Text | Yau Peach
"Spring Chill"
On the surface, the "death" of women's clothing e-commerce that occurred in March 2022 originated from the "Four Seasons Green" clothing wholesale market in Hangzhou.
March was originally the new season of spring wear, and Taobao and Tmall", which are positioned as "Internet Fashion Week", are scheduled to be held from March 21 to 24. However, the scene of lively trading did not appear as expected. "Performance has been declining since March 8," says a number of women's clothing store owners.
(Interior of Four Seasons Green)
The "Four Seasons Green" wholesale market, which was closed for two weeks during the peak season, was the first to feel the cold snap.
The status of "Four Seasons Green" in the apparel industry is equivalent to the engine of a car. It may also make some small problems, but once it is stopped, it will endanger the operation of the entire system.
This clothing wholesale city, which has been open for more than 30 years, has been famous for its quality women's clothing in the era of physical business. Its name has appeared on the billboards of train seats passed through Countless times through Hangzhou, and it has also been passed down by word of mouth among women's clothing businessmen. In the era of e-commerce, it has become a "water source" for more wealth stories, and many shopkeepers will come here to buy goods.
However, in early March this year, due to the emergence of confirmed cases of covid-19, the "Four Seasons Green" market was closed and did not recover until March 19. Because of the suddenness of the incident, many shopkeepers did not have time to move out all the goods, and thousands of spring clothes were sealed in the closed market.
Like a set of fallen dominoes, a "spring chill" spread from the "four seasons of green", with the e-commerce link, penetrated into countless tiny commercial organizations such as Taobao stores.
"My launch has been delayed for a week," Taobao shopkeeper Anran told "Noise Reduction NoNoise." Because of the suspension of "Four Seasons Green" and the suspension of express delivery in many areas, the recent sales of spring clothes in the store are not ideal, and many customers who have placed orders will choose to cancel orders during the waiting period.
Spring clothing sales in March and April every year are actually a race against time. China is a vast region, in Shenzhen and Guangzhou and other cities, the temperature in the afternoon of March is often as close as 30 degrees, and young people who are afraid of heat will wear summer clothes early. For women's clothing store owners, if the funds are not returned from spring clothing sales in April, the purchase and sales rhythm of summer clothes will be affected.
But now, shopkeepers are scrambling against calendars.
"It seems to be back to the most tense time of the epidemic," said Konishi, a Shopkeeper in Fujian, whose orders have plummeted in recent days. A colleague in Jinan told her that there were still one or two thousand yuan in daily sales a few days ago, but recently it suddenly disappeared, and she ate "duck eggs" for several days. In fact, there is no epidemic in Jinan these days, but the village committee where the warehouse is located has repeatedly reminded him to keep the phone open at all times.
"Every day, a few packages are returned. Plus a few more buyers applied for a refund, and it was done in vain in one day." The owner of the store also said that she has been busy dealing with the after-sales of returns in recent days, and she has no choice but to set regional restrictions for the store and simply stop sending express deliveries in dozens of cities.
The owner Su Su has received a notice from the logistics partner on March 27: from today, due to the impact of the epidemic, all the goods sent out are not guaranteed to be timed and not guaranteed to be issued normally. "The hardest year for e-commerce," she lamented. Compared with the peak period, her Taobao store's daily sales have decreased by more than 60%.
Spring was originally the season of hope, but for Taobao women's clothing store owners, "hope" has become the most scarce thing in the spring of 2022.
"Abandoned Spring Wear"
The suspension of the "Four Seasons" is only the fuse that ignited the crisis.
This "spring chill" is more like a "prank" conspired by many parties. Many factors "exquisitely" overlap, and the ending is no longer suspenseful. These factors include the impermanence of the spring climate, the pandemic, and, the collective lack of hope.
Consumption needs to be supported by confidence.
"Lipstick economics" has always been interpreted by the world as consumption can boost confidence, the worse the economy, the better lipstick sales, people need such a lower cost of positive signals to light up the mood, similar efforts also appeared in this year's spring clothing sales. Countless women's clothing brands, whether they are in the mall, or popular in Guangzhou", "Thirteen Elements" and Hangzhou", have taken pink as the main color of this year, trying to create a little joy in this rainy spring. However, if there is a "two-or" between the future and the present, the first thing people must guarantee is definitely the latter.
Only by eating enough and surviving can we talk about the future.
As a result, many people chose to give up buying new spring clothes in 2022. They made the decision to control consumption based on uncertainty about this year's income. Spring clothes, which are not just needed, have become the most easily cut consumption items.
Douban "Has consumption been downgraded today?" The group has gathered more than 360,000 members, many of which have posted "Just returned about 1600 clothes, the whole person feels refreshed!" The poster sighed after posting a screenshot of the page of the online shopping return application, "Sisters who are really difficult to earn money, the figure itself is much more important than clothes, and then self-discipline, fat loss, and welcome the summer."
(Douban group screenshot)
People who still have the desire to consume may also lose to uncertain couriers. From factories to wholesale markets to logistics, the shutdown of these key links has made the delivery time of Taobao stores become "Schrödinger's cats".
Some people joke that when life returns to normal, it may be time to buy summer clothes. "Since March, I have done 21 nucleic acids," said Xiao Xin, who lives in Shenzhen. Shanghai adjusted its latest outbreak control measures on March 27, and it is foreseeable that one of China's most important cities will not be able to resume operations until at least April 5.
In Changsha, a new wave of the epidemic is fighting back, and those locals who were most concerned about eating, drinking and hedonism have also begun to talk about the progress of the new square cabin hospital. Suzhou also announced on March 27 that it had transformed two square cabin hospitals within 48 hours.
From Shanghai and Shenzhen to Jilin and Tangshan, when more and more communities are sealed in the spring light, home pajamas have become the "soul partner" of isolated life.
"I look backstage, there are 200 visitors today, but none of them have placed an order," Enron said, adding that in January, the store averaged about 1,000 daily visitors.
Such a scenario is not common in March of previous years. Even the "New Forces Week" activities of Taobao and Tmall seem to have failed in the face of "spring cold". This event mainly covers categories such as clothing, shoes and bags, underwear and accessories, and the official will provide traffic tilt and policy support. The event has a certain threshold requirement for the store, and the store needs to receive the invitation before it can register to participate.
However, many Taobao women's clothing store owners said that business did not improve significantly during the event, "no way, the epidemic is too serious, and the activity cannot be moved."
On Taobao, the once innovative move, pre-sale, has now become a bit out of place.
At the beginning, this was a new model of "big data" developed by Taobao net red clothing stores: first use fan trust to open pre-sales, measure models based on data, guide production, and reduce clothing inventory risks.
But when "Spring Cold" encountered the "super long pre-sale" of 30 days and 45 days, this set of gameplay began to become chicken ribs.
To paraphrase a recently popular meme, "Spring is only a few days, and pre-sales account for 45 days." Probably the most direct description of the situation at hand. On platforms such as Weibo and Zhihu, there are also complaints:
"Can the pre-sale roll out of Taobao, and the epidemic can not get out of China."
"Taobao pre-sale is really disgusting, it's still more than ten or twenty days, do you know how many days there are in chengdu in the spring?" 」
"The most annoying thing is that Taobao buys clothes, waits for half a month or even a month of pre-sale, and when it comes to trying, it is ugly to die."
Someone posted their Taobao order on March 15, and the page showed that the estimated delivery time was April 29. "Noise Reduction NoNoise" looked through a number of Taobao stores and found that the pre-sale period of many women's clothing is more than 15 days, that is, now the order is placed, the delivery time is mostly in mid-to-late April, and the estimated delivery time of some stores is even in May.
There are also some orders that are destined not to wait. For some styles with poor pre-sale data, Taobao shopkeepers will directly cancel the order before the pre-sale period expires, and then inform the buyer to apply for a refund on the grounds of "out of stock", "there is a problem in the factory", "the sample is not ideal, temporarily remove the shelves and stop selling".
Xiao Xiao, a Beijing user, was glad he cancelled his order last week.
Half a month ago, she placed an order for four spring clothes at an internet celebrity store, with a total price of nearly 1500 yuan. When placing the order, she noticed that the estimated delivery time was the end of March, which meant that the waiting time was almost 1 month.
After waiting for three weeks, she found that the national epidemic counterattack led to more and more logistics suspensions, and almost everyone around her was lamenting that this year's market was not good, it was difficult to make money, and she suddenly realized that it seemed too worthless to spend another 1500 yuan to buy clothes for Beijing's short spring, and to wait so long.
She cancelled the order late one late last week. At that moment, she was happier than when she placed the order. She knew she had made the right choice.
"Disappearing Shopkeeper"
Hope and desire are like twins who are inseparable.
Because of the book "Low Desire Society", the Japanese economist Kenichi Omae became famous in China. He has been observing and studying the problem of "low desire" in Japan for many years, and summarizes the main symptoms into several points: the decline of the new population, the intensification of social aging, the loss of motivation of the younger generation, and the decline of the consumption power of the whole society.
In the earlier book "Restart, Absolute Survival manual in the workplace", he mentioned that the downturn in the consumer economy has accelerated the formation of a low-desire society.
Whether China will also enter a "low-desire society" has been repeatedly discussed in the Chinese Internet world. In the spring of 2022, many Taobao women's clothing store owners felt the disappearance of "desire".
"My biggest wish now is to go to the civil service examination."
Enron graduated from college in 2011 and began selling women's clothing in a Taobao store, and bought two houses in his hometown of Anqing. Business started out significantly tougher in 2019. The impact of the epidemic is only one aspect, other factors include the high cost of traffic, user diversion is becoming more and more serious, Douyin live broadcast, Pinduoduo and even Xiaohongshu are robbing users who originally belonged to Taobao.
"It's embarrassing", she once tried to do an all-platform, but soon found that the operating threshold was too high, and it was necessary to build a dedicated team, which meant higher costs and risks. After a simple attempt, she chose to give up and continue to focus on Taobao stores. But even so, her turnover last year suffered a "cut-off".
In the industry of women's clothing, which has been rolled up for many years, there is never a shortage of stories of getting rich one day. A seasonal explosion may bring tens of millions of dollars to the merchant. At the same time, the "diaphragm" between sudden wealth and huge losses is extremely thin, and a wrong decision or judgment may lose years of savings.
For example, going to Hangzhou to develop live streaming with goods is a business that grows on the "diaphragm".
Enron has a relative who also does women's clothing, and began to do the vibrato live broadcast in August last year, but was quickly overwhelmed by the price war.
"At the beginning, the price was very low, tens of thousands of traffic were invested every day, and it sold really well", Enron said, after the explosion, there were soon peers to copy, with a lower price to sell the same model to take the customer away, leaving relatives with a return rate of more than 50%. After half a year of tossing and turning, losing millions, in March this year, relatives have begun to clear their stocks and retreat, "Hangzhou has become a city she never wants to remember again."
The more stories such as this are heard, the more Enron wants to be stable. "Many of my civil servant friends are now much more comfortable than I am."
Li Xiaofan, who started the Taobao women's clothing business in 2006, had 2 Tmall stores and 2 Taobao stores at the same time when the business was at its peak, and raised a team of more than 20 people. Later, the market was not good, she shrank step by step, and now there is only one Taobao store and 3 employees. Last year, the annual sales were about 2 million, and the net profit was less than 200,000.
"I'm old, my life matters, I don't want to fight," she sighed.
Some people have temporarily let go of their desires, and some people are trying to find new "containers" for desire, such as turning to emerging e-commerce platforms such as Douyin Live and Pinduoduo, or establishing private domain traffic and doing community marketing.
Hebei Girl Grain once owned a Taobao women's clothing store with diamonds. The Taobao shop, which has been doing it since 2007, has given her a large house near Aosen in Beijing, which now costs 100,000 yuan, and the scooter has been replaced by a BMW of more than 500,000 yuan. In a few years, during Tmall's "Double Eleven", she was also invited to Hangzhou as a merchant to participate in celebrations, and even took a group photo with Ma Yun. The circle of friends faithfully records the golden age of those who belong to Taobao e-commerce.
But now, she spends almost all her energy on the private domain business. She built several large groups of 500 people, expanded the SKU to categories such as clothing, fresh food, snacks, jewelry accessories, etc., and updated them several times a week.
"The epidemic was transformed at the beginning", Granul told "Noise Reduction NoNoise", the current income of private domain operations has been comparable to the golden age of Taobao, and compared with the previous Taobao women's clothing, the existing model is less risky, because she plays the role of the platform, "at the very least, do not need to press the goods myself".
More Taobao women's clothing store owners are retreating this spring.
"It's so hard to be an e-commerce businessman", Taobao women's clothing store owner Wei Wei only opened a store after the epidemic began in 2019, for 3 years, almost every day work is nine to ten in the morning, and only 10 days before and after the Spring Festival can rest every year. The dismal situation under the epidemic has left her confused, deducting the cost of promotion and other costs every day, she has almost no surplus, "becoming a part-time job for the platform".
This depressed spring when the clothing business is difficult to do has made Taobao e-commerce merchants, wholesalers of the four seasons, and retail store owners in eighteen-tier small cities have similar troubles. On platforms such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu, shopkeepers who have never met before comfort each other and hug each other for warmth.
But where the way out, no one can give a standard answer.
"Moat"
Taobao women's clothing business has had a good life.
This is the most important category of Taobao, and until now, it is also one of the "moats" of Taobao. It has high gross profits and relatively high frequency, which can incubate brands such as Handu Clothing House and Rong Mei, and has created enough wealth stories in the past ten years.
In 2016, before Handu Clothing House hit the New Third Board, Alibaba set up a special "Office to Assist Merchants in Listing" under the joint suggestion of platform merchants, including Handu Clothing House, to help these merchants build bridges with securities companies, exchanges, and other e-commerce brands that have been listed or will soon be listed.
Helping a women's clothing Taobao store become a star listed company is the best endorsement of Alibaba's "empowerment" gene. As a platform, Ali naturally hopes to hatch more "Handu Clothing House".
But the story of the "Hando Cloakhouse" soon became an old ticket. Taobao subverted itself with the live broadcast room, and Ruhan, Qianxun and Meione became more imaginative new stories. Those old Tao brand, Handu Clothing House, Crack, Inman, now often can't squeeze into the top ten of Taobao women's clothing list. Those who have occupied those positions for a long time have become offline brands such as Uniqlo.
Change actually began in 2015. This year, UNIQLO began to win the Tmall Double Eleven women's clothing sales championship, in the previous few years, this throne belonged to the "Tao brand" such as Inman and Handu Clothing House.
Later, Zhao Yingguang, founder of Handu Clothing House, said, "The internal cycle and the consumer population of Generation Z, these two factors led to the end of the traffic era." Women's wear "Tao brands" have not been able to keep up with the new era of consumption. Whether it is from the marketing method or the product iteration, they can't get rid of the breath of a decade ago. They grew up in Taobao, but they are also trapped in Taobao, and they have not achieved a real circle breaking and gained a firm foothold offline. Alibaba's resources, on the other hand, are adapting to the needs of the times and tilting more towards international brands and new consumer brands.
This can not be blamed on Ali like the new and tired of the old. New joy and old love are sometimes the result of being picked up by the "big parent" of the times.
Alibaba needs such iterations. It has lost the advantage of "riding the dust" in the big changes in the e-commerce pattern.
Surrounded by strong enemies, Alibaba is seriously threatened even as a traditional strong clothing category. Alibaba executives acknowledged on the third-quarter 2021 earnings call that GMV growth in the apparel accessories category has slowed. In the fourth quarter of the year, Ali once again mentioned that the year-on-year growth of clothing accessories and consumer electronics was lower than the overall average growth.
In addition to their old rival JD.com, Douyin and Kuaishou have launched a more impactful attack on Taobao's clothing category.
Douyin once released the "Seed Plan", for five major categories of merchants such as clothing, shoes and bags, providing zero threshold to open live shopping carts, traffic support and other policies; Kuaishou also released the "Clothing Merchants Traffic Support Plan", focusing on supporting new brands, and also recruiting fashion MCN.
"Old irons, if you want 1, you want 1." On March 26, at a clothing store near Qingnian Road in Beijing, "Noise Reduction NoNoise" saw that the owner was busy broadcasting in a corner of the store. The platform she is used to is Kuaishou. Compared with Taobao's more stringent entry conditions, the threshold of Kuaishou is lower, "there is real traffic, and there are real people who buy it.".
According to the data released by Kuaishou officially, the "Women's Super Anchor Day" activity that began on February 16 this year was carried out for one month, with a cumulative GMV of nearly 700 million.
For Ali, this is equivalent to the enemy having attacked under the city walls.
"Ammunition"
The tens of thousands of Taobao women's clothing stores, which exist like capillaries, are also suffering from the pain of "change". This pain, eventually, is transmitted from the center to the capillaries.
The loss of traffic and the high cost have become the most direct pain they feel. This spring's "spring chill" only aggravated the pain.
"Business will be harder this year," almost all Taobao women's clothing store owners interviewed told Noise Reduction NoNoise. Some people draw such conclusions from operational data, and others rely on intuition formed by years of experience. Controlling costs and lowering expectations has become their consensus.
But for many shopkeepers, a real question right now is: What about the backlog of spring clothes? Many people have already put their money in the spring clothes, but they need to turn around, so that in the summer clothes sales season, they will try to win back a round and fill the "hole" of this spring.
Without ammunition, the best soldiers are powerless.
The battle is getting tougher. The trend of great weakness in consumption is emerging in various industries. Some institutional research reports that: in the current recession, there is desire, the consumption ability is seriously damaged, the ability is capable, and the lack of consumption desire.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the total retail sales of consumer goods in 2021 will be 440823 billion yuan, an increase of 12.5% year-on-year. Among them, the total retail sales of "clothing, shoes and hats, knitted textiles" were 1,384.2 billion yuan, an increase of 12.7% year-on-year, basically in the median. Specifically, from October 2021, the year-on-year growth rate of this category was -3.3%, -0.5%, and -2.3%, respectively, with negative growth for three consecutive months. That is to say, in the fourth quarter of 2021, consumer spending on clothing has not risen.
The change in the general environment fell on Alibaba, that is, the growth of the core business was weak. In Alibaba's fiscal 2022 third quarter earnings report released on February 24, Taobao and Tmall GMV both grew by single digits.
The era of rejoicing and pursuing high growth has become a thing of the past, and the more difficult "protracted war" is slowly and powerfully changing the e-commerce landscape. Ali is also trying to hold on to the "basic disk". Not growth data, but something that is considered a core element of the business story in any era: people.
In 2021, Taobao and Tmall launched a number of initiatives to reduce the operating costs of merchants, such as reducing the cost of return shipping insurance and changing a number of paid marketing tools to free. According to Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang, the company has prepared billions of yuan for this purpose, and will increase investment and improve merchant training.
For high-flow stores, these "burden reduction" measures can lead to hundreds of thousands of cost reductions a year.
However, the effect of these efforts is not immediately apparent. At least this spring, Taobao women's clothing store owners feel the full chill of rainy days. Some people have asked everywhere on platforms such as Xiaohongshu, how to get traffic faster if they open stores on Douyin and Pinduoduo, "Taobao really can't do it."
For Taobao and Tmall, these subtle signals may contain a huge crisis. Women's clothing is a category that it cannot afford to lose.
But how can an e-commerce company sustain growth in a "low-desire society"? This is a problem that requires Alibaba to plan ahead. After all, even the shopkeepers who sell women's clothing are "awake in the world."
A shopkeeper who works in Korean women's clothing on Taobao today posted a screenshot of her chat with customers. The other party ordered 5 pieces of clothing in one go, and she intimately reminded: you have placed too many orders, or buy less. I don't think it's necessary to have too many clothes.
"Everyone really don't buy too many clothes, just wear enough, in special periods, leave more money for yourself to spend." 」 She sighed in the circle of friends.
For customers who are kindly reminded, this sentence may be like the cluster of spring flowers blooming in the corner, small but warm. But for women's clothing e-commerce and even the entire consumer industry, it should be like spring thunder, with its own wake-up effect.