Recently, the Japanese brand MUJI announced that there will be a price reduction of 200 popular products this autumn and winter, with the highest drop of about 50%.
Think about it carefully, the last time you heard about MUJI, the last time, and the last time you heard about MUJI, was it also related to news such as price cuts. As a brand that once had a unique scenery in China, and even once brought a Japanese minimalist style, MUJI now continues to rely on price cuts to reverse the decline of the posture to surprise many people.
From cultivating a kind of consumption habits and consumer goods bits that are completely built around the brand in China, to the performance of more than ten consecutive price cuts that are still unable to recover the decline, MUJI has finally coincided with its market positioning in Japan after sixteen years of entering China - this brand that once had "labels" such as Japanese minimalism, natural environmental protection, and unique style has finally become a grocery store with everyone with their families and mouths when they are discounted and reduced.
Muji became popular in Japan, originally because it was "cheap". At the beginning of the 1980s, Japan was embroiled in the energy crisis, which made consumers in the bubble economy era think for the first time whether they should continue to splurge extravagantly or whether they should spend on a planned geographical basis. With the main business goal of operating cheap, durable, and cost-effective daily necessities, MUJI was born as a private brand of Nishitomo Supermarket in Japan.
In 1989, MUJI was officially registered as an independent company and began the expansion of the chain. In the trend of anti-consumerism, MUJI re-sorted the process, simplified the outer packaging, and looked for raw materials of the same quality but lower cost, so that the price of the daily necessities produced was in the middle and low grade of the market, but the texture and details were handled well. The brand has also gradually developed a unique design aesthetic that does not follow trends, cuts out the complicated and simplifies, and has been very successful in Japan.
THE MUJI HOTEL in Ginza, Tokyo
However, in the early days of entering the Chinese market, MUJI, which focuses on "cost performance" in Japan, has not yet completed the expansion of stores and has a small number, as a brand that has just emerged in China, the order amount is too small to reach the minimum moq quantity produced by the factory, so it has not set up a warehousing center in China.
Although most of the products in the store are made in China, they must go through the process of labeling the goods in Japanese after shipping them out of customs, then distributing them according to the supply plan, re-entering the customs and labeling them with Chinese. The freight, material costs, labor costs, import taxes, etc. that occurred between the two times were finally calculated into the selling price, so that THE MUJI Chinese version suddenly had a price that could only be borne by the middle class. A pen of tens of yuan and an acrylic storage rack of hundreds of yuan are difficult to say as "affordable daily necessities" for ordinary Chinese in any case.
As a result, MUJI's marketing strategy in China is also very different from that in Japan. In 2005, MUJI opened its first store in Shanghai, and MUJI took the Japanese designer Kenya Hara's "empty" and "white" as the core ideas of the design, and created the unique "MUJI style" at that time with a "no significant brand identity" but highly recognizable style.
When a MUJI company opened in Shanghai, it was crowded
Accustomed to the Chinese of gorgeous and complicated home and daily necessities design, the first time I saw such a simple and down-to-earth style in daily necessities, but extremely focused on details, coupled with the pursuit of overseas brands in the Chinese market at that time, the Japanese simplicity of MUJI soon became a "lifestyle" tacitly recognized by the middle class who could afford to spend hundreds of dollars on daily necessities and young people who followed the trend.
The original MUJI followers will pursue a similar decoration style in their own homes to MUJI stores, simplify the soft decoration colors and the number of items, and insist on buying MUJI products even if they can find affordable alternatives. Even the logo "good product without a name" has become a symbol that can flaunt taste and philosophy, and even intentionally or unintentionally turn ordinary daily purchases into conspicuous consumption.
After a few years of MUJI's fire and store expansion across the country, in 2013, there were already 100 MUJI stores in China. However, just after the explosion of quantity and the doubling of product types, MUJI unexpectedly broke through the positive stereotypes of "environmental protection and safety" and "excellent quality" left by Japanese brands.
At the beginning of 2019, the Hong Kong Council detected that a Oatmeal biscuit on sale had high content of glycidin and acrylamide; in March of the same year, MUJI China issued a statement that it decided to conduct an independent recall of the product and the carbonated water on the same production line because it had detected that the bromate contained in the "natural water" product exceeded the standard.
Two consecutive quality accidents have also made MUJI complete disenchantment in the eyes of Chinese consumers, compared with the higher pricing of similar products, but even the most basic food safety can not be guaranteed, it is inevitable to doubt whether the brand can achieve its advertised "natural environmental protection", "the ultimate pursuit of details" and other characteristics.
What's more, with the "Made in China" in the past decade with higher efficiency to improve product quality, many local brands on the quality, details of the treatment, has not lost MUJI and other former "daily necessities quality ceiling". Daily necessities, clothing, food is a low cost, the technical threshold is not high categories, when the quality of local brands to catch up, still in the Chinese market to maintain a medium price OF MUJI also gradually lost its once proudest competitiveness.
On the other hand, many middle-class and literary young people who buy MUJI products were originally only attracted by this Japanese "lifestyle" and consumption concept, and after consumption gradually returned to rationality, they also began to re-examine the high price of MUJI. Although MUJI has reduced its price more than a dozen times in China in recent years, the price of the product is still higher than that of Japan. The fact that budget-conscious Chinese consumers have always been highly price-sensitive may not be a decisive reason for them to abandon MUJI, but the thought of paying several times more for the same quality products will ultimately make them hesitate to pay.
Not only in China, MUJI's trip to the sea is as difficult in Europe and the United States. Under the impact of the new crown epidemic, the operation of MUJI's US subsidiary took a sharp turn for the worse last year, and finally applied to the court for bankruptcy protection with a debt of $64 million. The epidemic is just a fuse, in fact, before that, MUJI's US subsidiary had lost money for three consecutive years.
For many years, INMUJI in the United States In order to maintain brand tone, store locations are often in golden locations such as Times Square in New York; and due to the cumbersome import and logistics in the country, transportation costs are high, the US subsidiaries choose to stock up on a large number of goods locally; and MUJI advocates minimalist, blank design aesthetics on the contrary, American consumers like to buy goods in excess, and will not be easily changed by the trend of their original aesthetic taste.
High store rents, backlogs of inventory, and consistently misguided local spending habits have left MUJI losing to local brands in the United States in the face of the global economic downturn caused by the pandemic. At this time, for MUJI, it will be more advantageous to file for bankruptcy than to continue to operate at a loss.
The collapse of the US subsidiary seems to be accidental, but in fact it is just a microcosm of MUJI's road to sea. Although MUJI continues to open new stores around the world, MUJI's product development and business philosophy has been a bit sluggish for a long time in full compliance with the rhythm and wishes of the Japanese headquarters.
MUJIGRAM has a set of 13-volume workflow guides MUJIGRAM, ranging from the daily operation of the storefront, the visual design of the window, and even as small as how to lay out the goods on each floor of a showcase, how to greet customers at different time periods, and this manual has corresponding guidelines and regulations. At the same time, for a detailed description of the different parts of the company's business, MUJI also has another "business specification book" of more than 6,000 pages.
Former President of the Good Products Program and one-handedly expanding MUJI into a world-class chain believes that "there are no accidents in business, and as long as you find factors that can be standardized, you can build a mechanism that does not rely on intuition to judge and will never fail." ”
Therefore, for a long time, all OFI's stores in China had to operate word for word according to the standardized procedures of the Japanese parent company. This ensures the in-store experience of each customer, but also solidifies the consumer group - people who agree with the taste of MUJI and the set of values behind it will continue to come to the store to experience and shop, and people who have no interest or even dislike it will never try to consume because of this immutable behavior.
If you've ever bought furniture at MUJI, you'll know that MUJI's bed has a strange size, not 1.5 meters or 1.8 meters, but a few centimeters narrower than the standard size. This is obviously not in line with the usage habits of Chinese consumers, but it was not until 2019 that the issue was taken seriously, and the brand re-launched 1.2 meters, 1.5 meters and 1.8 meters of beds according to the habits of the Chinese market.
Such a small problem, why did MUJI take so long to finally solve it? The answer is obvious, because before September 2018, MUJI did not have a product development team in China, and all the product design came from the Japanese team.
It was not until 2018, 13 years after entering the Chinese market, that MUJI specially set up a Chinese localization product development team to design and improve products according to the living habits of Chinese.
Detachable sofa designed by MUJI for the Chinese market (source "People of the Day")
However, the team's thinking logic and handling methods will still follow the Japanese cultural habits - one of the members found that the thermos cup, as an unpopular item in Japan and other countries, is in high demand and frequency in China after visiting thirty households in China. So he proposed to develop a lighter and larger capacity thermos cup product for the Chinese market.
The localization team then spent half a year researching mullies to improve MUJI's existing thermos products, which ultimately reduced the weight of the cup by 55 grams and increased the capacity without changing the appearance. Such a craftsmanship spirit and the pursuit of quality may be the reason why consumers favor MUJI.
However, in the past decade in China, no local company has carried out product research and development in annual time units. A new thermos cup can take weeks or even days from the time the improvement concept is generated to the time the sample leaves the factory. Even if MUJI realizes the importance of localized R&D, they have been left far behind by China's speed. In the face of China's product life cycle, MUJI's consistent paranoia about details sometimes becomes an obstacle to competing for the market and occupying opportunities.
The popularity of MUJI has blown the wind of Japanese minimalism to the country, and it has also tied this style to MUJI. Interestingly, however, MUJI's decline in China does not mean that the minimalist style is no longer loved by Chinese consumers. More precisely, there is still a demand for Japanese simple style utensils, but in addition to MUJI, there are more brands that can meet this demand.
The entanglement between MUJI and the copycat brand began from the moment it intended to enter the Chinese market. In 1999, Japan's "MUJI" applied for the simplified character "MUJI" in Simplified Characters as its registered trademark in China. At that time, they only registered the right to use trademarks in categories such as "clothing, stationery, furniture, advertising" and other categories, and omitted the trademark use rights of home textiles, towels, bath towels and other products.
This "small oversight" just allowed Beijing Cotton Field Textile Co., Ltd. to take advantage of the fact that they registered the trademark use rights of most of the products in class 24, which mainly include: home textiles, towels, bath towels, etc., and opened many stores in China that design and sell product styles very similar to those of Japanese MUJI.
Beijing Cotton Field Textile Co., Ltd. opened a "MUJI" store
In 2001, Japan's MUJI filed a lawsuit against Beijing Cotton Field for "bad faith trademark squatting", hoping to regain the right to use the class 24 trademark in the Chinese mainland. However, after 11 years of repeated appeals, it was finally rejected by the Supreme People's Court in 2012, on the grounds that when the trademark was applied for registration, "MUJI" had limited popularity in China and did not constitute a bad faith preemptive registration.
This episode did not hinder the expansion of Japan's MUJI in the country, but it laid a hidden danger for its future development.
In 2013, when MUJI was in the midst of a domestic scenery, a store called "Mingchuang Premium" under the banner of "Japanese Designer Brand" quietly opened in Guangzhou, quickly opening thousands of stores across the country.
In 2016, NetEase launched the e-commerce brand "NetEase Yanxuan", and the product style sold is also very similar to muji's Japanese simple style. NetEase Yanxuan directly connected with big brand manufacturers through the ODM model (original design manufacturer), removing the additional costs caused by the premium of big brands and further reducing the price of goods.
NetEase Yanxuan opened its first offline store in 2019
In 2017, Xiaomi launched the boutique life e-commerce platform "Youpin", the product style is also similar to MUJI, and it has also caused some third-party independent brands to provide consumers with more choices.
In simple terms, the Japanese minimalist style represented by MUJI is no longer unique in the Chinese market, and it has become increasingly easy to imitate and make similar products. Local grocery stores such as Mingchuang Premium, NOME, NetEase Yanxuan, Hibiscus Life, etc. have gradually found their own brand positioning from imitation, and even formed a certain differentiated style, which has largely separated the target consumers of MUJI.
What's more, most of these brands use domestic manufacturers and supply chains to make the price of products much lower than MUJI. If a small fan with a similar appearance is priced at 190 yuan in MUJI, but in Miniso Premium, you only need 40 yuan to buy it, then why don't consumers choose a more cost-effective Mingchuang premium product?
E-commerce and brands such as NetEase Yanxuan and Mingchuang Premium have taken away consumers who are more cost-effective, and those rich people who hope to find a more personalized aesthetic in minimalism have gone to the lonely wind. 18,000 yuan a carpet, 400 yuan a piece of washboard, obsessed with the lonely wind people never pursue cost-effective, these seemingly simple utensils have their own pursuit of high-end sense.
They no longer need a brand that is overly sought after by the public like MUJI to show their taste, but the rich prefer quiet niche brands: you may not know what brand I'm using, but it looks expensive.
Ordinary consumers choose more cost-effective domestic grocery brands, and rich people have gone to the game of showing off their wealth represented by the silent wind, leaving muji time for MUJI, which is indeed running out.
Resources:
People of the Day: MUJI has cut prices 11 times in a row, but why am I still too expensive?
Bloomberg：Muji’s Minimalist Aesthetic Is Too Easy to Knock Off
Author: Bonsai & Echo
Edit: Echo
Some of the image sources come from Visual China
The rest comes from the web and is owned by the original author
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