Text | Gravel Business Review, author | Diego
Shenzhen Wenheyou opened, and the queue reached more than 40,000, blocking a whole street. In today's restaurant industry, such a grand situation has not been seen for many years.
Prior to this, Wen Heyou's name had been popular in Changsha for many years, but outside changsha, not many people knew about it. Changsha Wenheyou is a theme park-like food city, although it is still a restaurant street in essence, but because it recreates the street scene of the old Changsha in the 1980s, it has created its own unique competitiveness. In the three years since its opening, it has received 20,000 customers every day and an average queue time of more than 3 hours, becoming a new landmark in Changsha.
From a food stall 10 years ago to a store that can top the income of 50 Haidilao, what did Wen Heyou do right? Can such a "right" be copied? Does it really have the potential to become, as it claims, a company like Disney?
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01 From food stalls to cultural shops
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The story of Wen Heyou originated from Pozi Street in Changsha 10 years ago. This is a thousand-year-old street, with many commercial names since ancient times, and now it is a must-visit snack and trend street for young people in Changsha.
Wen Bin, the founder of Wen Heyou, opened the first roadside stall here, mainly promoting fried pork ribs. From the beginning, he showed a superior brand awareness, a total of 5,000 yuan of initial funds, the sign sign spent 1,000 yuan. Wen Heyou's "sharp ribs" have gradually become a popular snack, and more and more people are queuing up.
Following the vine of "Old Changsha", Wen Bin quickly found out the tastes of the locals in terms of snacks. Along with the explosive strategy, fried stinky tofu, sausage, and crayfish have been launched. Starting with the crayfish, the name "Wen Heyou" gradually became popular and embarked on the path of the dining matrix. According to 2018 data, the annual sales of a 1,400-square-meter lobster restaurant can exceed 100 million yuan.
Throughout Wen Heyou's catering content, it is only Changsha's street food, but from the perspective of profit, snacks are actually the most profitable categories in catering, and the predecessors of many catering brands are snack stalls.
The origin of snacks determines that catering is the gene of "Wen heyou". For any enterprise, the founder's successful first entity often determines the mode and path of the company's future development.
Unlike the owners of ordinary food stalls, Wen Bin also took a step forward, grafting the marketing gimmick of "city culture" to snacks, adding cultural value to the brand. The point of "city culture" is quite accurate, which is not only in line with the fireworks taste of snacks, but also caters to the life feelings of consumers.
When selling crayfish, Wen Bin said: "I am not selling crayfish, I am selling culture." He believes that "delicious" is an emotion, not only in the sense of taste, but also in the five senses to impress the heart, in order to form an emotion. "Only one sense is guaranteed, and that sense is not the only one that can bring emotions."
The creation of Super Wen and Friends follows the idea of "five senses". It's not the food that you eat, it's the atmosphere.
In 2018, Super Wenheyou was born in Changsha Hisense Plaza, known as a "new species" in the catering industry. With a total of seven floors and an area of more than 20,000 square meters, the streetscape of the old Changsha in the 1980s was moved in.
The ice rinks, pig farms, video halls, and foot-washing cities in the childhood memories of the 80s and 90s were restored one by one, the mottled walls, the silk floral shirts hanging outside the balcony, the red pair of enamel jars... Many old objects are collected from the folk. The strong sense of age hits the nostalgia complex of consumers.
A snack street consisting of 20 local snack bars in Changsha on the third floor of Super Wen He You is named "Forever Street", which is the same name as one of the oldest streets in Changsha; customers can even experience fishing for crayfish in a crayfish farming pond; Wen He You has also set up an art museum to do 4 to 6 local cultural exhibitions every year...
All kinds of business layouts seem to indicate Wen Heyou's determination to enter the cultural industry. But is what it does really cultural?
02 Sell food or culture? - Maybe not
Wen Heyou's identity in "Super Wen Heyou" is actually a "second landlord", asking for land from the mall and then subleasing it to sugar fried chestnuts, winter melon tea, foot washing city and other wholesalers. In terms of site selection, Wen Heyou's logic is still to try to be next to the popular business district, but not to go to the super high cost of the center, but to become the center by itself.
Take a walk around Super Wen and You, and you'll find the difference between this place and a normal mall.
Compared with the main meals in the mall, most of the catering shops in Wenheyou are given snacks and fast food, on the one hand, "ready to eat", can achieve high-frequency customer acquisition, on the other hand, the production is relatively simple, and "eat fast", the turnover rate is high.
The setting of the floors is also contrary to the logic of ordinary shopping malls. Generally speaking, shopping malls will put the fast food with the largest flow of people on the ground, the main meal on the fifth or sixth floor, and the first to fourth floors to create a refreshing and smooth shopping environment.
Wen Heyou is just the opposite, the first and second floors of Changsha store are specialties, and the third floor is a food street. Guangzhou store is more direct, the first floor is all given to the long-established gourmet merchants, the entrance is ready to eat. This is bound to cause a lot of congestion at the entrance, which is avoided by the mall, but it is exactly what Wen Heyou wants.
Wenheyou has three criteria for introducing merchants: first, mainly old brands, the existence time usually can not be less than 10 years; second, do not accept chain brands, merchants must be unique; third, the business is good, to 3 months as the stage, if the merchant revenue is too low, it will be replaced.
Most of Wen Heyou's consumer groups are young people, so they are very young from the selection of catering tastes to the entire marketing methods.
In terms of taste, for young people, cold is better than hot, fried is better than boiled, and delicious and relieved is more important than eating. Take Guangzhou Wenheyou Liu Fuji Wonton Noodles, which opened last year, as an example, relying on a plate of fried wonton, and its turnover increased by 30%.
WeChat, Weibo and Douyin, where young people gather, have also become the most important marketing positions for Wenheyou. Wen Heyou grasped the "punch card to take photos", a simple and easy,widely disseminated category of Internet celebrities. Super Wen He You is not so much a food city as a "scenic spot" for taking photos and punching cards. Shenzhen Wenheyou, newly opened this year, in addition to the dining route, there is also a tour route. Overlapping vertical signboards create a film-visual city effect that never sleeps; all kinds of realistic restoration of the era scenes can become shooting props; coupled with the current popular retro sense and the so-called "feelings", completely poke the "itch" of Internet celebrities, the entire mall is like a studio, corners and corners can shoot blockbusters. According to media data, in 2020, changsha super wenheyou in the "two micro and one shake self-media" exposure, a total of more than 6 billion times.
After the success of Changsha Wen and You, they began to embark on the road of expansion. In 2020, it entered Guangzhou, and in April this year, the Shenzhen store opened, with more than 50,000 people queuing up.
It seems that Wen Heyou wants to replicate Changsha's success to the end. The question is, can such a pattern be replicated successfully?
03 Replication Puzzle
WenHeyou's goal is to take the Changsha Hisense Plaza store model as the basic prototype and open 10 super stores in first-tier cities at home and abroad such as Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles.
To complete such an expansion, it is necessary to need the support of capital. At present, Wen Heyou has taken two financings, the first is the 70 million yuan strategic investment of Tang Renshen Group in 2018, and the second is the investment of hundreds of millions of yuan by Jiahua Capital. Overall, the investment heat and the huge traffic of Wenheyou seem to be not proportional.
For capital investment, a business model that can be replicated at scale is critical. Whether Wen Heyou's model can be copied is still a question. Localization in Changsha is in place, and the traffic is also very hot, but so far, it is difficult to say what business model can be copied on a large scale.
First of all, it should be clear that the core of the Wenheyou model is catering or culture, or cultural real estate.
Let's start with catering. Wen Heyou's initial success was because it captured the taste of Changsha people, which was the experience of Wen Bin for more than ten years. Its "city well culture" is also changsha's city well culture. This set of localized content cannot be replicated in other cities. Wen Bin himself also said: "A foreigner goes to Beijing to eat Changsha stinky tofu, this scene must be problematic." ”
Guangzhou Super Wen and Friends seems to be a lesson. In addition to the frenzied queuing in the early days of opening, it soon returned to flatness, and in just a few months, many merchants have withdrawn. Many people attribute the slump of Guangzhou Wenheyou to the excessive reproduction of Changsha Wenheyou, not only rarely can evoke the feelings of Guangzhou people, but also in the choice of food categories, "Guangzhou characteristics" are not enough.
Then, the road in front of Wen Heyou can only be localized according to the characteristics of each city. It's really trying. Shenzhen Wenheyou settled in the merchants, there are Niuxiang sweet potato porridge, old local yantian intestine powder, Baheli beef balls, A Ba oyster sauce and many other Guangdong specialty catering products that are popular with locals, and the main dishes have also changed from crayfish in Changsha to "deep oysters".
However, from the perspective of capital, such expansion efficiency is not high, compared to the chain brand that can be quickly copied by The Great Food Generation, Wen Heyou is equivalent to re-polishing a system every time he goes to a city. The Changsha model has few resources to share except to provide the underlying logic.
As far as cultural real estate is concerned, Wen Heyou is only a second landlord, asking for land from the mall and then subleasing it to other merchants. At that time, Hisense Plaza in Changsha, because it fell into operational difficulties, gave Wen Heyou a high degree of preferential treatment in rent, and Wen Heyou returned with no less than 10,000 passengers per day. But will the future "big landlords" still have such an offer?
On the other hand, Wen Heyou's "cultural" attribute poses more challenges to the identity of the second landlord. Merchants are not only tenants, but also should be a member of the Wenhe friendship cultural scene.
Wen Heyou's vision is to "become the Disney of China's food industry", but the various attractions of Disneyland are organically unified with the Disney brand, while the merchants under Wen heyou are more like tenants, and the merchants who have entered the scene are independently operating, and they all opened a branch in Wenheyou. If the store's revenue is not as expected, it will propose to break up. Such a "look and feel" is difficult to condense a real cultural brand.
This catering flagship, which is called "Ichijing Culture Museum", is dragging a huge body and trying to advance into the wider territory of China and even the world. Its founders declared that their goal was to be the "Disney of the food world." Many companies with cultural and creative genes like to describe the company's great vision as "Disney in so-and-so field". Disney has become a typical narrative way of creating a cultural brand through ip, and everyone can understand it.
But the real city culture can only be in the city, Wen and You to create the "city culture", no matter how realistic the visual, is only a scene, no soul. It can't replace the steaming warmth of the early morning street stalls.
Internet celebrities are easy to explode overnight, but internet celebrities who explode overnight are often difficult to copy, even if they copy themselves. This may also be Wen Heyou's dilemma. If there is only a lively scene, then consumers are only looking at a hilarity, if it is only a consumer feeling, then what kind of feelings are worth repeated consumption? Without a deep connection with consumers, the tide of phenomena recedes, and it is likely to be a mess.
Moreover, the future Wen Heyou, is it serious about doing catering, or focusing on real estate? These are two different industries, and the business ideas are very different.
After all, if "internet celebrity" Wen Heyou wants to become "Disney", it is not enough to rely on the number of queues. There are still many questions that need to be answered.