan, in 2019, directly left the judgment that "indoor parent-child park as LBE (location based entertainment) format, characterized by non-standard mixed industry, so the scale is not economical".
The high dependence on site selection is the core basis for Chen Xiaofan. In his view, factors such as the location, volume, positioning, opening surface, floor height, area, and rent of the mall have a decisive impact on the passenger flow and income cost structure of the park.
Tickets are the core source of income of the parent-child park, the industry generally adopts the form of pre-collection such as "annual card, recharge member", especially for children from about the age of 2, parents will tend to indoor parent-child park, for multiple consumption. There are more cards, which makes "the revenue in the first three months or even half a year before opening is very high", which will make new entrants have the illusion of "making money", but in fact, the money received in advance is not real income.
Another lesson left by Youyoutang is that the indoor parent-child park format is not very ripe for capital.
After getting hundreds of millions of financing, Youyoutang quickly responded to the large-scale demand of capital, and successively developed a variety of stores such as pure naughty castles, medium-sized theme parks, large theme blocks and outdoor resort camps, with an area from the initial small to 200-300 square meters, and gradually to 6-7000 square meters in the back, and the expansion speed is also accelerating.
"We responded to the market demand of customers with different amusement content and different venues in the mall, but in the end, the difficulty of management was very high." Chen Xiaofan believes that many practitioners, including Youyoutang, think of this matter too simply.
In the expansion, Yuyudo gradually spiraled out of control, and the movements were deformed. Chen Xiaofan reflected to 36Kr that capital is in the front, and the pressure to make money is increasing, "hoping to use a year and a half, or even a shorter time to recover investment." At that time, because it was "considered by pre-collection rather than write-off", there was the illusion that it was easy to "recover investment".
The urgent mentality of recovering investment has a chain reaction, and further evolved into a shopping mall site selection has become more "profit-seeking", thus ignoring dimensions such as the operation level of shopping malls and the maturity of business circles. "There are also some objective reasons here," said Mr. Chen, adding that between 2010 and 2015, shopping malls themselves were new and they couldn't give a comprehensive judgment.
This series of problems has not been exposed at once. When the number of Youyoutang stores did not reach 150, "many problems can still be solved to a certain extent, or covered up", but it is difficult to turn after a larger one.
As the battle line lengthens, another problem facing U-YoDo is that there are very few suitable content or product suppliers in the market. "Parent-child play is not the same as early education, the content of early education is relatively fixed, and play is trendy, and for a long time, children and parents will feel tired." Chen Xiaofan said.
So he chose to do his own back-end investment, self-built IP, system, VR projection, retail company, etc. Chen Xiaofan reflected that this was a fatal mistake. "Youyoutang shifted its business focus to the back end in a hurry, without sufficient demonstration, and wanted to try in all directions, so that the management cost did not decrease but increased."
Some of the problems faced by Youyoutang and its indoor parks in the same period have been solved, whether it is the richness of amusement equipment, professional design teams, or digital technology, there are still some problems that need to be vigilant.
Compared with small and medium-sized parks, the upfront investment of large indoor parks is higher, and the dependence on site selection is only a lot more. "Site selection basically determines a 50 to 60 percent probability." Cheng Tingmao told 36 Krypton.
In addition, the lease period between shopping malls and parent-child format brands is generally long, ranging from 8-10 years, which is almost equivalent to the lease time of supermarkets as one of the "standards", while in contrast, the lease of retail formats is more than 2-3 years. The longer lease period means that the brand is more strongly tied to the interests of the mall, and even if the operation is unfavorable, it cannot close the store in time to make a U-turn.
Tickets are the main income of new brands, and the pricing is not cheap, taking Beijing as an example, meland, Nairbao, Honey Country and other brands "weekday / one big and one small" door ticket prices are about 400 yuan, which is almost twice the unit price of cartoons and Wanda Baby Kings in the same city. Such pricing restricts them from opening stores to lower-tier cities and determines the ceiling of this business.
Covering an area of about 2300 square meters, Aofei Happy World (Zhengzhou Hanhai Store) was once the "traffic king of the mall" of the brand, and the highest monthly sales were only 1 million yuan, that is to say, the annual ping effect was only about 4000 yuan. For new brands, even in the most optimistic situation, the ability to make money still has to be marked with a question mark.
The above-mentioned commercial real estate operation told 36Kr that although the price of the new park ticket is higher, it is already a good result to sell 10,000 yuan per square meter per year, and it means that it will take two to three years to recover the input cost; the selling is not good, the operating cost is barely flat, and it is impossible to make money at all.
Due to the longer play time, catering is a secondary sales business with high certainty in large indoor parks, and it is also the key to making high customer unit prices. But the development of other new businesses remains unknown. Some brands are exploring more models such as early education and private parties that emphasize service attributes, and the retail business with higher requirements for brands is still a relatively primary stage.
How far is "Indoor Disneyland"?
Let's take a look at how Disney, the ceiling of the park class, exerts influence on the industry.
According to a data from the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) and AECOM, among the top ten theme park companies in the world in 2019, Disney is almost the sum of two, three and four in terms of number of visitors. Specific to the passenger flow of individual parks, Disney Group's parks are in the top ten in the world.
Top 10 theme parks in the world
Rich IP resources and content influence are the prerequisites for Disneyland to master its dominant position. Through acquisitions, originals, self-made and other forms, Disney's IP resources include marvel heroes series, Disney studio princess series, Pixar series and Travelogue series, Lucasfilm Star Wars series, 20th Century Fox Avatar series and X-Men series. According to the previous statistics of Southwest Securities, among the top 20 box offices in global film history, Disney IP occupies 14 seats.
The strength of IP is also related to the level of secondary sales revenue of the park, and Disney has tasted the most sweetness in this regard. According to Disney's fiscal 2021 financial report, Disney achieved revenue of $67.418 billion for the whole year, of which the park, experience and consumer goods business revenue was $16.5522 billion.
Disney's domestic imitators are many, and there is no shortage of precedents for introducing animation, film and television IP to theme parks. Wanda Baby King previously acquired the IP of the undersea column and built related theme park scenes; the head IP of Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf, Balala Little Devil Fairy, etc., which is the pillar content of the theme park of Ofei Entertainment; Cartoony opened a parent-child park of the same name by obtaining the authorization of the Japanese IP ugly.
However, these IPs themselves are difficult to count as successful, and the driving role of the park business is even more doubtful.
For indoor parent-child park brands, there is also a "non-mainstream option" that is to create IP independently.
Mini Mars' store is an original IP designed around 4 small animals that have been in space with space as the main line, connecting scene design, amusement products, catering and future retail products. According to Cheng Tingmao, at the end of last year, the newly opened Suzhou first store, Mini Mars also newly designed a teamlab-like children's projection painting interactive game, the game IP, soundtrack, plot are set independently. In Cheng Tingmao's view, the essence of Mini Mars business is to do content, not decoration design.
In fact, the older generation of players have also tried in this regard, and Cartoony has specially designed the Feimeng family anime characters for its park. But at present, the results are not outstanding.
Bubble Mart, which relies on the blind box model and several core IPs such as Molly, has also begun to focus on the park and do content, but at least for now, it is still a trendy toy company in the minds of users.
This is not an easy road for new and old players.
(At the request of the interviewee, Lu Xue and Shen Zhuoran are pseudonyms)