On the road of "being the world's Naixue", Peng Xin has his own persistence and change.
Nai Xue's first new Chinese tea house is located in the artistic Shenzhen OCT O· POWER Center for Culture and Arts. The two-storey space, with wood tones, is composed of several areas such as reading, retail, guest and semi-open private rooms, and there is a circle of independent tea tables outside the room, which is a good place to make tea around the hearth.
It is only a 15-minute drive from Nayuki's tea headquarters office building. After its opening, this tea house has also become the most frequent place for founder Peng Xin to entertain friends and partners.
"Cellar Pu'er comes from Jingmai Mountain, where there is the largest surviving ancient tea forest in China, and it exudes the fragrance of orchids. "This tea is kept in the cellar, like red wine, for 5 years...... Its aroma is the taste that comes out of the cellar. ”
Speaking of tea, Peng Xin could not hide the excitement in her tone, in a quiet corner of the hall on the first floor of the tea house, she was introducing several teas from her collection to visitors. In the cabinet behind Peng Xin, there are good teas that she and her team have picked out from all over the world over the years.
Not long ago, Chen Hongbo, the founder of Red Restaurant, took the "Red Coffee Talk" column group and met Peng Xin in this tea house.
Since 2014, when he began to prepare Nai Xue's tea, tea has long been a part of Peng Xin's life. If he doesn't go to the base to find tea and choose tea, the first thing Peng Xin does when he goes to the office every day is to make a pot of tea and let his body "wake up".
During the more than 2 hours of conversation, every time she talked about tea, she couldn't help but talk more.
Peng Xin is an affinity, self-consistency, and planning person, she likes tea very much, and she is highly passionate about the cause she devotes herself to. At the same time, she also has a delicate and romantic side of women, pursuing a comfortable and beautiful life experience.
"It's very busy, I work every day. Peng Xin commented on his 2023.
In the past year, Peng Xin has been very busy, and Nai Xue's tea is constantly adjusting: 506 new directly-operated stores have been opened and franchise business has been opened, the first store in Thailand has been restarted and the first store in Thailand has been opened, and Nai Xue Tea House has been launched and 5 have been opened.
It is said that the personality of the founder will affect the way the company plays. In the crazy volume scale of tea drinking, Peng Xin and Nai Xue's tea, which she founded for nearly 9 years, still insist on striding forward at their own pace.
"The tea house is served by 35-year-old me and my friends"
The afternoon before the interview, Peng Xingang and the team met to discuss plans to adjust the menu and retail offerings of Nai Xue Tea House.
In the past year, Peng Xin has devoted half of his energy to the new project of Naixue Tea House.
The original intention of the birth of the teahouse was that Peng Xin realized that he and his friends around him had new needs. She found that the consumers who liked Nai Xue 8 years ago have changed, and with the growth of experience, they have begun to have business and social needs, and they have also returned to tea itself in tea drinking, preferring to drink pure tea.
However, traditional teahouses are too formal, and ordinary street-side tea shops cannot meet the needs of business and social interaction. In Peng Xin's planning, what Naixue Tea House should do is to provide customers with a place where they can drink tea with quality and ease.
△ Shuke Nayuki Tea House
Based on this idea, in February last year, the first store of Naixue Tea House opened in Shenzhen Overseas Chinese Town.
This shop has more than 200 square meters, in addition to the original leaf tea retail, freshly made pure tea business, you can also enjoy tea, reading, dining, etc. The space is deliberately created to create a quiet and elegant atmosphere, and the furniture is mainly made of wood, supplemented by green plants...... According to Dianping, the unit price of the store is 81 yuan.
Opening a big store and creating a "third space" is what Peng Xin has always insisted on, but the consumption trend is changing, catering consumption is becoming more rational and pragmatic, and Peng Xin hopes to provide customers with high-quality tea in a more cost-effective way.
Under various considerations, she chose to adjust the store type of the tea house. In October last year, the first standard store of Naixue Tea House opened in Shenzhen Haiya Colorful City, and the store business was streamlined into raw leaf tea retail and pure tea, and the price dropped to 5-21 yuan.
Lighter, more flexible, yet still sophisticated.
This is also Peng Xin's consistent attitude, never perfunctory, she enjoys the small beauty brought by the environment, space and other details.
Drawing on the aesthetics of the Song Dynasty, the standard store of Nai Xue Tea House adopts a courtyard-style space design, through a combination of pastel tones such as beige, ivory, and moss green, so that the whole environment is simple without losing temperature. After the removal of the private rooms, the standard store uses a semi-enclosed design to plan different types of seating such as sofas, long tables, and single-backed chairs to provide customers with a relatively private space.
△ Nayuki Tea House standard store
Peng Xin said that the tea house is still being further optimized and adjusted, just like the tea store in the early Naixue, the positioning and products will continue to iterate. However, the more flexible standard store will be the main store type of the tea house to go nationwide.
When many reports mentioned Nayuki Tea House, it was described as a new sub-brand of Nayuki's tea.
Peng Xin didn't see it that way. She believes that if the relationship between the two must be defined, Nai Xue Tea House is more like a sibling brand of Nai Xue's tea than a sub-brand.
"Nayuki's tea served me and my friends 8 years ago, and Nayuki Tea House served me and my friends at 35 years old. Peng Xin explained that Nai Xue Tea House and Nai Xue's tea serve two different consumer groups.
In order to better serve young friends, Nai Xue's tea is also constantly trying new ways of communication, such as last year, Nai Xue proposed "perfume that can be drunk", upgrading eight classic products to "Nai Xue Eight Fragrances".
"Communicating with young people needs to use more interesting language", in Peng Xin's view, it may be difficult for young consumers to understand the charm of tea, and the concept of "perfume" will resonate stronger.
Whether it is Nai Xue Tea House or Nai Xue's tea, in the final analysis, it is still making a big fuss about tea, and in the matter of making tea, Peng Xin has always been extremely serious and devoted.
Since founding Nai Xue's tea in 2015, Peng Xin has insisted on making high-quality tea. In her daily work, she is also keen to find tea and choose tea. "It's a lot of fun to go to the place of origin to find tea, and there is a lot to explore and try. ”
Today, Naixue has raw materials from many tea producing areas such as Chaoshan in Guangdong, Yunnan, Hubei, Sichuan, Fujian, Alishan in Taiwan, etc., and has established exclusive tea raw material production bases in Fenghuangshan, Chaozhou, Jian'ou, Nanping, Fujian and other places.
Peng Xin said with a smile that opening a tea house and selling the tea she likes and the tea she has saved over the years is the old age lifestyle she is looking forward to. But now that the teahouse has been made in advance, I have a lot more things to do.
"If you only listen to the outside world, what else can you do?"
In 2021, Nai Xue's tea will be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and Peng Xin will have an additional identity in addition to the founder of the brand - executive director of a listed company.
After the listing, Peng Xin's daily work has not changed much, and he is still mainly responsible for brands and products, but there is more attention and voices from the outside world.
In the past year, the biggest doubt is that Nai Xue's tea has been released to franchise business.
In July 2023, Naixue officially launched the "Partner Program", but its franchise conditions are considered to be extremely harsh: the store area is limited to 90-170 square meters, the investment amount of a single store starts at 980,000 yuan, and a store needs at least 5 employees.
After more than half a year of letting go of the franchise, Nai Xue handed over the report card of more than 200 franchise stores, and the speed was not fast in the new tea drink track of the crazy volume "10,000 store scale", which was also considered by the outside world to be burdened by the big store model.
Many people don't understand why Peng Xin is obsessed with creating a "third place", and in the face of all kinds of doubts, Peng Xin bluntly said, "If you only listen to the voice of the outside world, how can you do things?"
At the beginning of its establishment, Peng Xin set the tone of Nai Xue - to be a consumer brand with tonality and fashion elements. Peng Xin's romance and delicacy, which belong to female entrepreneurs, also make Nai Xue's bright and brisk "third space" characteristics.
In Peng Xin's values, the speed of opening a store is important, but she hopes that every store can be operated well and customers have a good reputation, which is what she values more.
In fact, from the conception of open franchise to the landing, Peng Xin and the team have been preparing for a long time.
Before opening up to join, Peng Xin noticed that Nai Xue's stores in third- and fourth-tier cities were doing very well. The financial report data is also reflected - in the first half of 2023, the operating profit margin of Naixue's tea stores will be 20.1%, an increase of 9.7% year-on-year. Stores in third- and fourth-tier cities and below performed better, with an operating profit margin of 21.7%.
However, the deeper the store, the more the daily management is beyond the reach.
Peng Xin took his hometown Jingzhou as an example, the local store business is not inferior to the first-tier cities, but if the Naixue Central China branch is allowed to visit the store every day to manage, it is obviously a little inadequate.
"At that time, we considered joining to find partners in the sinking market and run Naixue's stores well, so the strategy we set completely continued the way of direct stores. Peng Xin said.
After the first batch of franchised stores opened, the market feedback was also good, and the monthly turnover of franchised stores in Hulunbuir, Longyan, Shangqiu and other places was as high as 700,000.
Although Peng Xin still insists that Nai Xue does not open a pure takeaway restaurant, this does not mean that she will not judge the situation.
At the end of February this year, Naixue adjusted the franchise policy: the investment budget for a single store starts at 580,000 yuan, and the store area is adjusted from the original 90-170 square meters to 40 square meters.
These changes are partly due to Peng Xin's seeing more and more demand for online ordering and consumption in Naixue.
It can also be confirmed from the data that in 2020, Naixue's revenue from takeaway orders accounted for 31.9% of the total revenue, and this figure reached 43.9% in the first half of 2023.
In the past few years, Nai Xue's tea has also made some adjustments to its stores, such as supplying bakery products from the central factory, increasing coffee business, selling more retail products, reducing kitchen area, reducing labor costs, and improving ping efficiency.
This year, Peng Xin plans to open more "crypto" stores with lower investment costs and an area of about 60-80 square meters.
In Peng Xin's view, the outside world's "criticism is also the voice of advice." She will choose to absorb good advice, but she will not let herself and Nayuki be "trapped" in the outside world's speech, and she is not willing to be coerced by public opinion to move forward.
"To be the world's Nayuki"
Peng Xin has mentioned many times in public speeches that in the future, world-class brands will be born in the tea industry.
But on the road to internationalization, Nai Xue has experienced a lot of twists and turns. In December 2018, Nayuki opened its first overseas store in Singapore, and in the following two years, a total of three stores were opened in Singapore and Japan.
It seems that I got up early in the morning, but I rushed to the late set. Peng Xin bluntly said that going overseas to open a store at that time was very stressful for Nai Xue.
After going to sea, Naixue maintained the domestic tonality, located in a high-end shopping mall, with a store area of about 200 square meters, and also set up baking, freshly made tea, retail and other areas in the store.
"The performance is good, but the cost is too high. Peng Xin lamented that the rent and labor costs in Japan and Singapore are high, and the supply chain is also a major bottleneck.
The supply chain of new tea drinks is not as focused as coffee, and the raw material side involves a large number of fresh fruits, small ingredients, different types of tea, and different brewing methods, so it is a big problem for store staff to just remember the SOPs (standard operating procedures) of each product.
The cost structure is difficult to optimize, and with the impact of the epidemic, Peng Xin finally decided to close overseas stores.
"It's not good, there must be something we didn't do well, we have to turn it off, adjust it and turn it on again. For this decision at that time, Peng Xin was not entangled.
But since then, the standardization of production and the optimization of the cost structure have become things that Peng Xin has always been concerned about. In 2021, Naixue began to build an IT team of more than 200 people, focusing on promoting the transformation of digital systems.
In 2022, Naixue's tea stores in the Guangshen region will launch a "self-developed tea machine", which can automatically configure tea soup, juice and other bases according to orders, liberating store employees from complex SOPs. Today, the self-developed tea machine has covered all Naixue's stores.
In addition, Naixue has also developed automatic self-inspection equipment to reduce the difficulty of staff training, and gradually implemented digital systems such as automatic scheduling system and intelligent ordering system to improve store operation efficiency.
"As you can see from our report data, the automation equipment has reduced labor costs a lot. The remarkable results brought by digitalization are something that Peng Xin has often mentioned to the media in recent years. In her opinion, this has provided a great boost to the development of the brand.
According to the financial report, the average number of clerks in each store dropped from 11.5 in 2021 to 4.1 in the first half of 2023. During the same period, the proportion of Naixue's labor costs decreased from 33.2% in 2021 to 19.6% in the first half of 2023.
This also gave Peng Xin the confidence to go to sea again.
In December 2023, Nai Xue's tea once again opened its first overseas store in Emsphere, a high-end shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand, with an area of nearly 200 square meters on the upper and lower floors of the store, and maintaining the bright and fashionable characteristics of Nai Xue in style.
After more than 3 months of opening, the Nai Xue Thailand store has achieved a single-day sales of more than 300,000 baht. Naixue's overseas stores adhere to direct sales, and its first store in Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries, as well as the United Kingdom, the United States and other European and American countries is in preparation.
△Nayuki's tea Thai shop
After twists and turns and changes, Peng Xin has gradually added a team that has been with him for many years and has been maturing.
In Peng Xin's view, the bottleneck and detour of enterprise development have a lot to do with the cognition of the boss and the core team, "Naixue's core team has been with the company for many years, and everyone's understanding and love for the brand, and the determination to solve problems together are very good." ”
Write at the end
In 2017, Chen Hongbo, the founder of Red Meal.com, interviewed the brand founders Peng Xin and Zhao Lin in the tea headquarters building of Naixue.
On this visit, Peng Xin is as full of entrepreneurial vitality as 7 years ago.
In Peng Xin's view, the new tea drink track is changing too fast, and the founder must always keep paying attention to and thinking about the outside world to understand the new market dynamics and the new needs of consumers. "I'm doing what I love in a good industry, so I'm going to be good even when I'm under pressure. ”
For the future, Peng's heart is very pure and ambitious, and she hopes to bring Chinese tea culture and tea fashion lifestyle to the world.