Image source @ Visual China
Wen | Kuaidao Finance, written by | Gawaine, edited by Huang Xiaojun |
From hair arming to eyelashes, delicate girls have no upper limit to their pursuit of beauty. They wished they had the best not to have a single hair, and at the same time hoped that their eyelashes would grow wildly.
Mascara, eyelash clips, eyelash fibers, eyelash growth fluid, kind of eyelashes, perm eyelashes, the pattern on the eyelashes can be tossed more than hair, just to make their eyelashes longer and more upturned.
In Paris, France in the 19th century, beautiful women who loved beautiful women used natural hairs to sew into the eyelids in order to make their eyelashes longer, and because there was no anesthetic, people who performed this kind of surgery had to endure a considerable degree of pain.
People who were reluctant to do surgery invented the original pasted false eyelashes. At that time, false eyelashes were made of natural hair, glued to silk, gauze or fish skin, but the paste was not firm, and aristocratic women usually just sat down to chat for a few days, and a few false eyelashes floated into the tea they were drinking.
Until the 1930s, false eyelashes first became widely popular among Hollywood actresses, and then became popular all over the world, and false eyelashes have become a necessity for daily makeup.
It is such a pair of must-have gadgets for women, at least 7 out of every 10 pairs are from the "first county of China's eyelashes" - Qingdao Pingdu, and the false eyelashes sold last year alone are enough to circle Qingdao 5 times.
For decades, Pingdu has quietly supplied women around the world with affordable false eyelashes, and few outsiders know about this obscure county except for the workers and makeup and hair merchants.
An eyelash town with an annual output of 7 billion
From Qingdao, it takes two and a half hours to drive to Changle Town in Pingdu County, which is known as The Changle Town of Eyelash Village is the place where the Eyelash industry originated in Pingdu.
Every step of the town you can see several stores with the word "eyelashes", which display a variety of false eyelashes. With the sound of keyboard tapping of the clerks next to them, these false eyelashes were sent out of Pingdu through offline wholesale or online e-commerce and sold to all parts of the country, as well as countries such as Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea.
Eventually, they will appear on the consumer's makeup table or flow to Taozhi merchants, eyelashes stores, etc., and the beauty technician will plant them on the eyelashes of the guests one by one, charging hundreds or even thousands of yuan, generating up to a hundred times the profit.
The false eyelashes that can roll out premium snowballs not only moisturize beauty practitioners across the country, but also revitalize Pingdu, a poor county that was once helpless.
Eyelash production technology is the product of the collective economy in the early years, and the eyelash industry in Changle Town dates back to 1976. Local villagers introduced eyelash making technology from a wig factory in Qingdao, and built a small eyelash processing village factory in the town, which is also the prototype of the pingdu eyelash processing industry. Later, due to the restructuring, it became a few family workshops and began to contract operations.
At that time, there were less than 10 households in the whole town of Changle who engaged in the business of fake eyelashes. Once this way to make money was only circulated among relatives and friends with excellent relationships, it was the secret of everyone's low-key wealth. At the end of the 1990s, the female workers in the eyelash factory earned a monthly salary of 1500 yuan, and the hawkers who took goods from the local area to run the market could net 500,000 or 6,000 yuan in three or five days, while the annual income of the producer was at least 200,000 yuan.
The secret of wealth is always hidden, and as more and more people taste the sweetness of the small eyelash business, large and small businesses and workshops have been set up in the town. By around 2010, there were hundreds of enterprises engaged in eyelash production and manufacturing in Changle Town.
Pingdu men run the market, Pingdu women are busy. Up to today, there are more than 5,000 registered eyelash enterprises in Pingdu City, Qingdao, of which more than 1,000 are engaged in the production and processing, trade and supporting enterprises of eyelash-related industries, with an output value of up to 7 billion yuan, accounting for 80% of the national output and 70% of the global market share.
Eyelashes begin to heat up the economy
The first batch of businessmen who did eyelash trade had long since retired to the pension and handed over all the resources accumulated in the early years of traveling south and north to the younger generation.
Eyelashes sales forms have also begun to become more, or mainly retail, while opening Taobao stores while cooperating with Internet celebrities to sell goods; or back to 1688 as an upstream wholesaler, the eyelashes to subordinate merchants and beauty institutions; the rest are attributed to offline channels, through cooperation with foreign trade companies sold to all over the world.
The false eyelashes that fan are like the wings of a butterfly, and under just the right conditions, they can also fan a gust of wind.
The eyelash economy is heating up just in time for the epidemic year of 2020. According to the usual economic law, once the economic growth period enters a period of low growth, lipstick will be the consumer product with the largest increase in sales, that is, the "lipstick economy".
The term was born in the 1930s and mainly refers to an economic phenomenon that has led to the hot sale of lipstick due to economic downturn. This means that in the face of an uncertain market environment, female consumers no longer buy higher-priced goods such as Louis Vuitton handbags or Chanel fashion, and instead choose to consume "cheap rather than necessary" things such as lipstick.
However, in the face of masks, the lipstick economy rarely fails.
But the change of economic cycle makes the "lipstick economy" created by the inherent needs of human nature always valid, but in the case of the face obscured by masks, the focus of consumers shifts to the only eyes that can be exposed.
As a result, lipstick sales fell by nearly half, and the rise of the "eye makeup economy" became a new phenomenon.
Trend analysis agency Mintel released a beauty retail report in 2021 that overall makeup sales fell by 10.6% in 2020, but not all categories of makeup are declining. Another McKinsey report further pointed out that high-end makeup fell by 75%, but eye cosmetics increased by 150% against the trend.
Through the statistics of Aiqicha, it was found that in the past year, there were as many as 800 new companies around the production, processing and sales of eyelash products, nearly 20% more than in 2020.
Qingdao's false eyelashes are directly on the hot search because the sales of double ten are too huge. According to the feedback of eyelash manufacturers, double eleven for the flat eyelashes factories increased orders by nearly 40%, the cold late night is still bright eyelash factories even if they ship nearly 20,000 boxes of false eyelashes every day, it is still in short supply.
According to the online shopping survey during the Double Eleven period compiled by the Qingdao Municipal Bureau of Commerce, Pingdu's online retail sales ranked first in Qingdao.
The eyelash economy that continues to heat up has made the eyelashes merchants in Pingdu earn a lot of money every day in the explosive orders.
The small eyelashes go all the way to the south, "warping" the big market
The makeup table of the beauty-loving girls has given birth to many new consumer brands over the years, the eyeshadow has flower Xizi, the lipstick has the perfect diary, the makeup brush has the wolf, the energy, even the beauty pupil has candy, 4iNLOOK... Only the false eyelashes this partition is mostly "three no bulk goods".
Although Pingdu, which has been oem for overseas brands, has a strong manufacturing ability, because the link of the false eyelashes industry is too long, the branding of false eyelashes has not moved at a time when other local brands of beauty products have emerged.
It is not that there have been no false eyelashes manufacturers trying to develop in the direction of branding. It is just that the embarrassment is that although false eyelashes are used as cosmetics, the current state does not have a detailed specification for false eyelashes products, so false eyelashes do not have quality inspection reports.
False eyelashes manufacturers can not get the corresponding quality inspection report, which leads to many false eyelashes manufacturers' own brands can not enter the supply channels of chain beauty collection stores, or can only wholesale to small dealers without quality inspection reports.
And the production of false eyelashes is extremely dependent on labor, "pressing hair, closing hair, going up, cutting hair, coiling, shaping, stripping, supporting, packaging", the production of a pair of false eyelashes needs to go through a total of nine steps to leave the factory.
In addition to the two most common grafted eyelashes and daily wear of eyelashes, there are classifications of hair, dense rows and flowers, according to the density, length, color and curl of false eyelashes, accompanied by different materials and styles, and corresponding to different hair combination methods and styling methods.
The production of complicated false eyelashes is difficult to mechanize, because the mechanism of eyelashes is single and rigid, far less than the price of handmade eyelashes. Even in Pingdu, it is also a small family workshop as the main body of false eyelashes manufacturers accounted for the majority, than the risk of spending money on the brand, OEM for this once poor county people can be more drought and flood protection.
For many businessmen who have been engaged in the false eyelashes industry in Pingdu in their early years, most of the year is either in Guangdong or on the way to Guangdong. In that era when high-speed rail and airplanes were not yet popular, a day and a night of green-skinned trains became the only way for Pingdu people to go to Guangshen and Shenzhen, and merchants carrying samples were busy shuttling between daily markets and dealers.
Shenzhen and Guangzhou have a long history of foreign trade and the huge wholesale market that has been built with it, and most of the eyelash merchants from Pingdu have dug their first pots of gold here. The advantages of being a trading port for many years have made many new consumer brands born in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
Last year, when capital's attention began to enter the false eyelashes market, it was two companies in Shenzhen that preemptively touched the olive branch.
On December 8, 2021, MLENDIARY Milan Diary, a brand of eyelashes, announced the completion of a round of financing of more than tens of millions of yuan, led by Fengrui Capital and followed by Shengjing Jiacheng. Founded in November 2020, Milan Diary is the brand's most famous "flash-linked" false eyelashes, with sales of more than 100,000 boxes in the first month of launch.
The other is WOSADO Yue Hitomi, which, like Milan Diary, entered the market with magnetic false eyelashes. In February 2021, the Pre-A round of financing was completed, followed by the A round and A+ round in June and October respectively, with a cumulative financing amount of 300 million yuan, behind which the capital is Sequoia China Seed Fund, Hillhouse Venture Capital, Dachen Venture Capital, etc.
Although there are many doubts about the evaluation of soft magnetic false eyelashes, for example, magnetic false eyelashes are attached to magnets, so the tail of eyelashes will be heavier, and wearing them for a long time will inevitably compress the eyelids, feeling that the eyes are more tired. A pair of magnetic eyelashes can often be hundreds of prices can only be used for about a month, in addition to convenience, the use of the feeling is not good and so on.
But it does not prevent the fact that the support of a strong supply chain coupled with the unprecedented hot market demand, the small false eyelashes seem to be ushering in a golden age.
Just as all consumer goods are worth redoing once, it is now the turn of this little eyelashes, an industry that has neither educated consumers nor given birth to national brands by international big names, and is heading for its turning night.