Are you looking for a sense of ceremony or everyday dress.
Written | Nandu Weekly reporter Yan Yuhan
When Women's Day arrives, it is time to buy flowers and send flowers, and the price of one or two hundred yuan a bouquet of flowers on weekdays is usually much more expensive in the festival, and this premium is the price that people who are keen on ceremony must pay for this pursuit.
Nowadays, we pay more and more attention to the sense of ritual in life, and flowers, as a powerful tool to show the "sense of ritual" of life, appear more and more frequently in daily life.
Every year, Valentine's Day and Tanabata Festival are the moments when flowers are "competing for beauty". Usually inexpensive bouquets of flowers after the price of several times soared at least a few hundred yuan, plus packaging and brand premium, you can be as high as thousands of yuan or even tens of thousands.
Hundreds of thousands of yuan, people who like to buy flowers can't help but start to wonder, after the "cherry freedom" and "toon freedom", how is our "flower freedom" progressing?
Flowers also have "light luxury"
When it comes to the sense of ceremony brought by flowers, I am afraid that many people recall roseonly who once brushed up the circle of friends on Valentine's Day.
Unlike previous bouquets of flowers, Roseonly uses a creative vertical gift box with flowers neatly arranged in the gift box, which also makes the gift box only hold a limited number of roses at most.
Usually a box of roseonly contains 9 to 19 Ecuadorian roses, the cheapest 9 ordinary gift boxes are also 999 yuan, if the number of roses is large or has a special shape, it can be as high as two or three thousand yuan or even tens of thousands of yuan.
This price also implies that roseonly's positioning is not an ordinary flower brand, but a deliberate inclusion of flowers in the ranks of light luxury, although the price is expensive, but there are still many people willing to pay for it.
The Fauvism, which also made flowers into light luxuries, attracted a large number of fans with its star effect and creative shapes and themes, and a rose immortal flower would sell for 520 yuan.
It is said that the weddings of stars such as Huang Xiaoming, Gao Yuanyuan, Zhou Xun, and Lin Xinru all use Fauvist floral art.
Compared to Roseonly's iconic vertical gift box, The Fauvist bouquet is richer in style and choice. Different kinds of flowers are clustered into a plump bouquet of flowers through the skillful hands of the florist, and are given poetic names such as "the princess's cape" and "the queen's robe", which are full of bouquets, and when they are held up without paying attention, they will block their faces - at first glance, it seems that no one can refuse such a sense of romance and ceremony.
Wait, no mention of price yet.
This is this year's Valentine's Day limited edition.
In the comments below, some netizens separately reported their prices after local inquiries, ranging from 3800-5800 yuan, and some people revealed that there were 8888 bouquets of flowers in the offline physical store.
Some people once sent out a brutal rose bucket on Tanabata last year, 12,000 yuan a barrel, and sent it over to actually flower or flower.
Figure Little Red Book @ Yu Ge
But do you think $12,000 is the ceiling?
Not to be outdone, Roseonly launched a giant rose bear composed of 1200 Ecuadorian immortal roses, 1.2 meters high and priced at 99999 yuan.
Yes, you're not wrong, this bear is worth nearly one hundred thousand dollars.
Seeing this price, and then looking at your own wallet, this is a sky-high romantic and ritual sense of instantly unscented.
"Buyer Show" vs "Seller Show"
In fact, in addition to the often use of expensive Ecuadorian roses in varieties, the brand premium is also an important reason for the high price.
Brands like roseonly and Fauvism originally focused on the light luxury route, and those expensive bouquets were mostly aimed at important time nodes such as festivals, birthdays, and anniversaries.
Now, more and more flower e-commerce brands on the market such as Flowerplus Flower Plus, Spend Time, Flower Talk and other platforms have successively launched services that regularly subscribe to flowers, that is, to cultivate users' flower consumption habits in this way, so that flower consumption gradually shifts from festivals to daily life.
As far as the flower retail market is concerned, especially from 2013 to 2017, the development trend of flower e-commerce can be described as rapid. Mainstream flower e-commerce platforms such as Aishang Flowers, Flower Time, and FlowerPlus Flower Plus have all received a number of financings.
Affected by the epidemic in 2020, a large number of offline stores were closed, which led to flower production and distributors opening up online sales channels, which promoted the synchronous development of the mainland flower industry online and offline, and the scale of market retail increased without decreasing.
Flowers are also increasingly moving from high-end or festive consumer goods to daily demand. Platform data shows that in 2021, the sales of life flowers on the platform increased by 150% year-on-year, and women's flower consumption accounted for more than 65%.
At present, the price of the basic single-month package launched by Flowerplus Flower Plus and Spend Time is 99 yuan and 4 bunches, specific theme bouquets, sent every Monday, the average down a bouquet of flowers is about 25 yuan, there are also higher prices, about 200 yuan per month, with an average of 50 yuan per bunch.
Although the number of flowers is limited, at least the flowers are guaranteed every Monday, and the price sounds much more affordable.
A clever little friend sent out his flower arrangement works after buying a theme bouquet on the Internet, such as the texture of oil painting, and the effect of inserting a bunch of flowers for dozens of dollars a few hundred yuan.
Figure Little Red Book @LvyAn
However, according to the "2021 China Flower E-commerce Market Analysis Report - Industry Competition Status and Prospect Assessment Forecast" data show that 30.8% of users choose the flower e-commerce platform to consume because of the price concessions, only 11.85% of users believe that the flower e-commerce platform services are in place.
With the increasingly common daily subscription model of the flower e-commerce platform, problems such as stealing varieties, incorrect versions of goods, and flowers are not fresh have begun to be exposed.
Figure Little Red Book @ Little Sweet Potato_6125
People often complain that the flowers they receive are not fresh at all. The flowers are cheap and of poor quality, and the flowers originally ordered were sent with good quality lilies, peonies, and water lilies, but now they are sent with some cheap small wildflowers and a large number of leaves.
Figure Little Red Book @ Qiao Manman
Some people also ordered a large flower orchid, and the flowers received were exactly different from the flowers in the pictures. After contacting customer service, customer service also insisted that it was a variety. Some netizens who understand flowers pointed out that the flowers received are not large flower orchids at all, but tiger tail orchids, although both are orchids, but the price gap is very large, and tiger tail orchids are much cheaper.
Although the price is close to the people, the problem is the gap between the "buyer show" and the "seller show". Is it really that hard to achieve flower freedom?
Buy flowers only depends on luck?
Just when major flower e-commerce brands are fiercely competing for the market, merchants in the Dounan Flower Market in Kunming, Yunnan Province have also joined the struggle.
Kunming Dounan Flower Market is The largest cut flower trading center in Asia, the flowers here are exported to more than 50 countries and regions, and 7 out of every 10 flowers circulating in the Chinese market come from Dounan.
According to data from the Kunming Flower Auction Center, the volume of e-commerce transactions will double in 2021, reaching more than 100 million branches, while the turnover has increased by 2.5 to 3 times. For this special commodity, flowers, after a long journey, whether it is still complete and fresh is the most hardcore competitiveness.
Local flower companies have spent a lot of effort, and some companies have developed special turnover boxes for flower transportation, which can be 5-6 times more efficient than traditional cartons, and this kind of container can be folded and recycled.
Directly selling flowers from the "factory store" at the far end of the supply chain has launched a positive impact on flower e-commerce - according to CCTV Financial Report, some e-commerce platforms are also directly building shipping warehouses in Yunnan, using advanced cold storage mobile cold storage, which can keep the temperature in the carriage constant and make the loss rate in the circulation process as low as 1.5%.
Figure Little Red Book @ Miss Gong who is stronger and bigger
A large bucket of flowers containing bubble roses, sacred heart lilies and peonies cost only $29.
Such a price is really hard not to be impressed.
But don't be too happy too soon, do you think that flowers shipped from the origin can really guarantee good quality and low price?
Figure Little Red Book @ Strawberry Tree
Even for 12 yuan two bubble roses, there is also a situation where the gap between the "buyer show" and the "seller show" is too large.
Flowers themselves because of their short shelf life and very easy to damage, once the logistics problems lead to untimely distribution, the original fresh flowers may become flowers when they arrive, which is very demanding on logistics and supply chain.
According to the "2018 China Flower E-commerce Industry and User Research Report" released by iResearch, 50% of the quality of flowers depends on the planting of flowers and 50% on post-harvest management. Among them, picking pre-cooling, processing and packaging, logistics and transportation are the three most important links in the whole post-harvest.
The cost of cold chain transportation is very high. According to a florist in Dounan Flower Market, due to the high price of cold chain transportation, flower cold chain transportation will choose a return car. According to the transportation distance, the general one-way charge is about 13,000-20,000 yuan.
Even so, it is difficult to avoid the loss of flowers in the transportation process, coupled with other labor costs such as loading and unloading, packaging, etc., and the entire cost expenditure has reached almost half of the wholesale price of flowers.
In this way, no matter what level of price roses are bought, the quality of the flowers received cannot be guaranteed, and it seems that whether the car is turned over or not can only look at luck.
However, everyone's enthusiasm for the purchase of flowers is still undiminished. According to the data, since 2016, the scale of the mainland flower e-commerce market has shown an annual growth trend, and the market size was only 16.88 billion yuan in 2016, and it has quadrupled in 2020, reaching 72.06 billion yuan.
Compared with Japan, the United States and other countries, the daily consumption of flowers accounts for 30% to 40% of the market, and the daily consumption of flowers in China accounts for only 5%, which shows that the mainland flower consumption market still has a lot of room for growth in the future.
After all, no one can resist the romance and ritual that comes with a bouquet of flowers.