On January 11-14, 2022, the "Tencent Technology for Good Innovation Week" jointly sponsored by Tencent Research Institute and Tencent Sustainable Social Value Division was held. CatSuke, the founder of Duoyu Fish, delivered a speech entitled "DigitalLy Empowering circular economy - how to pick up the mess through software and hardware development" at the conference.
The following is the full text of Maosuke's speech:
Hello everyone, I'm a cat who catches more fish. Duo Catch Fish is a company that recycles durable goods, and our slogan is "really good stuff worth buying twice". This slogan sounds very reasonable, but if you want to achieve it, you need to have the ability to pan for gold from garbage.
Founded in 2017, Do-Catch was originally inspired by BOOK OFF, Japan's largest used book chain. At that time, our founding team went to the BOOK OFF flagship store of Hachioji in Tokyo, and we found that not only books, but all the goods that could be imagined were available there, and they could be bought at a very cheap price, and the range was so complete that it could already be called an ecological town.
Tokyo Hachioji Book-Off flagship store
We thought about how to bring this convenient, affordable and very enjoyable consumer experience back to China, so we made a lot of localization and online attempts in the past 4 years. Up to now, Duoyu has sold 20 million second-hand books, occupying a good market share in the domestic second-hand book market.
In fact, I've shared some of our practices in automating book recycling many times before, and today I want to share with you our new findings in clothing. Last year, we opened a brick-and-mortar store in Shanghai, where we cleaned and refurbished used clothing from users and put them on the shelves. So far, our garment recycling business has also recovered more than 100,000 garments.
As you can see in the picture, if you don't tell you, you won't actually find these neat and innovative costumes turning out to be second-hand clothes.
Shanghai Anfu Road catch fish recycling shop
Few friends will know that in fact, the garment manufacturing industry is the world's second largest polluting industry after petrochemicals, and it produces a lot of water pollution and carbon emissions every year. The mainland can effectively recycle less than 1% of clothing, and about 26 million tons of clothing are treated by landfill or incineration every year, and the treatment process has produced a lot of atmospheric and soil pollution, which is the current situation of the mainland clothing recycling industry. At the same time, the penetration rate of Japan's entire garment recycling industry can be 15%, why is there such a huge market gap?
Based on years of industry observation, we found that the main reason is that the acceptance of second-hand clothing by domestic consumers is not very high, resulting in a small market for clothing cycles. The entire market loop is still running in a very primitive, non-data-based state. Non-data recycling leads to poor quality of recycled clothing, which in turn exacerbates consumers' negative impressions of second-hand clothing, so the clothing recycling market is basically a negative cycle at present.
After analyzing the market, we found that there were basically three pain points in the past clothing cycle:
The first pain point is that it was difficult for previous recycling peers to recover clothing that had not been contaminated at the source. Now the main source of second-hand clothing recycling is actually the garbage bin of each community, and it is conceivable that most of the clothing in the garbage bin has been polluted by other garbage. Many friends may have seen old clothes recycling bins that look like pandas, especially in Shanghai and Hangzhou.
A recycling bin that resembles a panda
I can assure you that the recycling bin does not belong to any non-profit organization, and even who has the right to recycle old clothes from here is an open question. It can even be seen that many clothing recyclers will fight for who can get these old clothes from the property. In fact, many users will also put garbage in the stomach of the "panda", when the "panda" is filled, the clothes may be randomly stacked on the ground, so that the clothing has been polluted at the source.
The second pain point is the inability to finely sort recycled garments. As far as I know, the general domestic clothing recycling and treatment plant environment is very simple, even directly on the land for sorting, and the sorting process is that workers simply sort the clothing, and the classification standard is only the material or thickness and so on. Based on this sorting method, a cotton UNIQLO trench coat and a cotton Burberry trench coat are of the same value and do not produce a better output value. Because the sorting is too rough, poor quality clothing cannot be delivered to consumers. This leads to a long path for the realization of the entire second-hand clothing market, and it is difficult to achieve the digestion of the local market.
So where do these costumes go? I believe that you have also seen photos of African friends wearing Chinese clothes in some articles, in fact, those are second-hand clothes shipped from China in the name of industrial waste. An industry that should have achieved relatively high output value and environmental protection value actually used such a gray channel to achieve its own income. The output value created by such a channel is about 2,000 yuan for a ton of denim, 3,000 yuan for a ton of summer clothes, and the converted piece is 1-2 yuan for a piece of clothing.
Such a low output value has led to no profit to reinvest in the innovation of this industry, because there is no innovation, so it has been in a state of survival. Everyone was dirty and tired, but it didn't create the corresponding value.
Catching Fish provides a seemingly simple model to solve this problem, that is, the idle clothes in the hands of the user are paid to be recycled, cleaned and disinfected, and then sold on the shelves after renovation. But this simple model, first of all, to achieve the domestic internal circulation, if you want to sell clothing in the domestic market, you have to solve just said several problems.
Our solution to the first problem is not to make users pay a higher cost than to go downstairs and throw away the garbage. Just mentioned that Japan's second-hand clothing market penetration rate is high, one of the reasons is that the cost of throwing garbage in Japan is very high. If you don't catch up with the garbage trucks that recycle at a fixed time each month, you'll have to leave the garbage at home for a month; if you just litter, you'll have to pay a high garbage disposal fee. Therefore, many users in developed countries are more willing to send these things to environmental agencies or recycling stores to deal with. In contrast, most cities in China have not yet realized garbage classification, and even if they have achieved garbage classification, casual littering will not attract fines.
Users are actually relatively lazy, and if the processing cost is higher than his going downstairs, he does not have so much motivation to make the clothing can be recycled well. So we want to be able to let users not even need to take pictures, just need to click the phone screen to sell us clothes, but only if we have to be clear about the one-hand value of a piece of clothing.
Through the capture of the transaction records of thousands of brands in the primary market in half a year, we found that the seemingly dazzling pricing is actually only around three factors: brand, category, and fabric. For example, a Zara wool coat, although the style will be many different, but as long as these three factors are the same, its original price fluctuations will be controlled in a very small range. So by grasping these three elements, its historical median of transactions determines the value of the first-hand market corresponding to a piece of clothing.
Now in the fish to sell clothes, users do not even need to take out the clothes, just remember the brand of clothes to sell, and then may need to choose the fabric, after which the price will appear. As long as the user chooses a convenient time, we will send a courier to take the clothes away, it is as simple as that. There is no need to take pictures or go downstairs, which is more convenient than throwing garbage, and at the same time, you can get hundreds of dollars in revenue. I guess the experience should be very user-friendly.
Because the multi-catch fish is collected from the user's hands one by one, we can do very accurate single piece information confirmation and single piece sorting. All the processed garments will have a fixed unique packaging, corresponding to the unique code stored in the library area, the entire outbound process can be as standardized as the new clothes, greatly improving the standardization.
The second problem is that clothing is a fashion business after all, and if you do a fashion business, you must effectively identify popular and obsolete. Because we grasp the price of the primary market, there is a cycle before the second-hand market. If a piece of clothing is no longer popular when we receive it, and I am still using the original price to determine its value, it will definitely lose money. So how do we find out how fashionable a piece of clothing is?
After each piece of clothing reaches the catch of fish, it will actually record up to 70 fields. Not only including some online browsing and click data that traditional Internet companies will have, our unique arrival reminders, but also our offline data and many measurements of this dress, such as its size tightness, according to the collection of these fields, whether we can effectively judge the probability of a piece of clothing through data statistics or machine learning.
Based on this probability of sale, pricing becomes very simple, and we can charge a higher discount for clothes with a high probability of sale. If the probability of selling is relatively low, we can recover at a very low price, or even not collect it.
By analyzing this data, we found that there is another effect, that is, we can know some of the fashion trends in the market. Some brands have a small market share, but they will be snatched up in seconds as soon as they catch more fish on the shelves. After researching based on back-office data, I found that these brands are some of the designer brands that young people have liked very much recently. In addition to these niche brands, what kind of trends do volkswagen brands have? We found that the mass fashion market has actually not increased, but the market for functional clothing has increased very quickly, resulting in the mainstream brands that now occupy market share are basically functional clothing.
The third pain point is that we need to make second-hand clothing attractive at low cost. Nowadays, the general Taobao store sells new clothes mainly based on the logic of explosive models - you may be able to sell thousands or even tens of thousands of clothes if you take a set of pictures, and the display cost of splitting is actually relatively low. But second-hand clothing has a characteristic, that is, it has only one piece, if you shoot each piece very hard, this cost is very difficult to bear; but if you do not shoot well, it will make it difficult for clothes to be sold online.
Offline stores are of course very simple, as long as the clothes are hung out, everyone will try it on when they see that it is of good quality. But online in fact, in essence, everyone buys pictures, so how to catch more fish to control the cost of producing pictures of second-hand clothing? Our designers, hardware engineers and software engineers came up with the answer – an all-in-one machine that enables taking pictures, keying, retouching, dimming, color grading, and uploading.
Use the used clothing to catch more fish to take pictures and upload the all-in-one machine
First, some grid lines are generated, and the worker only needs to put the clothes on it, and the machine begins to shoot and cut pictures automatically. After the shooting is complete, the machine automatically sets the exposure and white balance according to the parameters, and performs retouching and detail correction. The whole process doesn't even need to be uploaded, because a piece of clothing corresponds to a unique code, and all the physical information corresponding to this unique code has been recorded, so taking a picture means that the page is generated.
We did a statistic, through automated shooting on the shelves, an extra ton of fish clothing can sell for 250,000 to 500,000 yuan, which is equivalent to increasing the original recycling model by 10,000%-20,000%.
There were also some unexpected gains in the process, the Minister of Commerce had previously visited our store in Shanghai, and he said that this model had not been seen in China before. The main model before was what I said about exporting to Africa, and countries have been discussing how the textile industry can carry out domestic secondary circulation, and he thinks this model is very good. I was a little flattered at the time, and I replied that we were still a very small shop and could not say that there was any real breakthrough in the industry. The minister said don't worry, good models are made from a very small scale. I thought it was quite motivating, I hope so.
A lot of things that are done with catching more fish are like this, it seems to be a lot of effort, but it is a small market. Why we specialize in these small markets that are difficult to do, because the value of catching more fish is "respect for the individual and eco-friendly". We want to do something that is beneficial to the whole social environment and ecological environment and all our user experience while creating profits, not to say that the profits I earn myself, but leave the external costs to the society and nature.
Respect for the individual is a simple concept of life happiness that is admired by catching fish. We feel that if everyone wants to achieve self-awakening, we must first pay attention to the choice of the individual's sincerity, liberate the self from the hierarchical sequence of consumption, and no longer consume for the identity symbol, but choose what the self needs. In this way, society can have a more diverse happiness.
Maybe it's because catching more fish has always adhered to this relatively strong concept, so although we have not made a community, users look like a community that is condensed together because of the value concept.
This year, we did a second-hand market in Sanlitun, and the scene was rubbing shoulders, and suddenly a few people came out of the crowd and started a pop-up chorus, and the result was that all the users in the audience were involved in a big chorus. Everyone sang "Let's live with red dust as a companion", and we were all infected at the scene. This kind of dependence and connection between strangers because of an idea is actually rare after the epidemic, and I think this is some happiness that catching more fish can bring us.
The process of catching more fish actually has a strong joy of solving problems and creating meaning, a double sense of happiness. Although this process did not make me any money, but I think, anyway, making money is also for happiness, since you can be happy now, it is better for everyone to be happy in situ, thank you.