Image source @ Visual China
Wen | Hugo cross-border, the author | Dong Xinyi You Minfang
Domestic beauty brands have gone to sea, and now there is an extra piece of grass "grass".
According to the late LatePost report, in early 2020, ByteDance launched a product similar to Little Red Book in Japan, Lemon8. This product, which is defined internally by ByteDance as an "interest planting community", has accumulated more than one million downloads, and has begun to expand to Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand in the case of the number of daily active users is much lower than this.
If you carefully observe Lemon8's label - "Interest planting community", it is natural to think of the grand situation of many domestic beauty brands "brushing the screen" on the Little Red Book in recent years.
In fact, there are already domestic beauty brands that have registered official accounts on Lemon8. For example, in the case that Clacky COLORKEY has not released promotional content and 0 likes on the official account, colorkey's topic attention has exceeded 2K.
Discussion of COLORKEY-related topics on Lemon8 Image source @Lemon8
Heartless willow lining. Even some domestic beauty brands have not yet opened the official account of Lemon8, and have already gained a lot of topic attention, and they are not yet perfect diaries and Huaxizi, which have been very "out of the circle" brands.
On Lemon8, the related topics of brands such as FOCALLURE, ZEESEA, and Flower Knowflowerknows have a good degree of attention, of which the topic of ZEESEA is particularly gratifying, with 69.9K.
Discussion of ZEESEA-related topics on Lemon8 Image source @Lemon8
This relatively natural flow also shows that this batch of domestic beauty brands has become quite influential in overseas markets. According to data released by the General Administration of Customs of China, China's exports of beauty cosmetics and toiletries reached US$4.852 billion in 2021, with a year-on-year growth rate of 14.4%, still maintaining strong growth.
Behind the domestic beauty brands getting together in the sea, Lemon8 is just a new springboard. So, how are these beauty brands going to sea?
This article will analyze the five relatively emerging beauty brands of Fei Luer, Zi Color, Orange, Flower Know, and Kolaqi, trying to find the differences and commonalities of their brands going to sea.
1 Social media: overseas beauty brands away from YouTube, Instagram is the biggest "grass"
Soldiers and horses have not moved, grain and grass have gone first, and social media marketing is the "rations" for the growth of beauty brands. The voice volume of different domestic beauty brands in different social media overseas has a huge difference. To some extent, this difference has also accelerated the differentiation of these brands going to sea.
By counting the fan followers of five domestic beauty brands on official accounts on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. It can be found that these beauty brands have a choice of marketing channels.
Source @ Major Overseas Social Media Officials of Each Brand, as of March 27, 2022
Note: K representative 1,000,M representative million
As the earliest brand among the five domestic beauty brands, Fei Lu'er has been the first to go global, and it has gained more than 1 million fans in terms of the number of TikTok fans. Instagram and Facebook are its "second base," with 86,000 and 33,460 followers, respectively, and have chosen to strategically abandon Twitter and YouTube.
Zi se's "home base" is on Instagram, with 128,000 followers. The interactive data is considerable, and the content of the comments is basically centered on topics that are more relevant to the product, such as color and product design. In addition, Twitter also has more than 30,000 followers. In contrast, its TikTok only has more than 5800 fans, which is slightly thin, but fortunately, there is an external link to place an independent station on the homepage, which can be directly jumped to its independent station.
TikTok homepage Image source @TikTok
Orange is a relatively weak player in the social media layout of the five brands. Its Instagram has more than 9,200 followers, while the layout of other social media is either not open an official account or seems to be "paddling". However, TikTok's backlinks can jump its Shopee's 6 sites and Tmall.
Image source @ Orange Online Shop
Hua knew that it was the only brand with an "omnichannel" social media presence, but it still focused on it, and the situation was similar to that of Kolachi around Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.
CMO Sara, a Polaris star company responsible for the export of domestic beauty brands to Japan, has said that beauty brands that go to the Japanese market, in terms of traffic conversion, the interaction rate of the TikTok platform is as high as 5 to 18 times that of Twitter, and the current conversion volume can reach 3% to 7%. [1]
The biggest commonality of these five brands is that almost all of them have chosen to strategically abandon YouTube. The logic behind it is also well understood, just like there are few beauty brands in China that are willing to invest a lot of energy and time in Youku. Fast-paced UCG (User Generated Content) platforms tend to be more popular with beauty brands and easier to "plant grass."
2 channels: Shopee as standard, there are differences in independent stations, and the offline market is a secret weapon
In the choice of overseas markets, the Southeast Asian market is the standard of these five brands. According to mintel's latest market trend report, Southeast Asia is included in the "future market" of the global cosmetics industry. It is estimated that by 2025, its market size will exceed 300 billion US dollars, of which Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand have a growth potential of more than 120%.
In addition to Orange, almost all four other brands have chosen Japan. In addition, Zise also laid out the US market. Overall, there are many differences in the sales channels and playing styles of each brand.
In terms of Amazon's site layout, Fei Lu'er, Zi Se, and Kolaqi all have decorative brand flagship stores on Amazon Japan, and all of them have placed on-site advertising. Hua knew that there was no advertising on the site, nor did it open a flagship store. Oranges, on the other hand, are not on Amazon Japan.
The Japanese Amazon flagship store page of Zi se, Fei Lu'er, and Kolachi Image source @ Amazon Japan
In addition, all five brands are based on Shopee. It is worth mentioning that Phillip's million TikTok fan accounts are directly backlinked to Lazada, Whatsapp, and Shopee through Linktree (a simple social marketing tool).
In terms of independent station layout, the performance of the five brands is different. ZBANX founder He Gu vividly described the independent station in an interview with Hugo cross-border, "the independent station is an isolated island, and it is not easy to get on the island without fishing ability."
Orange is the most discreet of the five brands and does not have a separate stand. Hana knew and Kolachi launched independent stations in Japan and made a series of optimizations for Japan. The home page of the Fei Luer Independent Station mainly promotes the chameleon liquid eyeliner and supports 5 currencies to pay. $49 per order is free shipping, which is about the price of 4 liquid eyeliner pens.
Among the four brands of independent stations, the only one with more than 50,000 total visits to independent stations in February 2022 is Zise. Similarweb data shows that zeeseacosmetics.com had 52,000 visits in February 2022, down 39.99% from January, with an average visit duration of 1 minute and 49 seconds.
The traffic situation of the zise independent station Data source @Similarweb
In terms of specific data, the jump rate of the Zise independent station is 67.94%, which is much higher than the 31.12% jump rate of SHEGLAM, the beauty independent station under SHEIN, and the total number of visits is about one-third of SHEGLAM. 44.04% of the traffic on the PC side of the Independent Site comes from search, and 33.07% comes from directly entering the WEBSITE of the Independent Site. Google Trends data shows that Fei Luer and Zi Se have led the other three brands in the popularity of Google web search in the past 12 months.
Over the past 12 months, the popularity of five beauty brands searching on google pages data sources @GoogleTrends
In terms of offline channels, Kiyoshi Matsumoto, which has been stationed in Japan, has nearly 2,000 stores, basically completing the sales closed loop of online and offline channels. "When we entered Japanese social media for online marketing, Kiyoshi Matsumoto noticed us, and then they took the initiative to find us to cooperate, and we established a long-term relationship in only one month, which is the fastest cooperation among non-Japanese brands."
He Jicai, marketing director of Zise, was strongly optimistic about the overseas offline market [2], "Regardless of Japan or Europe and the United States, the proportion of offline accounts for about 80%, and the proportion of e-commerce is only 20%. Offline is a very large market, Europe we expect to enter the offline Europe and North America at the end of the year will be our focus on the market. ”
3 Traceability: The Ring of Mobius for Brand Growth
The positioning and origin of a beauty brand will greatly affect the brand's product and supply chain, sales channels, and promotion methods. After the brand successfully passes through the 0 to 1 stage, these factors will affect each other in the stage of rapid growth, and together they will form a positive growth mobius ring.
Most domestic beauty brands such as Zi color, orange, flower know, kolaqi and so on take the domestic market as the starting point and radiate overseas markets in the later stage. On the contrary, Fei Lu'er, who started as a foreign trade factory, was one of the earliest cross-border export beauty sellers in China.
In terms of supply chain, all five brands have adopted a model of outsourcing OEM. In the beauty industry chain, the gross profit margin of brand owners is the highest, up to 60%-80%. According to the data of the National Cosmetics Filing Network, among the foundries of the five brands, there are many three major foundries that cooperate with Perfect Diary - Kosmeshi, Intrecht, and Shanghai Zhenchen. [3] Many first-line brands at home and abroad are also partners of these three cosmetics foundries.
Data source @ National Cosmetics Filing Network
Fang Xing, the co-founder of Fei Luer, once introduced the growth path of the brand in an interview with the media.[4]
"In 2013, an export trading company for makeup categories was established, which developed abroad in the form of cross-border e-commerce, but at that time it was only a simple supply chain output and product output; during the period, after accumulating mature supply chain and experience in overseas big-name OEM, in 2016, it created its own brand - Fei Luer. As the Chinese girl Haitao brought the brand back to China, Fei Lu'er opened Taobao and Tmall stores for the domestic market, and the company has gained a firm foothold in many makeup brand categories."
In terms of the user portrait of Fei Luer, Fang Xing said, "The early users of Fei Luer are students and a new generation of white-collar workers. As users and brands grow together, brand labels change. In terms of price, pricing rose, from the early 39 yuan / disk to 79 yuan / disk; user positioning: with the user age upgrade, expanded to married people. ”
This growth path and user positioning make Fei Luer's user portrait in the domestic market very clear, and "student model" is still the third most relevant keyword of its Douyin content. The "student" label did not appear in the top ten of the other four brands' content keywords.
Fei Luer's Douyin content keyword relevance ranking Data source @ huge arithmetic
Note: The data is taken from the analysis of the content of Douyin based on Judian Arithmetic, and the data collection time is from March 14 to March 20, 2022.
If you focus further on the portrait of the "potential users" of each brand divided by age dimension. It can be found that the user portraits of the domestic market of these five brands are relatively "young". Especially under the background of Saint Laurent, this difference is closely related to the overall tone of product pricing and branding.
Data source @ Big Arithmetic / Cartography @ Hugo Cross Border
Note: The data is taken from the analysis of the content of Douyin based on Judian Arithmetic, and the data collection time is from March 14 to March 20, 2022.
According to the data of Huge Arithmetic, among the "potential users" known to Hua, the 18-23-year-old population accounts for 55.76%, ranking first among the six brands, including Saint Laurent.
According to Yang Zifeng, co-founder of Huazhi, 15-25 years old is the age range of the main users of Huazhi, accounting for 70%; users aged 25-35 may account for about 30%[5]. "The reason why there are different age gradients is because women have a girlish heart to a greater or lesser extent." From this perspective, the brand positioning, product form, and user portrait that Hua knows have become a whole between the three.
4 Epilogues
It seems to be reasonable, but the situation is confused. In an era when traffic is king, many people are trying to find the law of growth once and for all. However, the growth path of each brand is closely related to the industry environment, brand strategy, cash flow and other situations at that time.
Between 2016 and 2021, an important condition for the rise of emerging beauty brands in the domestic market is the rapid increase in e-commerce penetration and the prosperity of "planting grass" platforms. Fang Xing said, "At that time, the ratio of skin care and beauty in foreign countries was 3:7, while in China it was the opposite. Before 2018, there was basically no concept of makeup, and until 2020, the volume of makeup was less than half that of skin care, so the ceiling of the industry was very high."
Now, for relatively mature domestic beauty brands, instead of continuing to "roll up" in China, it is better to sow "seeds" to the world, which may be a good choice.
Resources:
Jumeili | brand accelerated its going to sea, and C-Beauty went global
Bright Company | beauty brand "Shisei" to go to sea in Japan's decision-making logic: domestic content marketing to the sea is a dimensionality reduction blow
Growth Black Box Growbox | 12,000 words to read the perfect diary: from organizational structure to growth strategy
Tuya Finance | Co-Founder of Fei Luer: The makeup industry has a high ceiling, but the company's ceiling may be low
Daily Economic News | Build a Barrier to Beauty Differentiation Flower Know Founder: Original design is the core competitiveness