Wen 丨 Pan Qingqing
Editor 丨 Dong Jinpeng
After a short break during the Spring Festival, industrial belts around the world are beating with drums of war and returning to the hustle and bustle of the past. They are the "fragrant food" of e-commerce merchants and the "ballast stone" made in China.
2021, a worst year, is also a best year. Amazon's title is fierce, but the performance of Wotu has tripled; the live broadcast is serious, and the transaction volume of Hendish has increased by 2-3 times; from vibrato to Amazon, Tian ye has found a sense of belonging...
Opportunity and growth belong to keen entrepreneurs. They understand traffic, can operate, hold good goods at the source, and have the courage to innovate and change. They are the closest group of people to the new trend of e-commerce.
In Hangzhou, Hu Yu engaged in the marketing of TikTok overseas celebrities, receiving dozens of local government visiting delegations a year, and he was deeply touched by the enthusiasm and determination of local governments for cross-border sea. He hopes to help more industrial belt merchants go abroad in 2022.
In Yiwu, Zheng Liuping transformed from a small commodity wholesale to a kitchenware brand, ushered in a large foreign trade factory to set up a research and development department for his brand. He has been starting a business in Yiwu for many years, which is a particularly proud thing.
In Shanghai, serial entrepreneur Jiang Yu threw herself into the new track of washing and nursing, she knows that the new consumption frontal battlefield is cruel, does not want to be kidnapped by capital, and cuts into the gift and university campus market in another way, and unexpectedly gets a good response.
In Haining, Tong Dabao, a returnee who "created the second generation", took over the live e-commerce business under the encouragement of his father, relying on the supply chain capabilities of the family business to turn the brand live broadcast room into a fashion show that was regularly staged every day.
In Shenzhen, Zhong Weiping, who is in the water shell gold jewelry industry belt, originally wanted to rush sales in the peak season of gold jewelry sales, but was unexpectedly disrupted by the epidemic. He said that companies were born in the epidemic, but they did not want to fall because of the epidemic.
In Nanchang, Zhu Lei has been rooted in the bamboo industry for ten years, and he intends to use "platform thinking" to continue to do this business that requires a little "feeling" and to be a "pathfinder" to promote the development of the bamboo industry in Jiangxi.
In Humen, the Tmall store "old players" have tasted bitterness and bitterness in live e-commerce entrepreneurship, and now they are "hit workers" and regard Amazon as the only platform where they can find a "sense of belonging".
In 2022, how do merchants do TikTok? Where is the live streaming going? What are the new directions of cross-border e-commerce? After the hustle and bustle, how can new consumer brands continue to exert their strength? They have the deepest experience. Recently, Ebang Power launched a dialogue with seven industrial belt merchants across the country, talking about growth and expectations, and also unveiling new trends and new opportunities.
Here's what's dictated based on the conversation:
01
After the "Amazon ban" pain
The big sell turned to branding, and we tripled
Hu Yu, CEO of Hangzhou cross-border e-commerce Wotu Network
In the past 2021, I think it can be described as "twists and turns".
In the first half of the year, the cross-border e-commerce industry experienced a "highlight moment", and the performance of sellers grew rapidly. Our monthly growth also exceeded that of the whole of 2018, which can be said to be full of confidence.
From May to July, Amazon began platform governance, resulting in many domestic head seller stores being blocked, and the follow-up impact was still very large. Many sellers who have achieved annual sales of 1 billion, 2 billion, and 3 billion yuan on Amazon have frozen tens of millions of dollars in their stores, and the original four-story office building has suddenly shrunk to one floor, and the situation has become very difficult.
By November and February, the hardest moments were over. We obviously feel that the mentality of Amazon's big sale has changed, and they are more determined to do "branding" things, rather than laying out goods and fighting price wars like before.
Throughout 2021, Wotu's performance has more than tripled, mainly due to overseas celebrity marketing, including TikTok marketing. Our mentality is relatively stable, basically there is no rush to expand, but the overseas red marketing system has been made a SaaS product precipitation.
This year, I think the biggest gain is a mentality - compared with the "impetuousness" of barbaric growth, now there is a little more "indifference", and it is more able to sink down and consider some issues.
For example, we can look at the real demands of consumers more rationally, think about what is the core competitiveness of Chinese goods, and how to go to sea for brands. We see that more and more "shop-type" sellers have begun to leave or transform, and the model of making money purely on poor supply chain information is also almost out of the ordinary, and more merchants have begun to deepen the supply chain and do their own overseas brands and DTC brands.
Amazon's platform remediation is indeed very painful in the short term, but in the long run, it also encourages everyone to focus on the polishing of product strength and product value, rather than those simple and rough operational skills.
As the official head agent of TikTok, we will continue to cooperate with the platform in 2022 and explore the path of commercialization. As a new traffic aggregate for the young generation overseas, TikTok's demand for new and exotic products is still very strong, so it is also a very effective traffic entrance for Chinese merchant brands to go overseas.
In 2021, we launched the "Industrial Belt Overseas Empowerment Plan", and after a year, the deepest feeling is the attention and determination of local government executives to develop cross-border e-commerce. We probably received dozens of regional government leaders to visit the company, and after they returned, they would lead local enterprises to do special seminars and introduce a series of solutions to the development of the industrial belt.
To tell the truth, we visited industrial belts around the world and found that most of the business models of enterprises are still traditional, and they are more accustomed to doing business through offline Canton fairs and trade shows. Even if you contact cross-border e-commerce, most of them are mainly supply-oriented. Coupled with the influence of various external factors, the confidence of business operation is not so sufficient, and in 2022, it does not dare to rush to invest and trial and error in overseas markets. From the product chain, logistics chain, to overseas station construction, traffic operation, capital settlement, each link is a pain point for the industrial belt merchants.
In the new year, our key work is to make "overseas celebrity marketing" more data-based, standardized and scalable, on the one hand, to dig deep into the real opinion leaders in each industry, expand their business value, help more Chinese brands go to sea, do trust endorsement and dissemination; on the other hand, through the development of SaaS marketing platforms such as WotoHub, help more small and medium-sized businesses link overseas celebrity resources more efficiently and at low cost.
02
Selling goods can only be made for others to make wedding dresses
Building your own brand is longer
Yiwu small commodities e-commerce entrepreneur Zheng Liuping
We have been cooperating with foreign trade factories to sell kitchenware for more than two years, and the biggest breakthrough in 2021 is to create our own kitchenware brand.
In order to promote the new brand, we have cooperated with more than 40 vertical anchors on platforms such as Douyin, Watermelon Video, Today's Toutiao and Kuaishou, and asked them to live stream with goods. At its best, the weekly turnover is millions of dollars.
Yiwu is a city where foreign entrepreneurs gather, now everyone is talking about transformation, the previous low-priced volume model does not work, they all hope to do some high customer unit price, branded products, so that the profit margin is larger, after-sales is also easy to do.
We have also deeply realized in the past few years that only by doing a brand can we be more durable, selling other people's products, and always making wedding clothes for others.
In the past two years, due to the epidemic situation abroad, the order volume of Yiwu foreign trade factories has declined; coupled with the rising cost of shipping, many factories have not rushed to order containers, resulting in delayed delivery. The company we worked with, there was a batch of British orders that could not be delivered, and finally entrusted us to digest in China.
After this cooperation, their attitude has changed a lot and they are particularly supportive of our business. In the past, foreign trade brands turned to domestic sales, through traditional channels, at least five or six years to open the market; now cooperate with us, through live broadcast and group purchase channels, one or two years can quickly start the volume, the brand volume to do.
What is even more exciting is that this year, they have paid for the efforts of others to set up a special research and development department to do product research and development for our brand positioning.
In the past two years, our team has increased from a few people to more than 40 people now; as the company's business volume expands, it plans to expand to 60-100 people in 2021.
This year, we will explore more ways for talent to cooperate, such as inviting talents to come to our live broadcast room to "walk the broadcast" (providing live broadcast venues for talents), or cultivating more new anchors to join. On the basis of the distribution of talents, we plan to do the brand self-broadcast, but do not pursue much turnover, mainly to open up more display platforms for the brand, which is equivalent to advertising.
Everyone is quite optimistic about live e-commerce, and the next five years will definitely develop in a more refined and formalized direction, and will no longer be as mixed as before. Last year, many head anchors were punished, giving us small businesses some opportunities for development.
We have always believed in the power of the platform and have always followed the development of the platform. Because the platform has the ability to insight into the potential needs of consumers, it is also more forward-looking. For example, Douyin recently launched the "Douyin Box", which focuses on the tide brand, and we are also very concerned about this trend.
The products we sell on Douyin have a unit price of 99-1000 yuan, which is medium and high-end. Now, there are more and more shops on the platform that do creative kitchen utensils, and we hope to gradually extend the product warranty from one year to three or five years, retain users through services, and convert them into their own fans, so that it is possible to do long-term business.
03
The new consumption is fiercely fighting
We have chosen to "find another way" to grow momentum considerably
Jiang Yu, founder of Shanghai beauty bubble muscle brand
The bubble muscle brand has been established for more than a year and is still in the development stage from 0 to 1.
In 2021, our most important breakthrough is to solve some of the shortcomings of the supply chain, which will be of great help to further enhance product strength and control operating costs.
A small-scale brand enterprise like ours does not have laboratory and formulation research and development capabilities itself, and needs to cooperate with large OEM factories to solve product development problems. Although this type of factory can meet our product quality requirements, it is not possible to provide personalized support in research and development, including exclusive ingredients and formulations.
Last year, we reached a cooperation with China's largest supplier of amino acid raw materials, and the two sides have similar concepts, which is still a fortunate thing. As the most upstream suppliers of raw materials and formulas, they do not want to always stay in the top, but want to cooperate with downstream brands to efficiently understand market demand and develop new formulas. In the future, the two sides do not rule out cooperation in equity.
A start-up brand like Bubble Muscle is not particularly rich in cash, and it is certainly not a wise choice to fight with the new cutting-edge brands that are high and high. Therefore, we have not chosen to invest in the public domain traffic platform on a large scale, but have been looking for differentiated sales channels, such as the gift market and the university campus market.
Last year, although the overall sales target was not met, the growth momentum was still considerable due to the expansion of new sales channels in the fourth quarter. At the end of the year, we made some toiletries sets and boxes, and through the promotion of gift marketing, thousands of sets were issued at once, and the response was very good. There is also a university campus, although it will be affected by winter and summer vacations, but the overall user population is very accurate, and it is also very suitable for private domain operation.
Last year, the thing that touched us the most was the punishment of the top anchor. Many new consumer brands "love and hate" these top anchors, and everyone hollows out their minds to seek cooperation, but after cooperation, they are "kidnapped" by that business model, and the distribution of the entire value chain is actually unbalanced.
This way of cooperation does not actually make the entire market bigger, but concentrates the turnover on a few head anchors, and finally calculates the cost expenditure, the brand side does not make much money, and there will not be too much money invested in product research and development in the next year.
Communicating with investment institutions, the deepest feeling is that capital will not send charcoal in the snow, but will only add icing on the cake. In fact, the new consumption track is hot or cold, consumer demand has always existed, and it will always be a just-needed market.
We do not particularly care about what capital wants now, but first do what we want to do well, and at the right time, there will naturally be the right capital side.
04
Live e-commerce traffic is becoming more and more expensive
Five accounts work hard to use good products to retain fans
Haining leather fur Hengdishi brand manager Tong Dabao
We are northeast people who started a business in Haining. 30 years ago, my parents made fur in Liaoning, and 20 years ago, our family moved to Haining. At its peak, we had more than 30 physical stores and e-commerce supply centers across the country.
After I returned from studying abroad, I was in charge of live broadcast operations in the family business. There are many people in the northeast of the team, and the main force of fur consumption is in the north, so my main position is also selected in Kuaishou.
The first half of the year is the off-season of the fur industry, and the performance has been declining, so we will consider the number of fans first. Through short videos and commercial streaming, account followers have grown from 600,000 in September 2020 to 8 million by the end of 2021.
After entering the winter, it is considered to usher in the peak sales season, but last year's market situation was special, the epidemic was repeated and the New Year was advanced, and the fur sales cycle was shortened by one or two months compared with previous years. In order to seize the time window, we made every effort to prepare for the "Double 12" and "New Year Goods Festival", and concentrated on the new spot, pre-sale explosion and the welfare money of the price reduction and clearance in our hands.
We have our own factory and work with a lot of designer studios, so there are a lot of SKUs, and we don't bring heavy samples from morning to night. For example, the day before yesterday's mink special session, yesterday's Parker special session, today's down jacket special session, tomorrow will arrange a fur integration special session; at least one year, at least more than 20 large-scale special live broadcasts, an average of one per month.
In 2020, our live trading volume on Kuaishou has exceeded 100 million; in 2021, the live broadcast transaction volume will increase by 2-3 times.
Now the team has four anchors, divided into two accounts live, one of which is broadcast from 6 am to 12 pm, which is still very hard. Because there are too many clothing styles, we are also considering doing five accounts at the same time in 2022, each account designing a different style positioning, equipped with the corresponding anchor, field control, operation and quality inspection team.
In addition to selling high-value products such as furs, down jackets and coats, my dad also valued the benefits of fans. Now every live broadcast will prepare some welfare products, are brand-aware household necessities. Dad said that if there are more fans, more trust will be given to us, and the fur business can get better and better.
In fact, Kuaishou fans are still very "iron" and very "valuable". Once they pay attention to you and recognize you, they will not only buy furs in your house, but also clothes and daily necessities throughout the year.
Now, more and more peers come to Kuaishou to do business, the future will definitely be "more wolves and less meat", traffic is more and more expensive, so we also want to use good products to keep fans. I hope that in the new year, Hendich's five matrix accounts will work together, and there will be new breakthroughs in the number of fans and transactions.
05
Three lessons learned from the epidemic against the trend of entrepreneurship
WeChat sells gold jewelry for an annual income of 30 million
Water Shell Gold Jewelry Zhong Weiping, founder of Beshi Jewelry
The end of the year is the peak sales season of gold jewelry, I wanted to rush sales, but the result was a "bang", the Shenzhen epidemic came, and the head was covered. Although this wave of the epidemic is only 15 days, for us, every hour changes a lot, creating a series of chain reactions.
Bess Jewelry takes the S2K2C model online, and many sales channels have signed contracts because of the epidemic and a large number of orders returned. New products that were originally prepared for the New Year were pressed into inventory in the warehouse. We invested in a digital yuan experience store offline, and now it has been postponed due to the epidemic. At the end of the year, this wave, at least a few million losses.
In 2020, we made a turnover of 30 million yuan, and in 2021 we wanted to double our sales, but now it is a little difficult. For a start-up like ours, it's hard to say that there are any "highlight moments", and it would be nice to survive.
Bessee Jewelry was founded at the beginning of the epidemic in 2020, but does not want to fall under the epidemic. Factors majeure such as the epidemic have also reminded entrepreneurs: one is to control costs and expenses, and there must be cash flow in hand; the second is to cooperate with several suppliers to enhance the ability to respond at any time; the third is to rent more warehouse space and do not put goods in one place.
In the Shenzhen Shuibei Gold jewelry industry belt where we are located, the two years have benefited from the development of short video and live e-commerce, and the online transaction volume has increased significantly. The management consciousness of the bosses of traditional enterprises has also changed greatly, and those who first ignored our love and answer are now taking the initiative to talk to us about cooperation.
In 2021, we are just starting out, some "disorderly expansion", this year hope to slow down the speed of development, no longer "blindfolded wild". Especially in the case of repeated epidemics, it is more necessary to sink down and polish the business model, from "disorder" to "order".
To be honest, although we did tens of millions of dollars last year, the profits were actually very low, and most of the profits were given to the distribution masters. This year, we will optimize the product SKU, add some designer original products, and make profits.
From the perspective of brand competition, this year will focus on optimizing the supply chain and enhancing brand power. This is also the most challenging point. Last year, Douyin and Kuaishou officials invited us to settle in, which made many traditional jewelry merchants envious. However, 70% or 80% of our current transaction volume is still completed in the WeChat private domain. In the early stage of brand development, public domain traffic is more suitable for brand exposure, and the small single fast reaction model is more suitable for completion in the private domain.
In the past, when I started a business, I basically played the world by one person, but now we are a partnership system, and everyone can play their own strengths in order to achieve a little achievement now. The sales target for 2022, we are still low-key, set at about 50 million yuan.
06
Ten years of grinding a sword dawned
In the future, bamboo products will gradually replace wooden furniture
Zhu Lei, chairman of Jiangxi Bamboo Products Pinshengmei E-commerce
Founded for 11 years, Pin Sheng Mei initially engaged in the primary processing of bamboo products, such as bamboo chopsticks, bamboo vegetable boards, bamboo handicrafts, and now mainly produces high-end bamboo furniture series.
In 2021, Pinshengmei's performance growth mainly came from offline, including the space modeling of bamboo furniture for hotels, restaurants, tea houses, homestays, yoga studios and Japanese food shops, as well as cultural and creative bamboo products. At the same time, we have also been doing e-commerce (including live e-commerce), mainly selling bamboo products and bamboo furniture online.
China's bamboo resources are mainly distributed in Zhejiang, Fujian, Hunan and Jiangxi. Among them, the most developed is Zhejiang Anji, mainly doing bamboo packaging gift boxes, such as high-end tea pots, handicrafts, etc., mainly for foreign trade exports; followed by Fujian, mainly doing bamboo shelves and small household items, low-end products; Jiangxi is relatively backward, mainly bamboo products.
Pinshengmei's production base is in Yifeng County, under the jurisdiction of Jiangxi, where there are many bamboo product factories, but only we do deep processing. We hope to use bamboo to make high-end furniture, to achieve the quality of wooden furniture, and even the same quality, the price is reduced to two-thirds of the latter.
I was born in Jiangxi and worked as a civil servant in the system before starting my business. Before I came into contact with the bamboo industry, I did several Tmall online store operation projects. Compared with other industries, making bamboo products is really not profitable.
The annual revenue related to Pinshengmei bamboo products is tens of millions of yuan, and it loses money almost every year. If you change a track, such as making wood, you may still have money to earn. We have been able to sustain ourselves until now, thanks to the support of other industries.
I often think that the bamboo industry is influencing the next generation. This is not only an environmental protection undertaking, but also inherits the traditional Chinese bamboo culture. This is more like a feeling, people without feelings, it is difficult to do the bamboo industry for so many years.
We have always believed that bamboo furniture will gradually replace wooden furniture in the future. Wood takes decades or hundreds of years to make furniture, while bamboo takes only three to five years. At present, the global wood resources are slowly lacking, and the cost of wood production and processing will only become higher and higher.
In addition, the current international community is calling for "carbon neutrality" and "carbon peaking", and in forest resources, bamboo forests have a huge carbon storage capacity. According to the 60-year business cycle, 307 tons of carbon can be sequestered per hectare of bamboo forest, which is higher than that of broad-leaved forests and fir forests.
Unlike wood, bamboo has to be cut down once a year, and the bamboo forest is too dense to affect the growth of the second year. But the problem is that the current consumer market for bamboo products in China is not large enough, and many farmers are reluctant to go to the mountains to cut bamboo. Thousands of miles to the mountains to cut a bamboo, transported back to the city to sell, can only sell 10 yuan, can not make money at all.
In 2021, the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Protection and Development of Forestry and Grassland" was released, and the bamboo industry was listed as a key support for characteristic industries. Now we have a feeling of seeing the "dawn", ten years of grinding a sword, and finally "grinding" it.
I still feel like I have a long way to go. China's bamboo industry lacks industry standards, and consumer cognition is stuck in decades ago, worried about deformation, cracking and mold, and unwilling to use bamboo furniture. In fact, the industry has the ability to solve these problems, but the cost is relatively high, many production enterprises are reluctant to have more processes, and the finished products must be problematic.
In addition, there are two major pain points in the industry, one is that the bamboo furniture company's thinking is too traditional, whether it is new product development, or sales channel operation, it is relatively weak; the other is that the people who do bamboo product e-commerce lack their own supply chain integration capabilities.
Starting in 2021, we will try to develop the bamboo industry with platform thinking, and expand the application field of bamboo products by integrating the resources of all parties. The platform has gifts, home improvement, hotel homestays, live broadcasts, private domain operations and people who understand agriculture, everyone gets together, shares resources, and makes the plate of the bamboo industry bigger and shares the benefits, which can also improve the efficiency of the entire industry.
07
Big-name small sellers in Douyin were forced to leave
Turning to Amazon to find a long-lost "sense of belonging"
Dongguan leather goods bags live e-commerce entrepreneurs field
I have been doing e-commerce for seven or eight years, I am an "old player" operated by Tmall, but last year was quite unhappy, and at the beginning of the year, I took the team to do live broadcasting on Douyin, and the result was that the project lost money and the team was disbanded.
In the past two years, Tmall's traffic has declined badly, and we have been squeezed by traditional e-commerce to have no place to go, so we try to vibrato. Originally, we operated the store from 0 to 1, and it took five or six years to achieve a single monthly transaction volume of 10 million yuan. Come to Douyin to see, many people around only need a month, can go from 0 to 10 million, too incredible.
We sell women's bags on Douyin, which can sell 500 a night, of which two or three hundred are sold for "9 pieces of 9", and one down has to lose thousands to tens of thousands of yuan. The money lost can only be "filled" with high customer unit price products, so one after another "snowball". At the best time, the number of people online at the same time in the live broadcast room is 5000 or 6000, and the turnover is 200,000 or 300,000 yuan.
The surge in order volume also brings us trouble. We didn't have a stable supply chain at the time, and it took a month to get the goods out. During the period encountered various complaints, (someone) called and said that we were "scammers", and the platform also "took off" the enterprise blue V certification.
Since May 2021, we have obviously felt that the rules of Douyin have changed, and the merchants who play "low-cost drainage" have gradually been "cut". Later, a large number of brand merchants entered Douyin, and all of a sudden, we small and micro sellers were squeezed out of sight.
At that time, while docking the factory shipment, I docked with the platform to deal with complaints; coupled with the change of the platform traffic distribution rules, this series of bad things made me suddenly confused. From May to July, our live broadcast room could not be done no matter what.
In fact, it is not only me, during the period when the rules of the platform changed drastically, 99% of the friends around the entrepreneurs failed.
Our business is not good, and it is also implicated in the factories we work with. Most of the factories in Dongguan are OEM workers, and they will not prepare goods, so they have to wait for orders to come down. This is not as good as the factory in Yiwu, where there are a large number of spot to sell.
In April and May, when the live broadcast performance was good, a group of us went to the factory every day to squat and take the goods, and took away a batch of them. But after May, no one came to pick up the goods. At this time, the factory also panicked, including the luggage industry in Dongguan and Shenzhen, all of which did not dare to do goods anymore.
The wave of live e-commerce came too quickly, and in two years, all of us who do traditional e-commerce were "eliminated". From 2019 to now, although I have been starting a business, I always feel that I am "unemployed", like that kind of "lone ghost", without a sense of belonging.
This year, I followed my friends to do cross-border e-commerce, no matter the operating rules, or product styles, there is no domestic market changes as much. From 2017 to now, they suggested that I reuse the operational strategies and gameplay I learned in China to Amazon or independent platforms.
Those of us who are accustomed to traditional e-commerce operations may only be able to find a little sense of belonging on Amazon.