Tsutaya Bookstore is coming to Beijing.
At 10 o'clock in the morning of April 20th, the two new stores in Hall B of THE BOX opened for trial opening almost at the same time, and Beijing migrant workers, who have never been impatient, came to line up early in the morning. Half of it is lined up in front of BF's famous fast fashion brand one moment, while the other half in front of Tsutaya Bookstore looks more relaxed.
After all, unlike the next door where you can get in, Tsutaya requires an appointment. Only by showing the free tickets grabbed in advance on the mini program, the security guard in a suit and leather shoes at the door will invite you in with a standard gesture.
Source: Hydrogen Commercial Photo
According to the official mini program of Tsutaya Bookstore, as of 9 o'clock this morning, all the reserved tickets for the day have been snatched up, and the ticket time slot for the next day is only after 4 pm.
Although Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xi'an and other places have opened Tsutaya bookstores early, this one in Beijing is not the same. As the first TSUTAYA BOOKSTORE store in Chinese mainland, THE BOX is not an independent store, but a shopping mall, with more SHARE LOUNGE on the third floor than other stores.
In Tsutaya's own words, this shared space is dedicated to migrant workers, "hoping to be the most comfortable and inspiring place for creative workers."
After walking around, I realized why Tsutaya Bookstore is the bookstore that is "the best at making money for workers".
To be honest, as a bookstore, Tsutaya's books don't make people have much desire to buy.
It's not that the book is bad. The entire store spans three floors of the mall, and the transitional staircase is surrounded by CDs and Japanese magazines, and the whole store style presents a warm and trendy style. The immersive atmosphere of selling books is good, and the variety of Japanese magazines has only been seen in the unboxing videos of overseas bloggers, and a large number of foreign books, from popular to niche comic books, and anime manuscripts.
Source: Hydrogen Commercial Photo
The service attitude of the staff also follows the Japanese style, focusing on bowing at any time and smiling sideways to ask if you need help.
The reason why people don't want to buy is related to the fact that the new store has just opened and the price problem.
Since it is currently only in soft operation, the store's most popular Japanese magazines, anime books, and manuscripts are all in plastic sheets, so you can't flip through them at will. Although there is a small screen prompt next to it, if you see a book of interest, you can ask the staff to open it, but most of the customers in the store who are restrained just pick it up and put it down - they have not yet had the courage to open it, and they were persuaded to quit by the price tag first.
Pick up a copy of Hayao Miyazaki's anime, the price starts at 300 yuan, and most of the magazines are around sixty or seventy yuan. According to the feedback of netizens who have purchased it, there are still many missing pages in comic books due to content review, which affects the reading experience.
I don't know if it's because the backlog of the warehouse is too long or because of the newly opened decoration problem, and some books still have dust on them.
In addition, there are not many seats in the store, except for the café on the first floor and the shared space on the third floor, and there is a reminder that "it is forbidden to sit on the floor" in the precautions that are played on the wall, so it is difficult to have sufficient conditions for the matter of selecting books and selecting books, which requires sitting down and tasting slowly, as is the case in the usual bookstores.
Source: Hydrogen Commercial Photo
But at Tsutaya Shogun, it doesn't matter so much whether the book sells well or not. Because there are no books in the area where people are always the most.
Take Tsutaya Coffee, for example. Walking around the checkout area on the second and third floors, I found that the number of people queuing up to buy books was far less than the people who bought coffee on the first floor.
Perhaps the most affordable thing in this shop is coffee.
Source: Hydrogen Commercial Photo
Secondly, there is also a long queue for the shared space on the third floor, which attracts the most attention. 56 yuan an hour, there are snacks, drinks and even drinks (a little more expensive 78 yuan per hour) of the "part-time worker study room", not only can have a single compartment to hold a meeting, at any time to welcome Party A's revision of the opinions of the visit, but also provide a variety of chargers, wifi power supply.
According to Tsutaya's own description, it is to create a "comfortable and convenient office", and even the picture at the door is a video conference, and the whole heart is not moved to work first.
Coupled with the sunset of Jintai across the road and the International Trade Building across the street, there is a sense of hardship for the business elite.
Source: Hydrogen commercial photography is capped at 188 yuan a day, and you can stay from 10 o'clock in the morning to 10 o'clock in the evening. I really didn't expect to do it at home, and I came to the bookstore to achieve morning C and evening A. Drink a cup of coffee in the morning sunshine to start the overtime weekend, work until the evening nervous breakdown, and directly and seamlessly buy drunk on the spot. The snacks such as self-service Japanese biscuits during the day were automatically served with snacks, and were named "the most cost-effective place in Tsutaya Bookstore" by netizens.
Source: Xiaohongshu @ Xiaomao's mother loves life 👶
Aside from coffee and shared spaces, the most crowded areas in the Tsutaya bookstore are the anime perimeter on the second floor and the grocery area on the third floor. From anime peripherals to stationery to jellycat, from dishes and chopsticks to jewelry and socks, to cooperative niche designer brands, non-books occupy almost more area than the area of selling books.
"It's equivalent to having a Ghibli store in Beijing", a large number of Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai albums and the surrounding area are surrounded by several circles, and it seems that the price has become less important at this time.
The 70 yuan pair of Miyazaki poker was robbed to only two pairs, I picked it up and looked at it for a moment only to find that it was exactly the same as the 36 yuan equivalent to the deity that a friend bought for me from Japan; an anime co-branded card sleeve costs 228 yuan, and there are not many left; the texture of the super plastic "Howl's Moving Castle" Lucifer pendant sells for 69 yuan, and a thin stack of "Witch Courier Service" sticky notes sell for 50 yuan.
I bought a 39 yuan acrylic pendant small blind bag of "The Governess", but after opening it, I found that it was so thin that I was almost blown away by a gust of wind when I crossed the road.
Source: Hydrogen Commercial Photo
The price of groceries is not to be outdone, a night market can win 20 storage bags for 328 yuan, scented candles for 880 yuan, a greeting card for 32 yuan, a small pack of soap paper for 42 yuan...... I can even hear the sincere questions of the people next to me, "I wonder whether it is the yen price or the yuan price".
But it doesn't prevent everyone from rushing like crazy, after all, it's not necessarily genuine when you go out.
Source: Hydrogen Commercial Photo
Knowing that the price is a little inflated, there will still be people who will place an order without hesitation.
That's the genius of Tsutaya Bookstore – it can poke you in the sore spot. Founded in 1983, Takeshi Kitano's favorite bookstore never wanted to specialize in selling books from the beginning, and even its founder, Muneaki Masuda, publicly stated, "The problem with traditional bookstores is that they sell books." ”
According to statistics, 374 bookstores in Japan face closure every year. In such an environment, Tsutaya Bookstore not only opened nearly 2,000 stores, but also surpassed the turnover of large Japanese bookstores such as Kinokuniya and Junkudo, earning more than 20 billion yuan a year.
What does Tsutaya Bookstore do to make money?
When Masuda Muneaki went to the bank to borrow money to open Tsutaya Bookstore, his first sentence was not to state how his bookstore would sell books, but to write, "I want to be a lifestyle proposal place." I have to admit that Tsutaya's mental state is quite ahead of the current emerging Internet celebrity bookstores, and at a time when everyone was still popular in Xinhua Bookstore to sit on the floor and read romance novels, Masuda Muneaki had already seen that "selling lifestyle" was the most profitable business behind selling books.
Rather than selling everything, Tsutaya Shoten defines it as "a store that recommends lifestyle to everyone", as Masuda describes it. For example, instead of selling a book for 1,000 yen to 5,000 people who were affected by the book's marketing, Tsutaya would rather sell a book for 5,000,000 yen to someone who is already addicted to the lifestyle.
That's why at Tsutaya Bookstore, it's all about "people looking for people", not "people looking for goods".
Nowadays, bookstores at home and abroad are not easy to do. According to the 2020-2021 China Physical Bookstore Industry Report, a total of 1,573 bookstores closed in 2020, more than three times the number of closures in 2019. Nowadays, almost all bookstores have learned from the complex business model of Tsutaya Bookstore, selling not only books, but also coffee and miscellaneous goods.
But the difference is that the new latecomers are still essentially selling books, while Tsutaya Shoten does not make money by selling books at all.
Four years ago, the revenue of paper book stores in Japan was 6.2 billion US dollars, of which Tsutaya Shoten's parent company CCC (Culture Convenience Club) contributed more than 1.2 billion US dollars, reaching as much as 20% of the overall revenue. But this profit is not based on Tsutaya Bookstore's books, but from other grocery stores under Tsutaya's umbrella that sell and rent books.
According to statistics, only 20% of Tsutaya Bookstore's profits come from the sale of books and audio-visual products, and the remaining 80% is based on the franchise business that will be discussed later.
Source: Winshang.com
Compared with stores such as Sisyphean Bookstore and Zhongshuge, whose core strength is still selling books, Tsutaya Bookstore's efforts are completely different. Although Zhongshuge also has coffee, catering and cultural and creative products, the overall share is only 10%-20%, Sisyphus accounts for 80% of the entire store area of books, 15% of coffee, and only 5% of groceries.
Although relevant sources have also revealed that the profits of non-book goods are better than books, the sales of English original books and design books still account for 80% of Pageone's total revenue.
But in the world of Tsutaya Bookstore, books are only used as a vehicle to assist in the sale of lifestyles.
It is also different from Yanji, which is also not aimed at selling books, although the proportion of Yanji's book sales has also dropped to 20%, but the disadvantages of taking photos and punching cards and being too Internet celebrity are also more obvious. According to the feedback of many netizens, Yanji is a bookstore, the book walls in the store are filled with fake book shells, and the book area and rest area are also far away.
Source: Xiaohongshu @ Chen Lin &@西红柿炒番茄
Although Tsutaya Bookstore is highly discussed on social platforms and is also defined as an "Internet celebrity bookstore", it has a lot of genuine resources such as domestic scarce Japanese magazines and foreign language anime books similar to Pageone, and it is a natural dividend.
This also led to a dramatic scene - Xi'an Tsutaya Bookstore took over the store that Yanji had withdrawn again, and it had not even been renovated on a large scale, and it was still operating very well.
Bookstores don't rely on selling books, so how can they make money?
Tsutaya plays a game where everyone has money to earn, likes to work with non-private brands, and makes money in a similar way to earning franchisees' consulting fees.
As a lifestyle brand, CCC is also good at producing and selling itself. Tsutaya has a number of "unknown (designer) brands", such as lifestyle goods brands Lelierre and Necott Store, skincare brands Cu apothecary, stationery brands Black Bear and Hedera, and mobile accessories brand IROMEKI.
Unlike the OEM sales of most online celebrity bookstores, Tsutaya's own brand has a complete industrial chain from product development to production, to transportation, marketing, and sales. After all, the parent company's business is diverse and extensive – the subsidiary CCC Frontier Design is usually engaged in product design, and CCC Froniter specializes in product development, sales and operations. Without even the need for creative assistance, Tsutaya was able to secure an unobstructed assembly line for production.
With experience in creating these small brands, Tsutaya understands the mindset of niche designers and advises brands that have content and time but don't know how to open a store.
For example, on the third floor of the Tsutaya bookstore in Beijing, a large number of niche designer brand groceries appeared, such as the jewelry brand cucie in the picture, which was founded in 2018, and detailed brand introductions will be provided next to the jewelry. What do you think this brand has to do with bookstores? It doesn't matter, the important thing is that it has the faint taste of Tsutaya Bookstore's lifestyle.
Source: Hydrogen Commercial Photo
The money that Tsutaya earns is neither the venue fee nor the payment for the goods, but the consulting fee in the form of a commission. Masuda himself said, "We are a planning company, and we need to keep challenging ourselves so that franchisees are willing to pay for projects." ”
After all, CCC, the parent company behind Tsutaya Bookstore, has accumulated a lot of data through special library cards and other means. Not only does it have a powerful ordering system, but it also plays big data clearly.
The 124 companies under the CCC are dedicated to the database. In 2003, before the point system became popular, Tsutaya began to popularize a point card called the T-CARD as an alternative to the library card. This T-CARD can directly connect Tsutaya to major department stores, and can be used for consumption at 168 companies in Japan, including gas stations, and 640,000 stores such as Lawson and KFC.
MORE THAN 70 MILLION PEOPLE IN JAPAN CURRENTLY HAVE A TSUTAYA T-CARD, MORE THAN HALF OF THE COUNTRY'S TOTAL POPULATION, AND IT'S STILL RISING. 80% of cardholders are between the ages of 20 and 30, making them the group with the most spending power.
Because of this, Tsutaya is able to directly track the consumption behavior of more than half of the Japanese people, and then plan the lifestyle type of each store.
For example, in 2012, it was listed as one of the "20 most beautiful bookstores in the world" by the New York entertainment news website flavorwire.com "Tsutaya Bookstore in Japan", which has become one of the local attractions. Due to the large number of elderly people around, the overall layout of the store is comfortable and natural, and there are plenty of places to rest.
Source: Xiaohongshu @ Digital Nomad Tracy In areas where travel is more popular, there are often travel experts working part-time next to the travel books at Tsutaya Bookstore, or a reporter who has published more than 20 travel guides to discuss the possibility of this kind of lifestyle with you, and next to food books, there will even invite the former editor-in-chief of a women's magazine of a major publishing house to sit down. At Tsutaya Bookstore, they all share a common identity - "lifestyle proposals". However, this model is not very popular in China, because local points-based membership cards such as Taobao 88 membership have occupied the market, and the T-CARD loyalty card system does not play a big role, and can only rely on other advantages such as animation IP.
Source: Hydrogen Commercial Photo
To put it bluntly, the reason why Tsutaya can stand out and even lead the trend in the overall environment of the bookstore is essentially because people don't make a living by selling books. It's not so much a bookstore as a consulting company in a bookstore shell.
It relies on grasping the information cocoon and taking advantage of it in a targeted manner. Accurately snipe potential customers in Japan and other places, carry forward IP licensing in China, eat some animation dividends, and then put on the "marketing lifestyle" This petty bourgeoisie that is difficult for workers to refuse.
Take the new store of THE BOX in Beijing as an example, the geographical location and in-store layout also grasp the pain points of Guomao workers. First queue up on the first floor to buy a cup of coffee, then go up to the second floor to experience the emerging lifestyle, buy some "can't buy out of this door" peripherals, if you need to work overtime suddenly, go straight to the shared lounge on the third floor, spend 56 yuan to eat and drink on the spot to turn on the computer.
Don't worry about the bookstore closing too early, after all, the people's Tsutaya bookstore itself has emphasized that the only shared space on the third floor in Chinese mainland is tailor-made for migrant workers, and it does not close until ten o'clock in the evening.
Internet celebrity bookstores are crowded, and when they walk in, they are selling coffee and doing handicrafts, and there are fewer and fewer people who actually buy books. My friend Xiao Xie told me that if I really want to buy books, I will give priority to the used book library of Beijing Normal University on the Internet or near my home.
I will also go to the Internet celebrity bookstore. Shopping is the main reason, and the occasional consumption - "To tell you the truth, Sisyphean coffee is quite to my liking, and it is very photogenic".
编辑 | 橘总作者 | 加号设计 | 胖兔开篇图源 | 小红书@虾饺焦辣辣封面图源 | 氢商业自摄