Text/Golden Wrong Knife Channel
In the camp of Internet e-commerce, another general has fallen.
On July 27, the daily excellent fresh, which focuses on community fresh food, closed the "speed up" business, and the next day there was a 15-and-a-half minute meeting recording circulating on the Internet, about 700 employees were notified to end their work, and the company was dissolved in situ.
Listed companies with a revenue of more than 7 billion yuan a year, saying that they are gone, netizens commented on Weibo: "Listed companies can be dissolved in situ, and the capital market is too wonderful." ”
In fact, in March this year, Daily Excellent Fresh has begun to lay off a large area, originally more than 2,000 people, less than 900 people remaining, and suppliers often come to the door to collect debts.
Once the daily excellent fresh, half an hour can deliver fresh to the doorstep, by many first-tier city white-collar workers love, the number of users more than 30 million, 8 years to get more than 11 billion financing.
But with years of losses, investors who never get a return gradually lose confidence in it.
Daily Excellent Fresh has also gradually fallen into the death cycle of lack of money, lack of goods, and lack of users.
Open 1500 warehouses,
Saved 31 million users, all ran
In the early days, daily freshness was a typical "other person's child".
But it has a characteristic: some are money and ability, but they just can't get users.
The founder Xu is a mathematical genius, who entered the junior class of the University of Science and Technology of China at the age of 15; Selling goods relies on the marketing god Xu Xiaohui, who served as the vice president of Vanke Eslite and Cheetah Mobile; There is a group of executives in the company who have done fresh and agricultural work, and everything is handled by professional cattle people.
These people spare no effort in developing business, and Xu Zheng, who was then, often lay on his desk to do "mathematical problems" and study how to use the shortest time to deliver products to users.
Soon, he had the answer: the front position.
To explain simply, the front warehouse is a small warehouse of about 300 square meters, the user places an order in the daily excellent fresh APP, and the courier directly distributes the goods from the front warehouse. Because the distance is within 3 kilometers, the delivery time can be shortened to the fastest 30 minutes.
Source: China Entrepreneur Magazine, Deng Pan
Daily Youxian put Xu Zheng's calculation out of the method of practice in the country, by 2019, a total of 1500 front warehouses were opened, after the user placed an order, watching an episode of TV drama Kung Fu, the thing arrived.
But for Daily Fresh, the front position means high cost.
General warehouse as long as you pay the rent on the line, fresh pre-warehouse also have a freezer, 24 hours to open the air conditioning, a site a year electricity bill to more than 200,000, the more warehouses the more burning money.
Between serving users and making money, Daily Fresh chose the latter.
The most direct way to make a profit is to increase the number of users at all costs.
For this reason, daily excellent fresh crazy money marketing, at most a year to smash 800 million.
Some insiders revealed that in order to get a stable user, the daily excellent fresh at least 6 times to stimulate the order, which requires the platform to constantly discount, send coupons, the most powerful coupon is "99 yuan minus 80", so calculate the cost of each user, at least 200 yuan.
The number of daily users quickly reached 31 million, and the number of effective orders in 2020 exceeded 65.1 million.
A former employee of Daily Excellent Fresh said: "In 2021, the average monthly cost of a 300-square-meter front warehouse in Shanghai is about 40,000 yuan, and the unit price of customers is 40-50 yuan, and it can be recorded in the account for 40,000 or 50,000 yuan a day." ”
But it turns out that spending money on subsidies is the most unflattering way to make a profit, not only the investment is high, the stickiness of fans is also extremely low, the operating costs often exceed expectations, and the reputation is difficult to maintain.
If open source does not work, then throttling, daily excellent fresh began to shrink the front.
In order to reduce losses and operational difficulties, Daily Excellent Fresh quickly closed some of its pre-positions, and by 2021, there will be only 631 pre-positions left.
Messy and empty front warehouse
However, this is a symptom rather than a cure, and the remaining front position is still a loss.
Daily UX came up with a new way to transfer losses: joining.
Starting in the second half of 2019, Daily Excellent Fresh launched the "micro-warehouse" game, played the slogan of "0 yuan as the boss", and contracted some idle front warehouses to individuals, as long as they paid 50,000-100,000 yuan of security money, they could be the store manager.
However, this way of passing on the loss to the franchised merchants not only does not stop the loss, but also further corrupts the reputation of daily excellent fresh.
Because of many micro-warehouses, when the order does not exceed 100, the income is insufficient and cannot be profitable; After more than 100 orders, the cost of distribution and sorting is too high, and you still have to lose money.
In order to control the single amount, some people began to hoard and press goods; In order to reduce costs, some people turn off the air conditioner and cut off the power to the freezer, resulting in accelerated food spoilage.
This directly led to a decline in the shopping experience, with customers receiving spoiled overnight meat, rotten apples, long-haired grapes, and in severe cases, a small half of a whole bag of vegetables was rotten.
User reviews have fallen sharply, and many of the original old users have lost their powder.
Arrears of 2.4 billion payments,
Driven crazy suppliers, collectively cut off supply
If it is difficult to guarantee the quality of only the franchise warehouse, it will naturally not reduce the number of fans from 31 million to 5 million.
The bigger problem is that since 2021, there will be a significant shortage of daily fresh food, and supplier relations will become worse and worse.
The original daily fresh, high-end fruit came from Joyvo, China's largest fruit company. Joy's blueberries, kiwifruit, and cherries sell one fire at a time.
As of 2020, Daily Fresh has cooperated with more than 2,300 suppliers.
By 2021, its net red fruits are getting less and less, and after 2022, cherries and blueberries have disappeared on the fruit classification page.
In fact, since 2018, the relationship between Daily Fresh and suppliers has been extremely tense, and many suppliers who have cooperated for a long time have not played with it.
Because of the daily excellent fresh, it is too difficult to make money.
As a fresh platform with almost no stores and no social platform to rely on, Daily Fresh can only rely on subsidies to attract users, so it often provides second-kill products, second pieces of zero yuan and other preferential activities.
Wool cannot come out of the sheep, so let it be removed from the pig.
Vegetable and fruit merchants, who originally did not have much profit space, shouldered the heavy responsibility of low-cost drainage.
A supplier in Shenzhen told reporters that daily excellent fresh often put forward the requirements of selling below the market price, but the supplier itself has operating costs, so he and many fresh platforms have cooperation, but dare not cooperate with daily excellent fresh.
The reason why the merchants in the first half are willing to settle in is because the daily excellent fresh order volume is large and can be stable.
But it didn't take long for this stability to be broken, and some merchants began to be owed regularly.
Source: Black Cat Complaint
The beginning was a continuous extension of the redemption time, from 40 days in 2018 to 72 days in 2020. But by 2021, many people have been owed more than a year of money.
Insist on supply, to endure long-term arrears; But once the cooperation is stopped, the payment does not know when it will arrive, so the supplier of daily fresh has only two ways to go, either swallowing his anger or going to court.
An aquatic product supplier who was owed more than 1 million yuan revealed that in the face of the protection of the arrears, daily youxian often kicked the ball: "I found a procurement, procurement let me find the Beijing headquarters, the Beijing headquarters also ignored it, said no, you can sue it." ”
Someone found the prospectus before the listing of Daily Excellent Fresh and found that since 2018, Daily Excellent Fresh has owed up to 2.4 billion yuan to suppliers for 3 consecutive years.
In order to maintain the reputation of the platform, Daily Fresh often asks suppliers to withdraw their lawsuits, sign confidentiality agreements, and agree on a time to pay in installments in order to block messages.
But soon, the paper could not contain the fire.
In March this year, some merchants who had been in arrears for one or two years began to collectively defend their rights, and even the loyal partners who originally wanted to insist on it had no choice but to cut off their supply and came to the Beijing headquarters of Daily Excellent Fresh to defend their rights.
Supplier rights protection scene, image source: New Consumption Daily
Before the "disbandment in situ", the suppliers of daily excellent fresh food ran away.
In order to maintain the remaining supply, the daily preferential treatment has been reduced, and the enthusiasm of users to buy has also decreased, and they have switched to other platforms to place orders.
Daily Fresh falls into a serious vicious circle until the crash comes.
8 years burn 10 billion,
The daily fresh oxygen tube is pulled out by yourself
On the surface, the dissolution of Daily Fresh is because there is no money.
In the three years from 2018 to 2020, the cumulative loss of daily fresh food was 10.787 billion yuan.
People go to the empty daily fresh, and the old headquarters is in a mess. Image source: Times Finance
Compared with no money, many concepts and difficult landing are its biggest problems.
In the early days of daily excellent fresh, with high-quality net red fruits, and fast delivery services, let the major domestic gold owners rush to invest, when Beijing opened the first pre-position, Tencent took the lead in giving it 10 million.
In the following 8 years, Daily Excellent Fresh did what the fire did, even if it has been losing money, it still got tens of billions of financing.
In this regard, Hou Yidu, the founder of Hema, said publicly that the daily excellent fresh is for investors to see: "If you do not burn money, do not subsidize, can not get enough traffic and user stickiness, this is more of a 'to VC' model." ”
This kind of sound has long existed, but it has not awakened the daily freshness at all, which makes it more difficult to raise off-road financing in the early stage and make money later.
For example, it did two sub-projects from 2017 to 2018, and although it stepped on the stroke, it was both high and low, and ended dismal.
In 2017, Daily Excellent Fresh launched "convenience purchase", put unmanned shelves into the office, and the product docked with the front warehouse of Daily Excellent Fresh, and soon got 200 million yuan of financing.
But the convenience of buying a machine can only serve about 100 people, because of the close distance, almost no one hoards goods to make a single order, a day can not sell much things, but to tally twice, there is no way to return the cost, only maintained for about 1 year, began to large-scale layoffs, gradually disappeared.
Although he lost, he still held the investors tightly in his posture of chasing the wind.
In 2018, Daily Fresh launched the social e-commerce projects "Daily One Tao" and "Daily Spelling".
With the fission play, the number of members has exceeded 150,000 in the first 3 months of the daily Tao, and by the fourth month, the monthly turnover has exceeded 100 million, which makes the daily excellent freshness melt to 450 million.
Such a speed of rising fans relies on pulling people's heads and playing the edge of the pyramid scheme.
For example, the upgrade game of daily spelling advocates "let 2,000 people buy 50 yuan of goods per week, and you will earn 96,000 yuan a month." ”
Soon, the U.S.-Japan spelling was attacked by users and regulators on both sides, and was removed from major app stores.
The main business does not make money, the subsidiary only stays in the concept stage, the landing is dead, tens of billions of financing is like entering the bottomless pit, and the daily excellent fresh is more and more difficult to account for the gold owners.
It is impossible to break through the dilemma of difficulty in obtaining customers and high cost, and eventually loses the ability to survive.
Now Daily Fresh not only has no money, but also drags a bunch of rotten debts.
Labor Arbitration Hall's Rights Protection Supplier, Source: New Entropy
In the case of people going to the empty building, the founder Xu Zheng can only use "I did not run" to stabilize the supplier of debt collection, and was complained by netizens, and at this step, he is still deceiving people.
On July 29, Xu zheng spoke out in front of the media: "I have been in China, saying that the people who run away from me are too vicious, and the executives of Daily Excellent Fresh are in Beijing." ”
The daily excellent fresh website also issued a statement, making every effort to maintain the normal operation of the next-day delivery business, smart fresh and retail cloud.
But the statement at this time, even if it roars loudly, is pale and powerless.
Under the reality of consecutive years of losses, any promise can be shattered.
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The author of this article | JingXu