China's consumer electronics products have gone through the stage from OEM to private label. At the beginning, China's foundries delivered a steady stream of OEM products to European and American brands. After the technology and supply chain matured, Chinese entrepreneurs began to seek to design and build their own brands in the European and American markets, and these products were born with "overseas genes" in various aspects such as prototypes, brands, and market positioning, that is, specifically for overseas consumers. Many brands are not well known to Chinese consumers, but occupy a large share of the overseas consumer electronics market.
Ape Man Innovation is such a brand, it was born around 2016 when cross-border e-commerce boomed, mainly engaged in imaging and smart home products. Backed by Shenzhen's rich supply chain advantages, Ape Man Innovation has been able to make a world in overseas markets. In the third year after its establishment, Ape Man Innovation's monthly sales exceeded 100 million yuan, and it won the first sales performance in the industry in many categories. In 2019, the main brand apeman officially entered the Wal-Mart supermarket channel in the United States, with overseas sales of more than 2 billion yuan for the whole year.
Being able to quickly capture the market thanks to the experience of the team. Prior to this, the founder Luo Yuanjue had an entrepreneurial experience in China, and he developed two products for the domestic market: intelligent projectors and sweeping robots. In his second venture, which began in April 2016, he chose to focus on overseas markets. At that time, Amazon had opened up the logistics delivery system in the US market, and the time was ripe for cross-border e-commerce, and compared with the Chinese market, overseas markets were still facing a growing demand gap.
(Ape Man Innovation values future opportunities in the smart home and IoT tracks)
Make a global comparative advantage
When choosing products for the overseas market, Ape Man Innovation did not first choose the familiar intelligent projector and sweeping robot field, one is because the demand for these two products in the overseas market is still in the early stage, the market is unclear, and the second is to do a good job in the early research and development of sweeping robots. As a result, its second venture chose to use action cameras to cut into the European and American markets.
"Action cameras are medium-sized overseas, and extreme sports enthusiasts in Europe and the United States have strong demand for products, while demand in China is still very early. This also means that the competitive dimension of players entering the market will not be too high, which is very suitable for entering as an entrepreneurial category at that time. Luo Yuanjue analyzed the magazine "First Finance".
While action cameras used at professional sporting events have been around for years, the real explosion of this market came after the advent of the GoPro. American surfer Nick Woodman has developed a camera that can be tied to his wrist to help him take pictures of himself walking between the waves. The first GoPro camera was launched in 2004, and water and vibration resistance were the main feature selling points of the device. Later, GoPro successively launched high-resolution products that can shoot 1080P video. For a certain period of time, GoPro became the representative of action cameras, thriving in the industry.
At that time, GoPro dominated the overseas market and had many patents and research and development results, so the unit price of the product was higher, mainly for the high-end player market. Other consumers have no choice but to buy "copycat" products without a brand. If you can develop an action camera with similar functions and quality to GoPro, but more cost-effective, you can catch users who want to buy high-performance, inexpensive products. In addition, GoPro's sales are highly dependent on offline channels, which undoubtedly provides a huge market opportunity for Ape Man innovation.
With the understanding of the overseas market of action cameras and the advantages of China's supply chain, Ape Man Innovation has formulated a strategy of dot belt and line, focusing resources on the research and development of action cameras, and then using this successful advantage to enter a larger category.
The first product innovatively designed by Ape Man was benchmarked against the mainstream specifications of the market at that time: 1080P. 1080P is a high-definition standard format determined by the American Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, which can reach the resolution of 1920×1080 under progressive scan, and 4K further up is the resolution of the film level.
Ape Man's innovative product strategy is to make the product close to the same quality as GoPro when the market and product reach a stable period after the market and products have reached a stable period.
Compared with the Apeman A80 and GoPro's flagship Product, goPro Hero 6 Black, apeman is slightly inferior to GoPro in terms of resolution and performance of supported formats. But in terms of product waterproofness, Apeman made a breakthrough, GoPro is 10 meters, apeman A80 can be used at a depth of 40 meters underwater. Therefore, the apeman A80 is known as the most cost-effective action camera on the market at present, and its price is only 1/5 of that of the GoPro.
In Luo Yuanjue's view, there are two types of competitors of Ape Man Innovation overseas. One is overseas brands such as GoPro, the advantage of Ape Man Innovation is that it has a more efficient supply chain and R & D iteration efficiency, and can take advantage of China's supply chain and engineer dividends to improve the cost performance of products as much as possible under the premise of creating the same specifications and performance. The other is Chinese sellers who also have supply chain advantages. Compared with other cross-border sellers in China, Luo Yuanjue believes that the advantage of his team is that he has been starting a business for many years and has a deeper precipitation in the industry - he understands the industrial chain and supply chain of products better; compared with other product-based companies, Ape Man Innovation understands the usage habits and purchase psychology of overseas users better.
Product strength is still the core of "overseas out of the circle"
"Quality and patents are the two major barriers for Chinese products to enter overseas markets, and as long as they are cost-effective, they can be sold quickly." But if the quality is not good, there will be many returns, and the brand reputation will not be able to talk about. Luo Yuanjue said. Users on Amazon value quality the most, and they will leave real reviews for potential users to refer to, which also makes Luo Yuanjue determined to create higher quality products.
Luo Yuanjue said that the method of improving quality in the early stage of entrepreneurship is very "simple and direct", that is, to find the most authoritative experts and professionals in the field of action cameras, so that they can provide analysis methods and solutions to quality problems. Until now, Ape Man Innovation still holds a weekly quality improvement meeting involving technicians, operations teams, customer service and supply chain teams, and completes user insights by analyzing desensitized user data and consumer feedback.
Using this method, Ape Man's innovative products iterated quickly, through upgrades and small batches of fast-responding hardware improvements, the speed reached once a week, and the main quality problems were solved in two or three months. Luo Yuanjue calls this approach "Internet iterative thinking" – finding key problems and solving them. Instead of placing large orders at once, it is a small order in batches, and it is quickly changed in the next batch of orders based on customer feedback.
Ape Man Innovation is also committed to the innovation, quality improvement and technology research and development of its own products, and gradually establishes a real brand barrier. From 2019 to 2022, Ape Man Innovation has won 12 international product design awards, including the German Red Dot Design Award, IF Design Award, European Product Design Award (EPDA) and Golden Dot Award among the world's three major design awards, and independently owns more than 230 intellectual property rights and patents at home and abroad.
Later, the Ape Man innovation team extended the same product expansion logic to the fields of car cameras and security products.
The choice of security products stems from ape innovation's vision of the future opportunities of smart home and The Internet of Things track, just as Luo Yuanjue chose to cut into the domestic market from intelligent projectors and sweeping robots at the beginning. To this end, Ape Man Innovation deliberately introduced Midea capital when financing, Midea as a giant in the domestic small household appliance industry has a layout in many fields of smart home, Ape Man Innovation is in the Internet of Things and overseas markets have certain advantages, the two can form a certain complementary relationship. Ape Man Innovation hopes that through the opportunity of cooperation with the United States, it will be able to cooperate with more suppliers with field advantages in the future.
Products sold overseas need to be adapted to local conditions and adjusted according to the preferences and living habits of overseas consumers, rather than taking existing domestic products to proof everything. The detail of color alone has obviously different preferences from consumers at home and abroad. In the European and American markets, consumers are more likely to pay for black products, while Chinese consumers may prefer bright and lively colors. "You have to respect the habits of local consumers." Luo Yuanjue said.
In order to maximize the advantages of Chinese products, in terms of product selection, Ape Man Innovation basically only makes competitive new products, reducing unnecessary SKUs (inventory units). "In the smart home category, many stores are hundreds of thousands of SKUs, but Ape Man's AliExpress stores have less than 40 SKUs." The head of AliExpress, who is ape-man innovation, once said that with few SKUs, the team can focus and polish competitive products.
Join hands with the strong, build a local cloud system, and fear the local business habits
Ape Man's innovative security cameras and other Internet of Things products all use Amazon cloud technology services, including the interconnection of devices, cloud deployment of the Internet of Things, image storage, data analysis and intelligent decision-making. Because of the global infrastructure, equipped with Amazon cloud technology, Ape Man Innovation can be quickly deployed globally, so that overseas users can quickly access. At the same time, Amazon Cloud Technology effectively guarantees data security compliance on a global scale, making it easier for users to trust brands.
Ape Man's innovation was based on the Amazon e-commerce platform at the beginning of the sea, and with the deepening of cooperation, the two sides gradually reached a deep binding. To some extent, this relationship also helps Ape-Man Innovation in terms of compliance. Compliance services such as cybersecurity incident management solutions are an important service of Amazon Cloud Technology, which not only helps improve security on the cloud, but also further improves the compliance management of enterprises. Through cooperation with Amazon, as well as long-term overseas operation experience, Ape Man Innovation also realized that in overseas markets, it is necessary to combine practical scenarios, produce and design products that meet local needs, and patiently do a good job in products and services, and cannot take "shortcuts".
"Reduce your focus on traffic and operational 'black tech' and revere local business rules." In the case of the company's development is relatively benign, pay more attention to user satisfaction and product quality to improve efficiency, time will give you returns. Luo Yuanjue said.
![Have Serverless's promises been fulfilled?[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)