Text | Retail Krypton Planet, by Nicole, Editor | Mo Xiaolu
A good place for novelty and fashion, not only capturing young people, but also middle-aged people will be impressed.
Sisi, who works in Ningbo, was recently taken by a post-95 friend to a well-decorated, coffee-scented, high-quality café, and completely understood why young people are keen to explore new stores offline.
As a middle-aged man who "hopes not to go wrong", Sisi will habitually choose chain cafes. However, she admitted that the two-way rush between the "new stores" and the young people is "the living space for new brands and new formats to sprout".
In fact, it's not just about visiting trendy new cafes.
As the Internet and e-commerce continue to penetrate and provide unprecedented convenience for buying things, people are full of unprecedented enthusiasm for exploring all new offline commercial spaces that can provide completely different experiences.
HARMAY Jimei Industrial Cave Style Chongqing store
After all, as Internet natives, a new generation of consumers is born with curiosity and a desire to explore. When a new brand or new format appears, it will often use social media to quickly spread out the voice among young people, in this era of scarce attention, to maximize the harvest of magnesium light.
"Retail Krypton Planet" combed through some offline "new stores" that have stood out in recent years and found that whether it is bars, cafes and other catering formats, or brands such as beauty and offline physical stores, they are generating new content, reconstructing experiences, and becoming a new species of retail by playing cards without common sense and breaking through traditional stereotypes.
These newly emerging "new stores" actually have some commonalities in terms of functional, experience and aesthetic dimensions.
01 What does the "New Store" look like?
There is a view that the Internet age is a stage of all-round fragmentation and reorganization of the industrial age, both the great changes in lifestyles and business models brought about by new technologies, and the corresponding changes in aesthetic tastes.
The "new stores" are both a fragmented reconstruction of the business model that has traditionally been divided by age, gender, and price, as well as a change in aesthetic tastes based on the characteristics of a new generation of consumers.
Format "mix-and-match"
New brands that have grown up in the new wave of consumption have a special love for the exploration of "mixing and matching" of business formats.
Founded in 2016, COMMUNE Commune, after several years of obscure development, is now a "social landmark" for young people in first- and second-tier cities to punch cards. The key change of COMMUNE Commune to the traditional bar is to combine the three functional sections of the beverage self-selected supermarket, the super bar and the classic dining area, and transform it into a composite restaurant bar for the Z generation and the new middle class consumer group.
COMMUNE Commune is a "social landmark" for first- and second-tier young people to punch cards.
This way of recombining formats, spaces and products around the "social" scene enables HARMONE Commune to meet the consumption needs of multiple times and scenes such as lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and nighttime.
In addition to capturing young people, the COMMUNE commune also gained the favor of capital. New consumption was cold in the second half of last year, but HARMONE still announced the completion of hundreds of millions of yuan A+ round of financing before the Spring Festival in 2022.
Beauty collection store HARMAY Mei is also a "new store" with mixed and matched formats.
Typical examples are the HARMAY Meihai Anfu Road store, which is regarded as a version 2.0 store inside, and inside and outside a single-family building, it combines different contents such as beauty retail + coffee + lemon tea + public square + art window. In addition to buying products and enjoying afternoon tea, consumers can even watch art exhibitions in the public square on the first floor.
It is said that HARMAY will leave a window in each store to make an art Gallery. This kind of "pan-art museum", the evaluation of the person in charge of UCCA is: consumers may not go to the art museum on the weekend, but it is likely to go to HARMAY to talk about the plum, both consumption and beauty popularization and appreciation.
The biggest benefit of "mix-and-match" formats such as HARMONE Commune and HARMAY Is to help improve the efficiency of store space and consumer experience. After all, compared with a single format, the composite format can better meet the consumer demand of multiple time periods and multiple scenarios.
This is also why DAMIEN, the founder of HARMAY, opened a store in a way that has nothing to do with the traditional store opening logic from the beginning. In his view, the birth of many consumption scenarios is to implant new concepts in the existing space.
So, HARMAY said, "What has been challenging is that the store doesn't have to be a retail scenario, it can be a different scenario." ”
Damien emphasizes, "Stretch the consumption scene and timeline a little longer, like a hook, and repeatedly integrate consumers in time and space." ”
Step out of the "standardized" template
Shanghai coffee brand M Stand, founded in 2017, is a chain of cafes, but it has taken a path that is not copied according to the traditional chain standardization.
"One store, one design" is M Stand's new way of solving problems.
Different from the standardized and commercial traditional coffee "third space", when M Stand was established, it played an industrial style and a minimalist space style, and called itself "the Starbucks of China's new generation of young people" and called the Starbucks of the standardized route.
This means that the design of M Stand stores is always in dynamic evolution, even if it currently plans different store types, but it is the smallest capsule store, it is also "one store, one design".
HARMAY, in the design of store space, also tries to challenge the high difficulty like M Stand.
So far, HARMAY's stores in each city have different aesthetic styles, and through unique design themes and local cultures, they have become a new landmark of urban symbols and aesthetics.
M Stand and HARMAY have abandoned the traditional retail store standardization and rapid replication method. Although, on the road to self-replication and expansion, what is turned on is a Hard mode.
However, it is this breakthrough that will make consumers always have expectations and surprises like opening the blind box, and get an Easy model in winning the brand mentality.
All ascended to the "third dimension"
After the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg proposed the concept of "third space", it was interpreted by Starbucks as the most successful commercial space concept in history.
The "third space" is a public space that is different from the "first space" for family living and the "second space" for the workplace, and in addition to the well-known cafes, there are also public places such as city bars, museums, libraries, and parks.
In fact, the "new stores" that strive to rise in the new wave of consumption, after breaking through the single buying and selling function, are also trying to create a brand-level "third space" to attract target consumers to stay more, belong more, and become their gathering point.
In January 2022, ANTA opened a digital smart sports complex called "982 Creative Space" at its headquarters in Jinjiang, trying to explore a deeper emotional connection between customers and brands with a series of product-related diversified experiences, interactions and lifestyle expressions, so that consumers have a sense of belonging.
ZUCZUG's fashion athleisure women's wear brand Angao ruo AN KO RAU has gone earlier than ANTA's exploration. In 2018, Angaoruo AN KO RAU opened its first concept store on Anfu Road in Shanghai, trying to make the store not only an offline sales channel, but also a base for brands to organize outdoor and sports activities.
Traditional brands strive to upgrade their stores and move closer to the "third space", as Angaoruo AN KO RAU advertised: "In the Internet age, the most important purpose of offline stores is not to display goods, but to provide a real, high-quality platform for people who like sports and outdoors to gather together, share each other's stories, and plan new fun things together." ”
Yao Weixiong, CEO of ANTA Group's fashion and sports brand group, defined "982 Creative Space" as "a new commercial destination driven by user scene experience." ”
In the era of developed e-commerce and the performance of contracts into hours and minutes, offline stores have long been pushed to a new stage of new and old business logic.
When selling goods is no longer the core function of a store, the super experience is becoming the self-cultivation of the "new store".
Whether it is the mixing and matching of business formats, breaking the standard face, or upgrading the dimensional space, these new practices that are very different from the principles of offline operation and expansion in the past have been tested and explored in large quantities, trying to let consumers stay more, interact more, and immerse themselves as the core logic, and are lifting the hijab of "new stores".
Angela Ahrendts, a former senior vice president of retail at Apple, who is more avant-garde on the road to the "new store," has long said, "We don't need to open more stores, but we need to open a great venue, to make it look like a city square, like a gathering place." ”
03 The Old Puzzle of New Species: Finding equilibrium
Sigismo Baumann wrote in Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor: "If you want to increase the spending power of consumers, you cannot let them rest. They need to constantly accept new temptations, in constant excitement that never dries up. ”
On the one hand, this provides a direction for the "new store" that is eager to pull people back offline; on the other hand, it also points out the difficulties of this road, consumers who accept the new temptation can be excited to explore the "new store", but they will not necessarily become the consumer of the brand, so that the "new store" can make money.
Lack of consumer insight and the blunt mix-and-match reconstruction of the underlying logic of business, behind the "fake hi" set off by the Internet celebrity punch card, how many follow-up imitations can be turned into a moment? Even LINE FRIENDS, which sits on the head IP, closed the last offline cross-border collection store in the Chinese market this year after the popular punch card tide.
The concentrated outbreak of "new stores" has injected vitality into offline business with new experiences. However, as long as it is a business practice, it is necessary to find an operational balance between mixing and matching rich experiences and business transformation.
First of all, when any brand actively embraces the "new store", it needs to avoid and weigh the habituations and avoid the old thinking of traditional retail.
Wu Bin, the founding managing partner of Qingrui Venture Capital, was deeply touched by the fact that "you can't find a new continent with an old map".
In March 2019, he met with the founder of HARMY, but Wu Bin still missed the project. He recently posted a reflection on Zhihu: Before, we should not use traditional retail logic to evaluate HARMAY. For example, "new stores" do not necessarily follow the traditional retail practice of replicating standardized stores on a large scale.
HARMAY Also proves the advantages of the new approach: the revenue and profit of a single store in offline stores surpass those of traditional makeup retailers. Not only that, the Beijing Sanlitun store has also been reported by the media, and at its peak, it can achieve sales of about 15 million yuan a month, ranking in the forefront of the national offline channel ping effect.
With the development of e-commerce and social media, offline commercial space does need new doorways.
This is also like what Shen Shuaibo, a business observer and CEO of Pandong Media, found in some "new stores" that goes against traditional retail common sense: "Experience and efficiency are not two-choice issues, and there is no strong correspondence between space size and ping efficiency." ”
Of course, this does not mean that re-experience is the only label of "new stores".
Second, the essence of any retail is around cost, efficiency and experience. The basic skills of cost and efficiency are well laid, and the experience brought by labels such as beauty, personality, and characteristics will be the icing on the cake.
Don't be fooled by the superficial fancy, the core is a solid retail basic skill, the consumer experience and business transformation organic combination.
Some failed offline stores can see the imbalance between consumer experience and commercial transformation: the root cause of LINE FRIENDS's rapid popularity and disappearance lies in the lack of innovation and fan interaction of IP operation products, single experience, and lack of continuous drainage of "hooks".
The combination of catering + retro culture has not "worked" in other cities, on the contrary, it has fallen into a slump after the punch-in heat, which lies in the crowd that punches in for the novel experience, and is not impressed by its main business of catering to become a group of people who sit down to consume.
HARMAY's Damien has always emphasized two very core competencies. One is to build the latest field in the middle of the city for consumer exchange and entertainment; the other is to constantly look for new international brands, superimpose updates, and ensure that this field will not become obsolete.
The management team of COMMUNE Commune has been immersed in the industry for many years, understands the needs of consumers, and its solid supply chain capabilities can make COMMUNE Commune labeled "Wine Museum", and the price is close to the people.
Finally, in the Internet age, the super core of the "technology brain" will be the standard for all the "new stores" that have gone far.
Consumers will never be satisfied, and new demands will continue to arise. The "new store" needs to be able to grasp and keep up with the needs and changes of users, and while building a differentiated user experience, it is also necessary to use technology to build advantages and calculate the long-term economic account of cost reduction and efficiency.
Sun Yanhua, a partner at Zhong Ding Capital, commented on HARMAY, "On the one hand, the beauty is presented to the user, and the efficiency is achieved to the extreme through digitalization." ”
It is said that HARMAY has an IT team of nearly 100 people, who will observe the length of time spent by users entering the store in different areas of the store, judge the "hot zone" and "cold zone" for data calculation, constantly adjust the shelf placement and product display, and update and iterate on the goods.
On the whole, whether it is the harmay plum, COMMUNE commune or ANTA that has been discussed, or the new tea that has not appeared in the text but has changed from the popularity of the naked eye to the calm and daily trend in recent years, the exploration of "new stores" by brands and retailers is still in the early stages, and it needs to be continuously advanced.
However, in any case, "Retail Krypton Planet" believes that the "new store" that will succeed in the future may not be a closed fortress, but an open platform architecture that can be multiplied and combined with other new media to obtain a larger business space.
Today, more players have plunged into this sea, the waves are sanding, just waiting for time.