Image source: Laifen's official Weibo
Written by Lai Hsien-ki
Editor/ Li Wenjie
排版/ Annalee
When major brands began to rush to prepare for 618, high-speed hair dryer brands were eyeing Mother's Day and 520 early. Among them, Feike and Laifen have launched Mother's Day limited gift bags and 520 "Because of Love" gift boxes.
From the 599 yuan LF03 to the 399 yuan SE, and then to the 199 yuan SE Lite, Laifen has become the catfish that stirs the high-speed hair dryer industry again and again. Recently, Laifen has made frequent moves, first releasing electric tooth refreshers and high-frequency marketing, and then successively developing conferences in Southeast Asia, and has launched gift boxes many times.
At the beginning of the market, Laifen was once closely bound to the label of "Dyson replacement", although later Laifen wanted to get rid of this label many times, saying that "not Dyson replacement" was still often placed in this position.
But judging from the data, if Lefen is targeting Dyson, the market it has seized is actually more of the small and medium-sized brands in the past. After all, according to Aowei cloud network data and Jiuqian Zhongtai data, in the high-speed hair dryer market in 2022 and the second quarter of 2023, Dyson still occupies the majority of the market share, and Leifen is second only to Dyson. Among them, in the second quarter of 2023, Dyson's online market share remained almost unchanged, while the number of hair dryer brands decreased by 198.
However, in the invisible corner, some Huaqiangbei Dyson imitation cards are constantly eating away at the cake that Laifen is targeting. On social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo and short video platforms such as Douyin, as long as you type in "Dyson Pingti", you can see the same Dyson hair dryer evaluation and share notes as low as tens of yuan to three or four hundred yuan. In the comment area, countless people secretly bought a flat replacement and sighed "save a billion".
Whether it is to continue to lower the price or enter the electric toothbrush track, the pressure of Leifen is also visible to the naked eye.
all want to be a "Dyson replacement", and Laifen relies on marketing to get out of the circle
In January 2021, the high-speed hair dryer Leifen LF01 priced at 599 yuan was on sale, and only 3 units were sold in a month; By December 2021, Laifen's monthly sales were only 7 million yuan. According to the data released by Laifen, in 2022, the total annual revenue of Laifen will reach 1.567 billion yuan, and in 2023, Laifen's sales will exceed 3 billion yuan.
Such data is enough to prove that Leifen is a dark horse in the high-speed hair dryer track.
If you want to trace the rise of the high-speed hair dryer track, Dyson is the "originator" that cannot be avoided. In 2016, Dyson imported high-speed hair dryer products priced at 3,000 yuan into China. The price is ten times higher than that of ordinary hair dryers, or even 30 times higher, but it has quickly become a popular product by virtue of its brand appeal, as well as the advantages of low noise, fast drying speed, and no hair injury.
As a result, domestic small household appliance brands, especially hair dryer brands, have set off a wave of "Dyson replacement". Since 2017, many domestic high-speed hair dryer brands have appeared, and many home appliance brands have also set foot in the high-speed hair dryer track, such as Dreame Technology released a high-speed hair dryer in 2019, and the Shaoguang Pro product equipped with a high-speed motor costs 1,000 yuan; Another example is the straightforward release of high-speed hair dryer HL9 in the same year, priced at 1299 yuan; There is also VGO, which was established in 2017......
However, it is really known as the "Dyson replacement" that is not launched until 2021.
One of the big reasons is the price. Lefen's first product is priced at 599 yuan, which is not only one-fifth of the price of Dyson, but also much lower than other brands.
But Laifen's ability to quickly get out of the circle is inseparable from its marketing strategy.
36 Krypton reported that in 2021, Laifen cut the content of Ye Hongxin, the founder of Laifen, into a slice advertisement at the first product launch conference, and put a large number of them on Douyin and Station B, and spent tens of millions of yuan on the information flow alone, while Laifen's GMV in 2021 was only 100 million yuan.
Image source: Laifen official website
From the end of 2021 to the beginning of 2022, Laifen has a number of advertising videos on station B that have been played millions of times.
In 2022, Laifen will build a content team of 50 people, output to platforms such as Bilibili, Douyin, Zhihu, and Xiaohongshu, and launch multiple live broadcast rooms. Among them, the video with the highest data in Lefen's self-made video is called "Straight Men's Gift Guide", which introduces Laifen's selling points such as "110,000 rpm high-speed brushless motor" and "200 million negative ions", which has been played more than 8 million times.
So much so that Ye Hongxin once said, "Our content creators are salesmen."
In addition, Leifen has not neglected offline advertising, in office buildings and elevator halls, you may have seen or heard Leifen's "really Lafen" or "celebrities are blown" brainwashing advertising slogans.
It is especially worth mentioning that in 2022, a short video titled "Why is it not big to hang Dyson's hair dryer" will be played more than 100 million on Douyin, and it will also directly increase the sales of Laifen by 60 million. In this video, Wang Cen, a former partner of Red Shirt Capital, talks to Ye Hongxin, and when Wang Cen asks Laifen, "Which of you surpasses the competition?" At the time, Ye Hongxin once bluntly said that Laifen products surpassed Dyson in an all-round way - smaller sound, larger air volume, and smaller volume.
At that time, whether it was the promotion on major social media or the evaluation on short videos, "Dyson Pingti" once became a bundled label for Leifen, as long as you search for "Dyson Pingti", it is not difficult to see Laifen's name.
However, after the surge in sales, it seems that Leifen also has the idea of getting rid of this label. Regarding the statement of "Dyson replacement", Ye Hongxin once said vaguely at the press conference, "There are many users who don't know us very well, and when they see our pricing, they habitually portray us as a certain replacement, and do you have a performance experience that exceeds the replacement of the standard?" ”
Is it easier or more dangerous to seize the market by relying on high imitation?
Judging from market data, Laifen has quickly become a giant second only to Dyson in the domestic market, far surpassing old brands such as Panasonic, Feike, and Kangfu. And on the track of "Dyson Flat", there are also many opponents that are invisible to Leifen.
On Xiaohongshu, search for "Dyson Flat", in addition to seeing brands such as Laifen, you can often see many promotional notes issued by Dyson high-imitation manufacturers or white-label manufacturers produced in Huaqiangbei, which are often marked with "Dyson Flat" and similar to Dyson from shape to packaging, but the price often does not exceed 100 yuan. Zinc scale noticed that some merchants sold more than 6,000 sales, and tens of thousands of people added purchases.
Not only that, on short video platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, there are a large number of evaluation notes about Huaqiangbei Dyson, and even many netizens have bought both Dyson and high imitations for comparison. On platforms such as Pinduoduo, many products named "Huaqiang North Dyson" have sold more than two million pieces.
About Huaqiang North Dyson reviews and related products
If a few years ago, urban beauties were still eager to have a Dyson per person, now many netizens secretly buy a replacement and sigh "save a billion".
With lower prices and Dyson's "face", these manufacturers are not only soaring in sales, but also encroaching on the market from all corners. After all, for consumers who are increasingly emphasizing cost performance, 599 yuan is also worth waiting, and less than 100 yuan "what else do you need a bicycle".
In fact, the production of a high-imitation Dyson, the cost is only 240 yuan, but it can be as large as the packaging, as small as the warranty card, activation code sticker, there are a lot of things, to fake the real. And the risk behind this is not small, on August 1, 2022, the Huangpu District Procuratorate indicted a related case.
Earlier, after a large number of investigations, the police dispatched 150 police officers to Dongguan, Shenzhen and other six cities, and smashed a total of 2 counterfeiting dens and 5 counterfeiting dens. More than 5,000 counterfeit "Dyson" brand hair dryers were seized at the scene alone, as well as tens of thousands of spare parts, and more than 70 people were still working on the assembly line at that time. According to preliminary estimates, the value of the counterfeiting case reached more than 20 million yuan.
What's more, although the price of these three-no manufacturers is "really fragrant", the quality is often not guaranteed. According to previous media reports, in the major cross-provincial counterfeiting case cracked by the Yancheng police, the quality of counterfeit Dyson products is not up to standard, and the product repair rate is as high as 40%, and retail outlets often receive complaints from buyers.
However, it can be seen that Laifen is obviously not willing to lose the sinking market. After launching the SE priced at 399 yuan, Laifen launched a new hair dryer with a model of "SE Lite" this year, priced at 199 yuan. If a hair dryer of six or seven hundred yuan is still difficult to impress budget-conscious consumers, then the price of 199 yuan may be enough to shake the sinking market.
Entering the electric toothbrush, Laifen wants to copy the "myth"
"The company's competitors at each stage are different, when we first launched, the competitor must be Dyson, because we snatched some Dyson users, but after a little bit of it, we may seem to fight with Xiaomi, but Xiaomi is doing ecological chain, it is a concept of resource integration, who has a motor, who has technology, who has a factory, integrated to do, Xiaomi ecological chain has so many products, the success or failure of a product has little impact on them." In a previous interview with the Economic Observer, Ye Hongxin said that Laifen's attention is more concentrated, and the company must win on one product.
And since last year, Laifen seems to have bigger ambitions.
An obvious signal is that in October last year, Laifen's first electric toothbrush was launched, priced at 299 yuan, 399 yuan and 499 yuan respectively. Last year's Double 11, Laifen's electric toothbrush sales exceeded 135,000 pieces, of which the main shipment was the 299 yuan light-sensitive white version. Zinc scale noticed that in Laifen's official flagship store, its electric toothbrush priced at 299 yuan has become the first place on the hot sales list of electric toothbrushes, with sales exceeding 200,000.
Image source: Laifen official website
It is worth mentioning that Laifen seems to want to copy the out-of-the-circle strategy of high-speed hair dryers, and has also carried out carpet marketing. According to 36kr reports, before the press conference, many digital bloggers on Weibo began to forward the hashtag "Laifen brings half of the digital circle together", and also asked Luo Yonghao to record a video congratulating the press conference. After the press conference, Laifen put a lot of marketing content on Weibo, Douyin, Bilibili and Xiaohongshu, and many users complained that Laifen's marketing was "overwhelming".
In fact, the electric toothbrush market is already a red ocean, and brands targeting the low, medium and high-end markets are not uncommon. As mentioned above, Ye Hongxin once compared Laifen with the Xiaomi ecological chain, and admitted that when the company has only one product, "the price paid is very large." ”
It is not difficult to imagine that perhaps Laifen will continue to bet on the small household appliance track in the future, but whether it can replicate the myth again will take a little time and some luck.