Wen 丨 Cultural Industry Review, author 丨 Liu Shunxin
Thirty years east of the river, thirty years west of the river.
For the new species in the former catering industry, the super Wen Heyou, who was once known as the largest lobster house in Asia and disney in the Chinese catering industry, it took less than three years from the unprecedented grandeur to the scenery.
From popularity to cold, its short-lived popularity seems to be accidental, but in fact it coincides with the attributes of Internet celebrities originally positioned.
From the urban cultural and gastronomic landmarks lining up for 50,000 tables, to the "past stars" who ran away from businesses and laid off employees in a large area, why did Wen Heyou fall into such a situation? Zeng domineeringly threatened to "open up all over the country", how could he lose the long way forward in the initial expansion? Is this kind of internet celebrity playing style that combines the nostalgic scene route with urban cuisine feasible and can it be copied?
In August 2020, I wrote an article titled "Disney in the Chinese Food Industry, Queuing up 16,000 Tables... Can the "cultural invasion" of Super Wen and Friends replicate the whole country? " , some preliminary thinking on the business model of Super Wenheyou. After a year and a half, many questions about Wen Heyou seem to have gradually come to an answer.
City influencers, from glory to loneliness
In the past, the rapid popularity of Super Wen and Friends was actually not difficult to understand. The story has to start with Wen Heyou's "self-made".
The story originated from a Roadside Stall in Changsha 11 years ago. The stall owner is Wenbin, a changsha boy born in 1987. Eleven years ago, 23-year-old Wen Bin quit his job as a salesman at a car 4S store and set up a roadside stall to sell fried skewers in Pozi Street, Changsha, with 5,000 yuan of start-up capital. However, such an ordinary small vendor, with the secret recipe of exclusive research and development, achieved a turnover of 3,000 yuan per day in just 3 months.
△ Changsha Pozi Street
With the idea that "setting up stalls will not last long after all", under the advice of suppliers and friends Yang Ganjun, the two jointly opened a small shop of 10 square meters - Wenhe Youlao Changsha Fried Society, which quickly became popular and became famous.
On this occasion, Wen Heyou continued to expand his categories, from fried skewers to crayfish, stinky tofu, and sausages, and his business continued to expand. Wen Heyou, who is defined as a "cultural company", is getting stronger and stronger.
In 2018, a cultural and gastronomic complex covering an area of 5,000 square meters settled in Changsha Hisense Plaza, and the following year it was expanded to 20,000 square meters, creating an old neighborhood in Changsha in the 80s. Super Wen and Friends were born.
In addition, it also has a series of brands such as Wenhe Youlao Changsha Fried Society, Wenheyou Lao Changsha Lobster Restaurant, Wenheyou Large Sausage, WenheYou Stinky Tofu, etc., and the strong Changsha style is also its weapon to win the hearts of the citizens, forming a unique "Wenheyou Cultural Catering Model".
In July 2020, Wen Heyou walked out of Changsha and took root in Guangzhou's bustling Taikoo Hui business district, from which Guangzhou Wen Heyou was born and settled in a number of local long-established brands such as Apo Beef Offal and Shawan Milk Queen.
In April 2021, Shenzhen Wenheyou was born, and simultaneously settled in the Changsha net red milk tea shop "Tea Beauty", taking more than 50,000 tables in a single day, and the on-site queue was hundreds of meters long. Many people sweat only for the first experience, crazy enough to give birth to a 200 yuan once "queue to buy the party".
The offline boom soon spread online. Searching for Wenheyou in the Little Red Book, you will find that whether it is Guangshen or Changsha, it is full of a variety of punch card strategies, pit avoidance strategies, and store secret recipes. Only searching for Changsha Wenheyou, the relevant notes exceeded 60,000, and the number of likes for a single note casually exceeded 10,000, instantly becoming a new favorite of traffic.
The popularity of online and offline naturally attracts the entry of capital. In 2020, Wen Heyou received nearly 100 million yuan of investment from Jiahua Capital. In 2021, Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, Country Garden Venture Capital, Ekai Capital, etc. will all set their sights on Wenheyou and complete the B round of financing in August 2020. According to a number of media reports, the valuation of Wenheyou after the completion of the B round of financing reached 10 billion.
In this case, the goal of becoming the "Disney of China's catering industry" seems so logical and promising.
However, the road of brand longevity is doomed to be difficult. Like most internet celebrity restaurants, Super Wenheyou is facing many difficulties brought about by expansion while expanding rapidly, and behind the seeming scenery, it is actually turbulent.
In February 2022, the news of Wenheyou's large-scale layoffs was further fermented, and new projects were also affected. Previously, it was reported that the Nanjing "Super Wenheyou" project was led by the Qinhuai District Government, with a total investment of 500 million yuan, and was originally expected to open at the end of 2021. Today, the project has been repeatedly postponed, and it is still unknown whether it will open as scheduled in 2022.
At the same time, the retreat of merchants has also brought great disadvantages to the operation of Wen Heyou. Shenzhen Wenhe Youzhong, the retreat of tea and beauty led to a cliff-like decline in traffic, and the previous net red shop that sold fried skewers could reach tens of thousands of yuan a day, but now there are only a few hundred. Local merchants Wenji, Old Cat and QiaoshanFang, Li Ji Department Store, etc. have all left. The early merchants of the Guangzhou store, such as the Wind Tube Hui Bbq and the Shadowless Foot Chen's Blind Gong Pill, also left one after another.
More than 20 merchants, such as Shenzhen Wenhe Younei Chuangfa Restaurant and Hengji Mother-in-Law Noodles, received a notice of breach of contract from Wen Heyou due to failure to open on time, and encountered water and power outages, store enclosures, and were forced to leave the scene without decency, which laid a dark background for Wen Heyou's cold development.
Why loneliness? Contradictory personality with greedy ambition
From the moment he decided to expand the country, the development of Super Wen and You has hidden the seeds of decline.
From the perspective of external reasons, the failure of new project investment is considered to be the key to this layoff and its downward trend. It is reported that most of the employees who were laid off this time were the immersion theater project of Changsha Wenheyou and the Nanjing Wenheyou project. This has to mention the Nanjing Wenheyou Project, located in the core business district of Qinhuai District, which is still positioned as a combination of "local culture + food and entertainment".
According to reports, Wen Heyou initially planned to do Ming Dynasty culture, and research, operation, space design and other work were carried out. Half a year later, the planning team was suddenly accused of not doing Ming Dynasty culture, but changing to Six Dynasties culture, resulting in a complete half year of work being wasted.
But internally, the most fundamental reason is its own continued vague and wobbly positioning. From the source, Super Wenheyou itself is an extremely contradictory existence, which is mainly reflected in two points, one is the contradiction between how to balance the original Changsha culture and the relocated urban culture in the process of expansion.
The reason why Changsha Wenheyou became stronger and stronger at that time was because Wenheyou itself had the strong genes of Changsha City, including food genes, cultural genes, and urban genes. Whether it is the eating habits, the quality of dishes, the acceptance of the audience, or the pure purpose and strong original feelings of the founders to create Wen Heyou, they all laid the foundation for its development in Changsha.
The migration of culture must be both inherited and innovated, which is understandable. On the basis of inheriting the Changsha Wenheyou scene, crayfish and other dishes, Guangdong and Shenzhen have integrated local time-honored brands and improved the taste, which is called "localization transformation", which is actually a low-cost copy, and the hard Changsha culture and the local culture are superimposed, which ultimately leads to the cultural integration of the smorgasbord and the flavor, the personality is divided and the quality is rough.
For example, Shenzhen Wenheyou gave way to "Oyster Culture" with a compromised attitude and directly changed its name to "Old Street Oyster Market", but this move does not seem to have a salvage effect on the downhill decline of Shenzhen Wenheyou. Both cultures must be taken into account, and as a result, neither culture can be taken into account.
Second, the contradictory personality of Wen Heyou is reflected in the gradually expanding but not clear layout of the territory. If you have to do everything, it is difficult to do everything well. At the beginning of the food, later the introduction of tide play, beauty and other new formats, but also built their own stinky tofu museum, and launched the documentary "Street Chef", "One Day Guangzhou" and the original immersive drama "Qi Dream", etc., but the popularity is limited, the broadened field is not their own familiar, good at the field, so they failed to form a strong mutual help between IP.
Investor Huang Hai previously revealed that Wenheyou Shenzhen was originally planned to have a hotel and a movie theater, but it was shelved because it had not yet obtained a permit.
It is reported that Changsha Wenheyou also wants to create a fee-based project similar to Disney float parade, but according to reports, its executives are hesitant in setting IP themes, unable to determine whether to do local features or create a sense of the future, and the script plan has undergone several major adjustments. In the end, I did not wait for the new project, but waited for the suspension of the original project.
The contradictory personality indirectly leads to its wide layout of greedy ambitions and a lack of focused attitude. The expansion of multiple businesses is beyond reproach, which can consolidate IP and increase income generation, but if the previous step has not yet stood firm, the latter step will be anxious to run forward, and it will be an inevitable result if it is unstable and cannot run fast. If Wenheyou is only built into a complex that accommodates multiple formats and multiple stores, it will only be reduced to commercial real estate with cultural slogans, and it will gradually drift away from its original vision of "being a cultural company".
Can influencers play sustainably?
Whether it is the creation of nostalgic scenes or the integration of market culture, the emergence of Wen Heyou has a strong "net red catering" temperament from the beginning.
In China, people's general attention to the word "net red" began as early as 2012, when internet celebrities such as milk tea sister and Feng jie were born. After entering 2015, with the rapid development of video, live broadcast platforms and the Internet, the Internet celebrity economy has gradually entered the stage of industrialization.
The rapid development characteristics of the mobile Internet itself also determine the short-term timeliness of the internet red shop to some extent - coming fast, going fast, and behind the popularity of fast food, it is also one of the embodiments of social impetuosity. Looking at the current Internet celebrities in various fields, from the Internet celebrity characters Sharp Brother, Xidan Girl, Furong Sister, Milk Tea Sister, Internet Red Tea Drinking Xi Tea, Nai Xue's Tea, Lele Tea, Deer Horn Lane, etc., to the Internet celebrities everywhere punch card... Under the erosion of time, how many can become the classics of the times? It is just that the back wave of the Yangtze River pushes the front wave, and the front wave dies on the beach.
Most of the Internet celebrity brands have the characteristics of instant popularity, unsustainability and short-lived, which are actually determined by the fast pace of mobile Internet, the foundation of the birth of the Internet celebrity economy. Over time, internet celebrities seem to have become a fast-food, homogeneous derogatory term.
The author believes that the birth of net red catering has its era background. In recent years, the rapid development of the Internet is one of the backgrounds of the era in which the Internet celebrity economy was born. Therefore, as a key field of Internet celebrities, internet celebrity catering has its inevitability from birth to vigorous development. If influencers can indeed win traffic and fame for the restaurant industry, then to some extent, it is indeed worth encouraging.
After all, in real life, there are indeed more and more netizens who are willing to spend hours queuing up for a set of nine-square grids and a vibrato, just to wait for a photogenic hot drink and harvest blockbuster likes.
It's just that whether it's the catering industry or other industries, the way Internet celebrities play can only be the icing on the cake. Traffic is important, but a solid foundation is always a good product, quality service and experience. For Super Wen heyou, the scene layout of the old neighborhood of the city, the emotional sales of urban culture, and the diversified layout of the territory are all icing on the cake, and only good taste and excellent quality, and the cultural shaping that truly integrates into the spirit of the city, is the source of living water, and it is also the foundation of its continuous expansion of commercial and cultural tourism territory.
On the other hand, the author believes that even if the development is frustrated, the emergence of super wen and friends is still worth encouraging. Its emergence not only brings an innovative business model to China's catering industry, opens up a precedent for the integration of catering and culture, and creates an immersive cultural tourism business case, but also forces people to rethink with a critical eye - how to popularize local catering culture throughout the country? How should the catering industry establish brand culture confidence in adhering to local culture and expanding the whole country? How to expand the territory on the basis of basic needs, blossom at more points, and bring new experiences to consumers?
summary
Although large-scale layoffs and expansion stagnation are not beautiful from the surface, on the other hand, this is also the embodiment of active self-help after the setback of enterprise development, indicating the awakening of its crisis awareness. For its temporary popularity and cold setbacks, we should look at it with a rational eye. The market does not exist in the general of changsheng, the development of enterprises has its life cycle, there is a peak, it will naturally encounter a trough, Wen Heyou just encountered a normal enterprise in the step by step expansion of the dilemma, not to mention, this is a determined to become a Chinese catering industry Disney local enterprises. Occasional setbacks may not be a bad thing, but they can make it see reality clearly and seek transformation. When talent can't support ambition, what Super Wen and Friends have to do is perhaps to dive into their hearts, return to quality, and find themselves.