Last year, Edison Chen's Chao brand store in Sanlitun, Beijing, officially closed, which made former trend lovers lament.
IN ADDITION TO THE CLOSURE OF THE TMALL FLAGSHIP STORE RECENTLY, THERE ARE ALSO CONTINUOUS RUMORS THAT MADNESS'S STORE IN SANLITUN WILL NOT BE RENEWED AFTER THE CONTRACT EXPIRES.
The trend star behind the first generation of fashion brands
With the help of the artist's halo, the huge traffic entrance brought by the fan effect has made celebrity trendy cards a necessary side skill.
However, there is a cruel truth: celebrity personal trend brands are often closely linked to their own destiny.
For example, the active period of stars such as Edison Chen and Yue Wenle almost overlapped with the peak of their brands. Even if the original intention of the trendy brand is not to survive with the help of star effect, in today's new media replacing traditional media, the decline in traffic exposure has made consumers no longer as popular as these old star managers.
In 2017, after the 14th anniversary of its establishment, due to the rapid expansion of the brand, the brand budget was tight and a large number of layoffs were slimmed, in 2021, the store did not survive the impact of the epidemic, resulting in the closure of many stores without warning.
The trend-loving friend group Li Chen and Pan Weibai also opened their own trendy brand store - New Project Center, which is known as NPC. At the beginning of 2010, NPC's first physical store was officially opened in Shanghai, Li Chen was responsible for online and offline operation cooperation, and Pan Weibo used personal traffic to promote the store. Over the years, the two have cooperated tacitly, and have opened seven branches in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing and other places, with sales booming.
However, after 10 years as a trendy landmark, the Shanghai Changle Road store announced its closure in 2018, and then its own brand MLGB was declared invalid due to the alleged vulgarity of the brand name.
Traffic is the marketing password of the hottest period of Chao Pai, which has to talk about I.T, the Hong Kong Chao Pai Group was delisted from Hong Kong stocks in December 2020, and correspondingly, the company's performance fell seriously. Its fatal shortcoming lies in the lack of social media marketing.
PLAGUED BY THE SAME PROBLEM, THE ONCE POPULAR JAPANESE TIDE BRANDS, WHICH REFUSE TO JOIN THIS BUSINESS MODEL BECAUSE THEY WANT TO MAINTAIN THEIR OWN PERSONALITIES, SUCH AS BAPE AND NEIGHBORHOOD BRANDS, WHICH STILL DO NOT HAVE AN OFFICIAL ACCOUNT ON XIAOHONGSHU.
Are young people still chasing trendy brands?
The Chinese word "trendy brand" is derived from the English word Streetwear, and Chinese trendy lovers have been named "trendy brand" after these streetwear brands entered the country until today. This streetwear style evolved from New York hip-hop fashion and California surf culture in the 1970s and 1980s to include elements of sportswear, punk, skateboarding, and Japanese street fashion.
But the real popularity of these foreign-origin trendy brands among young Chinese consumers was after 2000.
BAPE, EVISU and mastermind japan, the godfather brands, all entered the Chinese market during the same period.
Edison Chen, a well-deserved "tide king" among Chinese stars, met Nigo, the manager of Chao brand BAPE, and Fujiwara Hiroshi, the godfather of Tokyo streets, and was inspired to return to China to found CLOT.
After Edison Chen, more and more star artists have created their own fashion brands, so Jay Chou founded PHANTACi, and the NPCs of Li Chen and Pan Weibai mentioned above, Zhang Zhenyue's WNP, Yu Wenle's MADNESS, etc. also appeared.
I.T Group, which smelled the "business opportunities of trendy brands", opened its first brand collection store in the mainland in Shanghai's youngest Xintiandi block in 2002, where many young people in China first came into contact with a large number of Japanese and Hong Kong fashion brands.
At that time, whether it was Xintiandi or Sanlitun Street, more than half of the outfits in the trendy street photos must have the familiar elements of BAPE shark hat mixed with EVISU jeans, and the "male gods and goddesses" who are sought after by everyone on the Internet always can't help but show the back of the MMJ flash diamond skull.
Going to work and class is painful, but getting up early to line up for trendy items is a must. Whether it is the first sale of BAPE STA shoes or Supreme's weekly new product restrictions, it is an important milestone in the history of fashion brands, and the exaggerated queue scene in front of the store is not difficult to see the love of consumers for fashion brands in that decade.
After 2010, with the increase of European and American fashion brands such as Stüssy, Off-White, Supreme and Crosin sweeping the market, the trend pattern loved by Chinese consumers has changed again.
During this time, Japan and South Korea and even domestic entertainment became popular idols, the MV is not like today's only luxury goods, the tide brands are the protagonists at that time, the star's comprehensive goods make the favorite keywords of the trendy brand dealers become "the same style of Quan Zhilong" and "Edison Chen the same style".
Who is influencing the purchasing power of trendy brands?
However, social media platforms such as Instagram, WeChat, and Xiaohongshu are transforming the consumer market from brand-driven to product-driven, and brands that have not grasped investment in this area in time have been phased out by consumers.
The rapidly changing Internet continues to shape the aesthetic preferences of Generation Z, and rapidly changing cultural symbols have formed one consumption boom after another, such as Supreme brands that know how to market have become the 1% of the mass trend seen, but the original relatively "underground" brand positioning, so that its consumer group is infinitely expanded The consequence is no longer recognized by niche circle culture.
The hunger marketing that consumers love and hate has long been the unspoken rule of trendy brands - the owner of Supreme's second-hand store in Lafayette, New York, once told the media: "When a product is very hot, Supreme will stop production, which makes it extremely expensive in the second-hand market." ”
The marketing model that trendy brands are vying to follow in order to survive has made the street tide environment worse and worse. The current trendy brand culture has nothing to do with the cognition that streetwear wants to express, the price tag is the mainstream, consumers pay less and less attention to style, but divide the trendy brand class into three, six and nine, which itself is very different from the original concept of street culture, and it is impossible for consumer groups to have a sense of belonging to their cultural symbols.
More obviously, everyone wants to share this big pie of Chao Pai. Streets and runways, trendy brands and haute couture, originally completely different scenes and styles, are now quietly merging and gradually developing into fashion trends.
“Stüssy x DIOR”，“LV x Supreme”，“BALENCIAGA x Adidas”.... More and more street-born fashion brands are co-branding with luxury fashion house brands, whether it is street fashion brands that want to cross classes, or established fashion houses catering to more younger audiences, no matter what the consideration, these brands have achieved a win-win situation.
Those niche brands that cannot be associated with luxury goods have watched consumers being constantly divided and diluted, but they are powerless.
But then again, part of the reason why the first batch of trendy brands are constantly receding comes from the extremely high instability and extremely low brand loyalty of the new generation of consumers.
It is difficult for old brands to move forward, and it is increasingly difficult for new brands to succeed, behind which is the transformation of people's consumption concepts and habits.
What causes them a headache is that the consumption preferences of "Gen Z" are not more homogeneous, but more individual. The lifestyle and preferences of Generation Z are quite "deviant" and "erratic", and why and how they pay for it is becoming more and more elusive.
Short video platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu allow all information to be quickly absorbed by young people, so they accept and get tired of new brands very quickly, and even show a very obvious preference for "liking the new and disliking the old".
For them, "a trend is a daily occurrence".
Is the next exit of the tide brand coming?
However, there were old fashion brands that encountered a crisis before, and then there were national fashion clothing with the assistance of e-commerce platforms, ushered in the golden age.
With the continuous introduction of policies to promote the development and export of domestic textile and garment, while the traditional old brands are brave to transform and make trial and error, the new batch of national chao clothing brands continue to use new thinking to make this batch of 2.0 version of national chao brands stand out in the domestic market.
For example, Li Ning, known as the "light of the national tide", with the "China Li Ning" shined at New York Fashion Week in 2018, just one month after the fashion week, its stock price rose by 27%, and its market value increased by nearly 10 billion Hong Kong dollars.
After Li Ning's clever transformation from a pure sports brand, Li-Ning launched a new independent sports fashion brand LI-NING 1990 with a more trendy brand positioning, further deepening communication with the "Generation Z".
There is also Randomevent, which was born in pure e-commerce and can more represent the 2.0 generation of national tides. The brand, known as the "National Tide Design Ceiling", started with stores on Taobao and now has three stores in Shanghai, Beijing and Hangzhou.
The simultaneous operation of physical and online allows Randomevent to compete among many e-commerce brands - physical stores allow consumers to intuitively experience product quality and brand concepts, and irregular activities are held to enhance stickiness with consumers; Online platforms, on the other hand, undertake the expansion of sales volume and sales scope, and expand brand influence quickly and effectively.
Through multiple joint series launched with avant-garde artists, as well as other traditional sports brands such as Puma and Adidas, the product design combines the art installations of offline stores to emphasize the brand's "experiential sense of consumption", and firmly locks in its own customer group with the design of benchmarking young people.
In addition to the independent planning and development of individual brands, the rise of new media delivery platforms such as Xiaohongshu or Douyin has given all national fashion brands a good opportunity to treat them equally.
Judging from the "2021 Douyin E-commerce Domestic Products Development Annual Report", Douyin e-commerce has been deploying for a long time in supporting domestic products. Throughout 2021, "helping the development of domestic products" is the keyword for the development of Douyin's e-commerce. Whether it is a cutting-edge national fashion brand or a time-honored domestic brand, the sales of Douyin e-commerce have risen rapidly this year.
The change in e-commerce platform policy is also because live streaming e-commerce has ushered in a new outlet for development, and live broadcasting, as a new type of marketing communication means, has expanded the influence of many national fashion brands with its characteristics of strong communication and strong interaction. The platform even cooperated with top anchors such as Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya to bring special sessions on domestic products, in order to cultivate the long-term purpose of consumers seeing, supporting and applying domestic brands for a long time.
Therefore, in this era of profound changes in the Internet, looking back at the decline of the first generation of Chinese fashion brands, everything seems to be logical.
Written by: Weilai
Edited by Sebastian
The source of the picture is the Internet, and the copyright belongs to the original author