Image source @ Visual China
Text | Hedgehog Commune, author | Jiaxuan Xiaohan, editor of the | Shi Can
A relatively traditional format, in the process of merging with the Internet ecology, evolved two wings to take off in the cloud of digitalization and new consumption, but there are still two feet trapped in the quagmire of overgrown weeds and accumulated shortcomings.
In the industry of costume photography, in terms of comprehensive scale, revenue, brand awareness and other aspects, Pan women's square is recognized as the top 1 in the industry.
According to public information, Pan Laden Fang, which specializes in ancient style photography, was founded in 2003 and has been in business for 18 years. At present, there are more than 40 first- and second-line directly operated stores and nearly 200 third- and fourth-line franchise stores across the country. In 2018, Chairman Yang Jian said in an interview that there were about 390 million guest films in Pan women's square, and it has maintained an annual growth of 30% in the past 3-5 years, with a turnover of more than 1 billion yuan.
In terms of financing, Pan's Daughter's Fang has obtained financing for three consecutive years from 2016 to 2018, and investors include Qingdao Zhixin, Chen Bang, chairman of Aier Ophthalmology, Elite Times, Yuanchuang Capital, etc. In 2020, Pan Women's Square completed a series D financing of 100 million yuan, and the investor was the investment institution Challenger Capital founded by Tang Binsen, the founder of Yuanqi Forest. At the end of the same year, Pan Women's Fang appeared in the list of enterprises to be listed (listed) in Changsha, Hunan Province, and in the track of commercial photography, Pan Women's Fang is most likely to become the "first stock of domestic photo studios".
However, the other side of commercial capital favor is the public opinion dilemma of Repeated Complaints and Bad Reviews by Netizens.
Under the Weibo entries such as "sky-high price photo studio", "19.9 yuan shooting finally cost more than 20,000 yuan", "how deep is the studio selection routine", the discussion about the pan women's square is very high. Open the news video comment area released by the CCTV Weibo, the two most liked directly "roll call" Pan Women's Fang, and thousands of netizens reply to the interaction, share and spit on the filming experience in Pan Women's Fang.
On other online platforms or communities, there are also many daily sharing of content about Pan women's workshops, and the proportion of complaints is relatively high. Low-price drainage, package upgrades, price increase selection, refusal to refund, etc. are the keywords that netizens complain about. Many netizens have said that when they walk out of the Pan Women's Square, the amount of final consumption has exceeded expectations of thousands of yuan to tens of thousands of yuan. In the Xiaohongshu or Zhihu search for "Pan Women's Workshop", some users posted the "anti-pit" strategy/guide of Pan Women's Workshop, some users wrote down their rights protection experience to provide refund experience, and some users even directly marked on the cover of the picture: Do not go near the Pan Women's Workshop, it will become unfortunate.
On the Black Cat Complaint Platform, the current satisfaction rate of Pan Women's Fang is 3 stars (out of 5 stars), and the number of complaints is 1867. Of these, 1860 have been replied to, and the completion rate is about 65%. The number of complaints in the past 30 days is 92, and 19 have been completed.
Consumer complaints are mainly divided into several categories.
First, the order that was not filmed refused to be refunded. Many consumers pointed out that Pan Women's Fang often organizes promotional activities in the WeChat group, and after the user places an order through Taobao, the staff will ask the consumer to provide a verification code for registration and verification, and after the verification, it cannot be refunded through Taobao, and can only contact customer service, and customer service will usually refuse to refund or ask for a deduction of 20%-30% of the liquidated damages.
The second is consumption inducement such as package upgrades and price increase selection. For example, consumers buy low-cost packages on the Internet, and when they go to offline stores to consume, they are repeatedly promoted and upgraded; the package clothing partition is not clear; and consumers are induced to add films through various means when selecting films.
Third, there is no acceptance after the cancellation of stores in some areas.
Source of the contract posted by consumers: Black Cat Complaint
According to the appointment contract posted by the consumer on the black cat complaint platform, lawyer Jialin told the hedgehog commune that there were invalid standard clauses such as "Party A shall not be required to return for any reason", restricting consumer rights, and excessive liquidated damages.
Even so, Pan Women's Workshop is still in the industry TOP1 scale continues to operate and develop, according to the previous founder to the media revealed information, Pan Women's Square currently occupies about 80% of China's costume photography market share, 20% of the commercial photography market share, the industry's second place is not even less than one-tenth of Pan Women's Square.
How exactly did Pan Women's Square rise? And how to create an annual turnover of more than 1 billion? Why are we caught in the predicament of public opinion now?
From these confusions, the Hedgehog Commune (ID: ciweigongshe) will try to restore a pan women's workshop that spans a long development process. From its rapid expansion speed, to the wolf sales "iron army", to the brand marketing that penetrates the traffic of the private domain, people will gradually understand why Pan Women's Fang presents a contradictory image of "traditional and trendy, cheap and high-end". And this contradiction does not even belong to a single woman's workshop.
Walk into the Pan Women's Square
If you search for Pan's offline stores in Beijing through the official website, people will find two direct-operated stores: the main store and the Dongsi store. When the hedgehog commune arrived at the Beijing main store located in the East Fourth Ring Road of Chaoyang District, the receptionist of Pan Women's Square said: This is the only store in Beijing, the East Fourth Store has been closed, the rest is only offline promotion points, only provide consulting services, "fortunately there is no white run."
The Beijing main store has a total of 4,000 square meters and is divided into several areas: the front hall reception, the finished product display area, the clothing area, the powder room, and the shooting room. These areas also represent the consumption links of offline shooting: looking at photo albums to choose packages, picking clothes, completing makeup to start shooting, and selecting films.
The photo album has models with exquisite makeup and wearing the same IP, and when customers pick their eyes and swing in various types, salespeople begin to vigorously promote the new series in 2022. One of the "flying" themes was recommended nine times in a one-hour conversation.
After that, the sales staff successively proposed a 2999 yuan package that did not include "Feitian" and a 3999 yuan package that included "Feitian". Emphasize that if multiple people place an order at the same time, they can enjoy the "flying sky" theme in the low-cost package. This sales method is called "rationalization smoke", which is a means for merchants to use some seemingly "loss-making" means to make consumers think it is cost-effective to buy, so as to make a profit. Originals such as "Feitian" are obviously the tools of the marketing link of Pan's Women's Square. However, this is only part of the sales process, when the customer shows interest in the product, but hesitates about the price, there will be a "manager" role, his role is to test the customer's bottom line in a senior identity, win the customer's trust, until the two sides hang out the bottom card.
The manager began to calculate the "math problem", and constantly tested the customer's psychological expectations through various ways such as product replacement, negative addition and subtraction, clothing promotion and upgrading. In a consulting exhibition area, the hedgehog commune finally won the "three people placed an order for a total of 4,000 yuan".
In the service introduction, Pan Women Renfang insists on not sending "negatives", because the "negatives" they let customers choose are actually "initial repair films", which have undergone simple modifications such as beautification, acne removal and freckles. After the selection of the film, the "refinement" will be carried out, and the "initial repair" that is not selected will be deleted on the spot.
In one of the packages, for example, it was a challenge for the customer to choose 18 of the many photos that had just been revised. A set of clothes to take about 20 photos, if you shoot 3 sets of clothing, each set of clothing can only be selected to refine in the end, more than one more to increase the price of 120 yuan. Shoot more, repair the beauty, free less, get the majority. In addition, the package usually includes an album, but the album has a fixed number of photos to be included, which is another fee if additional photos are required.
Not all ancient style photography institutions have adopted the sales strategy of "large discounts on plateau prices and incomplete delivery of negatives" in Pan women's workshop.
Headquartered in Hunan, Pan women's fang did not open its first direct-operated store in Beijing until 2016, which has also become a differentiated selling point for other Beijing stores. Panzi Costume Photography Studio (hereinafter referred to as Panzi Costume) in the sales link to clear their relationship with Pan Women's Fang, and emphasized that they have been in Beijing for eleven years, is the first brand in Beijing to focus on shooting the theme of the Forbidden City, "anyway, when our family began to shoot costumes, they have not yet come."
Taking the lead in entering the market and taking a long time for the brand has become an important means for the ancient style photography museum to gain the trust of consumers.
Also claiming to be the first in Beijing to shoot the theme of the Forbidden City is Miss Yu's costume photography (hereinafter referred to as Miss Yu). Plate Costume and Miss Yu both set up shops in the Beijing area, focusing on outdoor shooting. This is a stark difference between opening direct stores across the country and franchised stores and pan women's workshops that focus on indoor shooting.
In addition to the original theme, the costumes of Pan Women's Square are all from independent production, and in addition to the original theme, they will purchase film and television drama copyrights and reproduce the same model of the star, which will be new once in about three months. Miss Yu's clothing is partly produced, partially purchased, in addition to the original theme, it will also be on the shelves and weaken the publicity after the same revision of the film and television, about once a month, about 5 sets. The costumes of the plate costume are all purchased from special clothing brands, and 10 new sets can be installed every month.
Although the new speed of Pan Women's Workshop is slower than that of the other two, there are currently more than 1500 sets of clothing styles, while the number of costumes of Panzi Costume and Yu Meiren is more than 300 sets.
The homogenization of clothing reduces the advantages of research and development, and price becomes one of the driving forces of consumption. Hedgehog Commune found that during the March 8 festival, the prices and package contents of different brands were similar, the difference was whether the negatives were all delivered, the commonality was that the price discount was uncertain, and the final result was based on the communication results with the sales staff. Among them, the uncertainty of the price discount of Panrenrenfang is the greatest.
Comparison of event prices for different brands
With an annual income of more than 1 billion, where does the money come from?
The consumption routine of the store is easy to be experienced, but on the back of the Pan Women's Workshop, there is a story of the rise of a "studio giant" that consumers are not familiar with. Overall, this journey can be divided into three stages: the scale expansion period from 2003 to 2016, the brand operation period from 2016 to 2019, and the industrial layout period after 2019.
A. Out-of-control brick-and-mortar stores
1. More than 1400 stores, Pan Women's Fang extends to the tentacles of the whole country
Yang Jian, the chairman of Pan Women's Square, often mentions the current size of Pan Women's Place in interviews. This is also one of the company's proudest achievements. In the report of Chuangbang in early 2022, Yang Jian said that Pan women's fang now has more than 200 stores, and in the next 5 years, it will be laid out in every city in the country, stationed in 1,000 places in prefecture-level cities, county seats and provincial capitals, so that Pan Women's Fang will enter thousands of households.
This has to say about the type of physical store of The Women's Square. According to the public information of Pan women's fang, there are more than 40 directly operated stores and more than 180 franchise stores in its more than 200 stores. The layout of direct stores is in first- and second-tier cities, and the layout of franchise stores is in third- and fourth-tier cities. However, hedgehog commune observed that whether it is the spontaneous recommendation of consumers or the company's official marketing promotion, the largest proportion of publicity in Pan women's square is its direct store business, and the corresponding franchise store is full of problems.
For example, in 2019-2020, Pan Women's Fang has repeatedly exposed the problem of sudden store closures and the boss running away. Among them, anhui province, there was a case of "pan women's square" running away, the regulatory authorities accepted more than 200 complaints, consumers were defrauded of the amount from 999 yuan to 12,000 yuan, the case involved a total amount of more than 200,000 yuan.
At present, it is known that this case was signed by a photography shop in Tancheng District using the official seal of the "Pan ladies' Fang Photo Studio in Tancheng District" that had been registered and cancelled. In addition, Nanning, Luoyang and other places also have the problem of bosses running away, and complaints about the franchise stores of Pan Women's Square are endless.
In fact, the chaotic and out-of-control franchise store business originated from the early development and expansion strategy of Pan Renfang.
According to the founder Yang Jian, he dreamed of how to build the "moat" of Pan Women's Fang, and this thinking ran through the development path of Pan Women's Fang. The first and most important moat of Pan Women's Square is the scale of physical stores.
Pan Women's Square was established in 2003 in Changsha, Hunan Province. In terms of technical conditions at that time, costume photography was not a good business. Until 2004, the advent of digital cameras, the progress of spray painting technology, the great improvement of costume shooting effects, pan women's workshop survived, and entered a stage of steady development.
By 2005, Pan's Daughter's Workshop had accumulated tens of thousands of customers. In 2008, the Changsha store of Panjiarenfang moved from Jiefang Middle Road to Hongming Center Commercial Street, transformed from a studio to a company, and the store size expanded from more than 80 square meters to more than 1,000 square meters, and the store will continue to increase in the next few years, with a total construction area of 3,200 square meters in 2019.
From 2009 to 2016, Pan Women's Square continued to extend the tentacles of physical stores to the whole country. In 2009, when the franchise was fully opened, and by the time the first Shanghai direct store opened in 2013, Pan women's square began to adopt the expansion method of "direct operation + franchise" in parallel.
At this stage, Pan Women's Square maintained an amazing expansion rate, especially the franchise authorization. In 2009, the company held two national investment promotion meetings in one year, authorized more than 200 at a time, and expanded to more than 300 franchise stores in only one year. In 2013, the number of franchise stores nationwide exceeded 800, and in 2016, it reached more than 1400. For comparison, Starbucks had 1,367 Stores in China in 2014, while Pan Ladies Renfang had more stores than that number in 2016.
Pan Women's Fang store distribution map Source @ Pan Women's Fang public number
Yang Jian believes that the large-scale laying of physical branches, seemingly bulky, is actually smart, which is conducive to raising the barriers of pan women's squares. Indeed, no photography agency or brand has such a large store size so far.
Especially in the segment of gufeng photography, Yang Jian's market insight and business strategy are very effective. In the 2003 domestic photography market with European luxury as the mainstream style, "instead of being tough in the fiercely competitive photo studio industry, it is better to focus on the blank subdivision track and do 'big fish in a small pond'". Grasping the blank market, predicting the trend of the national tide, and concentrating on building a moat, these key points have laid the position of Pan women's fang as the "top 1 in the industry" to a considerable extent.
The other side of more than 1,400 franchise stores is that in addition to serving customers, Pan women's workshops must also serve franchisees.
In some past reports, Pan Ladies Renfang would introduce itself this way: "Who are we? Pan Women's Workshop, teacher Yang Jian began to draw a big blueprint for the industrial chain of Chinese style culture, he dreamed of creating 100 billionaires, 1,000 multi-millionaires, and 10,000 millionaires through the Pan Women's Workshop. This passage sounds really uplifting. In order to realize this "dream", Panworenfang has also turned franchisees and even peer training services into a new business.
In 2013, The Plate Business School was established, the goal is to create a "Whampoa Military Academy" in the photo photography industry, according to the publicity information of the Pan Women's Workshop, the Plate Business School opens no less than 10 classes a year, with a total of more than 300 classes and 50,000 lectures. According to the black light network, in January 2014, the three-day offline course of the "President's Business Program" cost 3998 yuan per person (excluding food and accommodation), and about 300 studio practitioners from all over the country signed up for this course. This course will be held 12 times a year, and is promoted by Pan Ladies and People's Workshop as a "compulsory system course for studio owners, and is known as the most effective and landing EMBA in China's photo studio industry".
In 2015, the 3-day Shanghai appreciation meeting and course training cost 998 yuan / person, 1800 yuan / 2 people, and the number of people present exceeded 1000 people, many of whom were franchisees and potential customers of companies considering joining. The course of the appreciation meeting included some of the essence of "President's Nuclear Fission", and for the first time, the course of "E-commerce Operation" was added, and the chairman of Pan women's square, the dean of the business school, the general manager of the direct business center, and the chief operating officer of e-commerce served as the main instructor.
Among them, the chairman of Pan Zi Ren Fang and the dean of the business school are the main lecturers of the course "President Nuclear Fission". Yang Jian said that the significance of "nuclear fission" is: a core, six fissions, that is, everything with profit as the core, to achieve six fissions of thinking mode, marketing mode, operation management mode, business model, performance model and store management and control. Yang Kang, dean of the business school, continued to analyze how the studio transformed from various aspects and introduced the "fission" method.
The report mentioned that the course instructor especially introduced the example of a single order received 168888 yuan in Suzhou store and 36666 yuan in the late stage of Shanghai store, and believed that to attract large customers and enhance the value of customer orders, the key lies in giving the commission in the later stage of the store, emphasizing the later selection, and suggesting customer consumption, etc., which aroused strong resonance among the guests on the spot.
The training business of Pan Ladies Workshop is in full swing. We can perceive that on the issue of how to improve profits, the main store, direct sales store and franchisee of Pan women's square are a "community". At the event, 5 franchisee leaders were invited to share on stage, and demonstrated the remarkable effect of the pan women's workshop training with practical cases. Many of the franchisees present also increased their horsepower to get rich through the business tips taught by the headquarters. However, Pan's Daughters Has not been able to "love each other and family" with these franchisees for a long time. The chaotic form of store authorization and the endless pursuit of profits have made these tentacles of the Pan Women's Workshop more and more "branching".
Some consumers posted online that when she spent in local stores, the staff repeatedly emphasized that it was a "direct store" not a "franchise store", and after consulting the headquarters, the headquarters customer service said that the store was not a "flagship store" or a "pure direct store", but it was not a "franchise store", but it was called a "cooperative direct store".
At the same time, the consumer found that the official website interface of Pan Women's Square has also been revised, from the original classification of direct stores and franchise stores to only flagship stores, and the number of flagship stores is less than the original direct stores.
Due to the difficulties of non-directly operated stores in cross-store transfer orders, after-sales rights protection, etc., consumers have repeatedly asked in detail, but they have been answered ambiguously and inconsistently by the headquarters customer service, she left a message: "Suddenly I feel that dealing with the plate has a feeling of buying lottery tickets, from choosing a store to taking the finished product, a series of processes in the middle have to look at luck." In mid-2016, PanRenrenfang received its first round of financing. At the end of the same year, Pan's Daughters Square announced a strategic adjustment and stopped attracting foreign investment.
Yang Jian said in an interview that Pan Women's Fang has always been vigilant about the management problems caused by the rapid development, and stopping investment does not mean stopping, but to start to improve the quality of brand services, focusing on customer satisfaction. The more important reason is that due to the wide enough stores of Pan Lady's Fangmen, the market has begun to saturate, and the Group has established a new stage of transformation to an asset-light model and relying on brands to obtain profits.
At the same time, another brand under Pan Women's Place, "Feng Aya'er", which focuses on Chinese-style children's photography, opened for investment. Yang Jian revealed that Feng Aya's profit is higher than that of Pan Women's Workshop, and the profit margin of a single store is more than 30%, which is a promising market.
Another fact is that to this day, there are still many complaints from Pan Women's Workshop. For many consumer complaints, Pan's daughters have replied to China Net Finance at the end of 2021: The pace of the company's development in recent years is relatively fast, so there are indeed some loopholes in service and control, and after adjustment, it has now improved. But some of the complaints on the Internet are true, some are produced by fake brands on the periphery, and some are malicious complaints, "Consumer complaints are mainly that the interest points are not agreed, not that refunds are not treated, but the needs of consumers have seriously exceeded our expectations, resulting in increased pressure on business operations." ”
Sale of the "Iron Army"
Art photography is a relatively low-frequency, non-rigid field of consumption, especially costume photography, which is often regarded as a sense of ritual or spiritual consumption. Relying only on customer-to-door consultation to form a single, of course, can not support such a large company. Usually, because the photo studio shooting must be offline store service, the photography agency is mostly a local service enterprise, and the photo studio is mostly publicized in the local area, and it is not necessary to invest huge costs to lay network advertising.
When the women's square goes to the whole country, the first problem it faces is how to leverage the needs of users in unfamiliar markets. To this end, Pan Women's Fang paid attention to e-commerce channels early, formed an e-commerce team, and made efforts to sell online. At the Changsha headquarters of Pan women's square, there is an e-commerce sales "iron army" of more than 600 people stationed. 70% of the total revenue of Pan women's square is created by this e-commerce "iron army".