Exposed to layoffs, deduction of wages, "top stream" Wen Heyou what happened?

Produced by Radar Finance and | Li Yihui, ed. | Deep Sea

Following the tide of Internet layoffs, there are also companies in the new consumer industry that follow up the layoffs.

On February 16, according to the "FMCG" report, a number of Wenheyou employees said that the company launched a round of large-scale layoffs a few years ago, and more than 60% of the departments were laid off; years later, a new round of layoffs continued.

In this regard, the relevant person in charge of Wenheyou Public Relations responded to the interface news that the layoffs belong to the normal personnel changes generated by the company's business adjustment, the company has a number of positions are also recruiting, while each project is now in progress, there will be new projects and formats.

According to the data, Wen Heyou, born in 2011, started from the small stall selling fried ribs in the hands of founder Wen Bin, and successively expanded the categories of lobster, sausage, stinky tofu and other categories in the past few years, creating the popularity of super Wen Heyou. After the multi-hundred million yuan C round of financing in June 2021, Wenheyou's valuation reached 10 billion yuan, becoming one of the most valuable new consumer catering culture companies in China.

Driven by capital, Wen Heyou walked out of Changsha with great ambition, went south to Guangzhou, and then entered Shenzhen and Nanjing. However, after leaving, Wen Heyou encountered disobedience. Some analysts pointed out that the layoffs are only one part of Wen Heyou's "decline", and the "top stream" of the restaurant industry has long been gone.

Exposed layoffs and deductions

According to the exposed employees, Wen Heyou's layoffs came very suddenly.

A week before the Spring Festival this year, Wen Jiake (pseudonym), who joined an immersive theater project in Changsha Wenheyou, was told that the project was stopped and received a layoff notice from the company. When it was "optimized", Wenjiake had been employed for less than 3 months and had not yet passed the probationary period.

It is reported that the project involving layoffs is a paid project similar to a float parade that Wen Heyou landed to achieve the vision of "Catering Disney".

According to public information, Wen Bin, the founder of Wenheyou, has repeatedly said to the outside world that Wenheyou will do "the Disney of the catering industry", "We are doing catering, but not simply doing catering, but also excavating local market culture." If it is only positioned in catering, there will be business limitations. ”

Wen Jiake said in the breaking news that Changsha Wen and You created the immersive theater project to emulate Disney. The project to cover the entire six floors of Changsha Wenyouhe, the workload is not small, but the progress is not smooth.

First of all, the personnel has not been fully configured, Wen Jiake can only be the scalp when encountering the game field that he is not familiar with; secondly, the setting of the IP theme changes back and forth, in more than two months, the script plan has undergone seven or eight major adjustments, and the top management has not reached a unified opinion on the main body of the project.

Until the entire project was stopped, Wen Jiake and other colleagues who did content planning and design received a layoff notice.

At present, Wenheyou has opened "Super Wenheyou" in Changsha, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and Nanjing is the fourth city that Wenheyou is ready to land.

In February 2021, Wen Heyou announced that it will enter Nanjing, intending to choose the site at No. 132 Changle Road, Qinhuai District, Nanjing, with the theme of Nanjing culture, theme entertainment and fashion as the development positioning, with a total investment of 500 million yuan, and is expected to be completed and opened by the end of 2021.

And this layoff also affected Nanjing Wenheyou. According to Hong Yu (pseudonym), a layoffed employee of the project, what he did for Nanjing Wenheyou was Ming Dynasty culture.

In December 2021, Hong Yu and the rest of the team were suddenly told that the Ming Dynasty culture was not done and would be changed to the Six Dynasties culture. After being recalled from Nanjing, Hong Yu received a notice of layoffs from the company, the same reason is that "the project is suspended, and the personnel should be optimized."

Since Nanjing is a new project, the number of people to be "optimized" far exceeds the Changsha project, "from more than 60 people in the heyday to about 20 people, I heard that it will be cut."

It is reported that this round of layoffs involves a number of departments other than Wenheyou Catering, and the proportion of "optimization" in some departments is as high as 60%.

In addition to layoffs, the remaining employees also face deducted wages. Wenheyou's employee salaries will not be paid in full every month, and 10% of the performance wages will be pressed to the end of the year award at the end of the year, while there is no year-end bonus for all employees in 2021.

Regarding the layoff information, Wen Heyou responded that the layoffs were normal personnel changes caused by the company's business adjustments. At present, many positions in the company are still recruiting, and there will be new people in the next year, and the company's various projects are advancing, and there will be new projects.

Expansion outside Changsha was hampered

Changsha, where the cultural and entertainment background has always been very strong, has given birth to many Internet celebrity brands, and Wen Heyou is one of the most concerned.

Regarding Wen Heyou's entrepreneurial history, a report by Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business introduced that at the age of 22, Wen Bin quit his sales job at an automobile company and used 5,000 yuan of start-up funds to set up a stall on the streets of Changsha, mainly promoting fried ribs.

In addition to the necessary expenses such as buying a cart and buying goods, it cost 4,000 yuan, and the remaining 1,000 yuan was all smashed on the signboard. In Wenbin's words, it's called "brand awareness."

The sign was launched, and Wenbin's "sharp ribs" gradually became a popular snack, and more and more people lined up.

At that time, Wen Heyou's co-founder Yang Ganjun was a sausage supplier, and Wen Bin was his client. The two became acquainted with each other and opened an "Old Changsha Fried Society" together, and the brand of Wen Heyou was officially established.

Since then, as the business has become more and more prosperous, from 2012 to 2016, the Wenheyou brand has added sub-brands such as Wenheyou Lobster House, Wenheyou Changsha Sausage, Wenheyou Stinky Tofu, Around Six Points Toast, Humble Art Noodles and so on.

According to data, by 2015, Wenheyou had eight stores in Changsha, with a cumulative revenue of more than 100 million yuan and a gross profit of more than 40 million yuan.

In 2017, due to the transformation of the old city, Wen Heyou in Dufu Jiangge had to be demolished. Seemingly an ordinary relocation, Wen Bin seized this opportunity to further graft the marketing gimmick of "city culture" into the snack business.

In 2018, after obtaining a strategic investment of no less than 70 million yuan from Tang Renshen Group, WenheYou Changsha Hisense Plaza store, which cost nearly 100 million yuan, opened. Different from the previous stores, this time more than 100 merchants were introduced by Wen Heyou, of which the main Changsha folk snacks, Wen Heyou was upgraded to a 7-storey building, covering an area of 20,000 square meters of "Super Wenheyou".

At the time of opening, when the social media punch card planting culture prevailed, through the community planting grass, short video marketing brush screen, Wen heyou became a holy place for Internet celebrities to punch in, and the limelight was the same.

Coupled with the integration of barbershops, billiard rooms, homestays, and art galleries, this grounded approach quickly opened up traffic entrances for Wen Heyou. In March 2019, Changsha Wenheyou Lobster Restaurant queued up more than 7,000 tables and released 16,000 numbers a day, setting a new record in the catering industry.

The success of Changsha Wenheyou soon attracted the attention of capital. According to Tianyan, in February 2020, Wenheyou obtained nearly 100 million yuan of A round financing from Jiahua Capital; in April 2021, Wenheyou's B-round investors were Sequoia China Fund, IDG and Warburg Pincus Capital, with an amount of 500 million yuan and a post-investment valuation of more than 10 billion yuan.

With the blessing of capital, it not only strengthens Wenbin's ambition to move towards the "Disney of the restaurant industry", but also provides support for its expansion beyond Changsha. As for the expansion plan, according to Wenheyou CEO Feng Bin, it is planned to open about 20 urban Wenheyou in the next 5 years.

The first stop of "Super Wenheyou" was in Guangzhou. In July 2020, Super Wenheyou, which spent 200 million yuan and an area of 5,000 square meters, landed in Guangzhou, located next to the Taikoo Hui Shopping Mall in the central Tianhe District of the CBD.

At the beginning of the opening, the number of people in Guangzhou Wenheyou once reached more than 2500, and the average queue time reached 4 hours. However, the good times are not long, there are media reports, and later because of the decline in passenger flow, a number of well-known merchants such as Feng Guan Hui BBQ, Pork Chop And Sour and Spicy Rice Noodles have left the market from Guangzhou Wenheyou.

According to media reports, a year later, Guangzhou Wenheyou changed "Super Wenheyou" to "Guangzhou Wenheyou", in addition, many of the goods in the store have also been changed. In the past, crayfish, which had been used as the main theme, was replaced by seafood.

In April 2021, Shenzhen Wenheyou opened, with an area four times that of Guangzhou. However, even with the introduction of well-known long-established stores such as "Bright Milk Pigeon" and "Shajing Oyster", Shenzhen Wenheyou, like Guangzhou, has become "snubbed" after experiencing the initial explosion of the opening.

In September 2021, the Shenzhen Wenhe Youyuan sign was removed and replaced by a new sign, "Old Street Oyster Market". Wu Xian, general manager of Shenzhen Wenheyou, said that after the adjustment and transformation of Shenzhen Wenheyou, it will present a cyberpunk-style future market, including seafood markets, vegetable markets and bazaars.

Nowadays, Wen Heyou Nanjing Store is still in preparation, but there has been news of layoffs, and many people believe that Wen Heyou is facing a situation of water and soil dissatisfaction outside.

Difficult cross-regional integration

Changsha has achieved local victories, but the expansion has not been able to get the people of Shenzhen and Guangzhou who love to eat, where is the problem of Wen Heyou?

"Our original idea was to promote the culture of Huxiang and publicize the culture of Huxiang through the carrier of food." Wen Bin once told the media that Super Wenheyou is not only a place with food, but a relatively rich platform to show the culture of the city.

However, after leaving Hunan, there is no problem that cannot be avoided in the replication expansion of the whole country, that is, the difficulty of cross-regional replication of culture. The diversity of living customs determines that it is difficult to replicate the culture of a region throughout the country and make it accepted and loved by all consumers, whether from the perspective of sustainability or the maintenance of freshness.

Zhu Danpeng, a researcher at the China Brand Research Institute, pointed out that Wenheyou has a very deep regional cultural color, as a Changsha Internet celebrity punch card, it has its own limitations, that is, it cannot meet and match consumers in other regions except Changsha.

Although Wen Heyou has now realized this problem, through the concept of one city, one policy, one store and one policy around the localized city culture, the diverse cultures and cuisines are gathered and displayed in a centralized place and integrated into the local culture. Unfortunately, at present, the "drastic" reforms of Wenhe and Friends in Shenzhen and Guangzhou have achieved little effect.

In addition, no matter how eye-catching Wen Heyou's promotion of its market culture is, most consumers come to consume catering, and in the final analysis, the quality of catering (taste, quality) is the key to retaining people. However, Wen Heyou's dishes are not enough to repurchase but are often criticized.

On the social platform, many netizens who have been to Wenheyou commented that Wenheyou's dishes are of ordinary standards, the taste is not worthy of its fame, and the outside of the stall snacks are similar, but there is no economy and taste of the stall snacks, so that they come to take pictures, hit the card and leave.

Zhu Danpeng pointed out that if the scene experiential catering model like Wen Heyou wants to go long, the quality of catering is still the key, and consumers punch cards to punch cards, and ultimately return to the essence of food.

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