Producer/Lianshang Network & Search Shop Network
Written/Associate Senior Advisory Board Member Old Knife
Photo/Wen Heyou official WeChat
In 1987, Wen Bin was born in Pozi Street, Changsha, Hunan Province, because his family was poor and his academic performance was poor, wen Bin did not read for several years.
When he was 20 years old, Wen Bin was doing sales in a car 4S shop, his life was boring, and he drank on skewers every day after work. Later, the girlfriend thought that his conditions were not good enough and broke up with him, which caused him a lot of stimulation.
In 2010, 23-year-old Wen bin took the 5,000 yuan he had saved to set up a roadside stall at the Pozi Street Night Market. The taste is good, the snacks are good and cheap, plus he is polite and down-to-earth, and the business is good.
In 2011, Wen Bin opened a WenHeYou Old Changsha Fried Society in Taiping Street, Changsha, announcing the birth of the Wenheyou brand, when the fried shop was less than 10 square meters, but the business was very good, and it made a net profit of 500,000 yuan a year.
After seeing the huge prospects of snacks, Wen Bin decided to build Wen Heyou into a snack comprehensive mall, so there is today's super Wen He You model.
01
What is the essence of Wen Heyou?
In Changsha, Wen Heyou looks more like a city museum: Xiaoluo stinky tofu, Yantian intestine powder, Wenji Yixin chicken, Dalilai pork steak, Deng Jia Chuanwen pastry, Donggua Mountain Meat Sausage... Bring together small shops or brands that are quite popular all over the country.
To sum up in one sentence, Wen Heyou is a characteristic food culture street decorated in the style of the city, and 80% of the shops are catering, but they can not only eat and drink.
▲ Changsha Wen and Friends
Changsha Wenheyou not only restores the community of old Changsha in the 1980s, but also has a retro discotheque, photo studio, barbershop, foot soaking city, independent bookstore, and even the Changsha Civil Affairs Bureau has also set up a marriage registration office inside.
Wen Heyou's various details are done beyond the imagination of ordinary people: clothes hanging outside the balcony, "Huan Zhu Gege" on the TV, the radio with previous news, clothes hanging in the closet, all the daily necessities in the private room in the form of residents, and even lying down on the bed, completely creating the appearance of a community where people live.
Fashion is wrapped in retro, retro is permeated with pyrotechnics, and pyrotechnics steam up a sense of fashion.
Of course, such a set also creates a space for Internet celebrities to take countless punch cards and take photos: on the Little Red Book, Wen Heyou punch card strategy notes tens of thousands. Changsha Wenheyou's exposure in the "two micro and one shake self-media" has accumulated more than 6 billion times, and Wen heyou claims that he has never invested in the hard and wide, and many stars even "spontaneously" "spoke" for Wen heyou.
When it was just built, Jay Chou sent ins to praise that this is an interesting place, Hunan Satellite TV's variety show "Brother Full of Vitality" the first stop site selection Wen Heyou, "Lang Sister" Rong Zu'er appeared in Wen Heyou on May Day this year, Zhang Yixing MV filmed in Wen Heyou's "Forever Street"...
However, Wen Heyou is still essentially a "catering" platform. If you put aside the unique decoration and retro style, Wen Heyou wants to continue to win consumers, and still has to return to the essence of catering "delicious".
02
Get out of the embarrassment of Changsha
On August 13, Wenheyou Crayfish Co., Ltd. announced the completion of the B round of financing, the investment lineup is luxurious, bringing together the head VC, PE and industrial capital including Sequoia China, IDG Capital, Warburg Pincus Investment, Country Garden Venture Capital, GIC, Yikai Fund, etc. Among them, Ekay Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Wen Heyou in this transaction. Analysts believe that this round of valuation may exceed 10 billion yuan. As early as February 2020, Wen Heyou completed an exclusive Series A strategic financing of nearly RMB 100 million, invested by Gahua Capital. It is said that Wen Heyou is expected to go public in Hong Kong as soon as 2024.
In 2019, Wenheyou announced that within 5 years, it will open 10 super Wenheyou in Beijing, Shanghai, Los Angeles and other first-tier cities at home and abroad to complete its layout of "Disney in the catering industry".
In July 2020, Guangzhou Wenheyou, which cost 200 million yuan to build, opened. The number 3,000 tables, with an average queue of 4 hours, set a record for the highest queue in the catering industry.
▲Guangzhou Wenheyou
But in only half a year, along with controversies such as "food in general", "insincerity of decoration" and "cannot represent Guangzhou culture", local merchants withdrew, the 3rd floor was closed, the door was deserted, and the former traffic champion was now standing alone in the Guangzhou CBD.
In the first half of 2021, Wen Heyou opened near the Luohu East Gate Pedestrian Street in Shenzhen, and it is rumored that on the opening day, the number of people queuing for numbers reached 50,000 people, and the queue lasted 8 hours.
▲Shenzhen Wenheyou queued up on the opening day
However, soon after the opening of Shenzhen Wenheyou, it encountered a decline in passenger flow, poor transaction volume, and the withdrawal of some merchants.
Whether it is Guangdong or Shenzhen, after Wen Heyou walked out of Changsha, what happened to him, why did the traffic decline, and the reputation was also very general? The author thinks that an analysis from the following aspects can be seen:
First, as mentioned above, Wen Heyou is still essentially a catering and retail enterprise. The essence of catering is to do a good "taste", or to have a certain explosive product (such as Yangzhou fried rice or Peking duck). For Wen Heyou, the main category of catering is Changsha snacks, such as crayfish, lard bibimbap, sugar oil and so on. These snacks, in the eyes of Hunan people, the taste is acceptable, but if you go out of Hunan, how high the acceptance of Guangzhou and Shenzhen people can be, you have to play a question mark.
From the appearance of Wen Heyou, what he is best at is the creation of retro scenes, but if you want to make it a special dish, it is really difficult for it.
Second, Wen heyou's location is often in large shopping malls, which naturally have a high passenger flow. The other side of the problem is that the rental cost is high. Compare the rental costs of selling bags and leather goods, cosmetics, and even luxury goods, and how can a snack seller afford it?
According to reports, Guangzhou Wenhe Youxuan is located in the CBD area of the city center, adjacent to The Five Star Shopping Mall Taikoo Hui, which gathers the world's famous luxury goods and well-known catering brands. Although the location of Shenzhen Wenheyou is located in the old business district of Dongmen Old Street, not adjacent to Hermès, the Luohu District where it is located has always been Shenzhen's well-deserved CBD.
▲Shenzhen Wenheyou
Third, the stability of passenger flow has become a big challenge. If there is no ultimate explosive product, and the creative output cannot be continuously followed (the cultural scene innovation is one-time, and it is very lacking in the later content innovation and cultural output innovation), its passenger flow acquisition is basically one-time.
After the consumer has experienced it once, there is no new incentive for users to repurchase.
03
What else does Wen Heyou need?
It must be admitted that Wen Heyou's creativity for the catering platform is very remarkable. Some articles accuse Wen Heyou of retro as a kind of "reversal of history", and the author thinks that such a statement is somewhat exaggerated.
If there is only one Wenheyou in the country, there will always be a lot of fresh customers coming to punch in and experience a corner of the street market in the 70s and 80s. Wen Heyou seized on this demand for nostalgia and grafted it into business, becoming a new species of business with a difference.
However, in the article "Starbucks is "Encircled and Suppressed"" in response to how the domestic coffee circuit continues to innovate, the idea is by no means a one-time, for consumers, it is easy to aesthetic fatigue for new things, so it is necessary to constantly produce new ideas, and continue to output a variety of creative products.
For Wen Heyou, the different scene creativity is only the first step to attracting customer flow, maintaining stable operation and achieving an acceptable breakeven, Wen Heyou needs to do a lot more:
First, delicious is the most important hardcore. If the essence of Wen Heyou is still catering, then the dish is the most important hardcore. Explosive products, and explosive dishes that are suitable for different local characteristics, are likely to continue to attract crowds of people. After all, for foodies, it's not just about seeing a scene.
Second, continuous creative output and cultural output. Wen Heyou itself has been labeled as traditional culture, and in the later stage of operation, it is necessary to continue to be creative around this label and always maintain a sense of freshness.
For example, there are more about the output of cultural content, the performance of old stars, the presentation of some artistic activities, the presentation of works of art, the salon sharing of traffic-oriented cultural celebrities, and so on.
Third, young marketing methods. Compared with the Internet celebrity brand Chayan Yuese, which also comes from Changsha, Wen Heyou is still a bit short of marketing and using for young people. In particular, Wenheyou needs to build its own private domain traffic pool, create a matrix of community marketing and fan marketing, form interactive marketing, and improve the participation of young people and the stickiness with the brand.
Fourth, the scene needs to be combined with regional characteristics. The old scenery of Changsha in the 1980s is certainly different from Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Therefore, for Wen Heyou's new store, the innovation of the scene needs to spend more effort and in-depth study of the local traditional culture. Every store is different, and that requires great wisdom.
Fifth, diversified business extensions. As mentioned earlier, Wenheyou needs to boost sales to balance higher rental costs. In addition to snack catering, cultural platforms such as Wenheyou can completely create more cultural and creative products. From another point of view, Wenheyou can gradually get rid of the single catering positioning and cross the border to cultural and creative souvenirs and daily necessities.