Metersbonwe: Walking In Light And Heavy

Traditional sense Clothing enterprise By plant, equipment, production Workers, such as hard conditions, are unable to make profits. market On the "light" exhibition fist. The issue of OEM and OBM's discussion may not be worth much discussion. But 15 years ago, Zhou Chengjian, who first thought about this problem, made it a major event, resulting in Metersbonwe's annual sales volume of 5 billion yuan. enterprise 。 In the past 15 years, Metersbonwe has leveraged the "light mode". Assets Between the light and the heavy, it can be called. Brand legend 。

　　 Putting on light: brand strategy falls into multiple puzzles

When he founded Metersbonwe in 1995, Zhou Chengjian did not know the concept of "virtual operation" proposed by Roger Nagel, a famous American scholar. But with the intuition of an entrepreneur, he had been well applying the concept of "virtual operation".

Since its foundation, Zhou Chengjian has outsourced production related heavy assets business to all kinds of processing enterprises in the US bond production chain. At the same time, he has sold product sales to the chain operation channels all over the country. He has concentrated on resources and energy for product design, research and development, and brand marketing, so as to avoid risks in production and marketing.

In 2008, the US bond listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, marking the great success of its "light asset strategy". The Zhou Chengjian family also became the richest man in the list of Hu Run's clothing rich list with 17 billion yuan assets. However, in the same year, the "light asset model" also encountered "Waterloo" dramatically. This year, the United States launched a new brand Me&City with higher price.

For more than a year, Zhou Chengjian invited the Hollywood stars to speak for himself, while collecting commercial real estate in the whole country to store up Me&City. However, Zhou Chengjian may not have expected that in the first quarter of 2010, the United States and the United States had a net profit margin of 90% decline. The company explains that the multi brand strategy has just started, and the decision-making team and the business team lack experience. In addition, the planning is obviously insufficient, the overall cost control is not effective, and the efficiency of some resources is not high.

It is undeniable that every aspect of Me&City consumes a lot of cost.

At the end of 2008, the company made drastic adjustments to divide Metersbonwe and Me&City into two major departments and operate independently. Marketing techniques are also trying to differentiate from Metersbonwe. Aaron Kwok's early spokesman was Jay Chou, and his successor was Jay Chou. Me&City began to look overseas at the very beginning. In addition to the earliest spokesperson Wentworth Miller and the famous model of the hotel, and then signed the "Elven Prince" Orlando Blum, to find internationally renowned photographers.

However, what best reflects the management's interest in Me&City is that all stores in 2009 opened up in a direct battalion mode without opening up. Metersbonwe has long been the mainstream of franchised stores. By the end of 2009, there were 2863 stores in the United States, including 523 outlets and 2340 stores.

International celebrity endorsement and massive publicity and promotion are just the tip of the iceberg. Over the past year, the company's most expensive business is in commercial real estate.

The company's annual report revealed that in 2009, the United States spent 820 million yuan on shop buying and leasing, and spent more than 50 million yuan on decorating the shop. Or buy or rent, the United States a lot of "hoarding", and most shops in the cultivation period of the loss. In 2009, Metersbonwe's sales revenue was 4 billion 800 million yuan, while Me&City was 350 million yuan. Me&City needs Metersbonwe's blood transfusion.

Zhou Chengjian's dream of marching toward the high end may not be difficult to understand, but "going up" is much more difficult than "going down". In this regard, Yuan Yue, chairman of the zero point research and consulting group, said that some enterprises started with low-end brands, in order to build high-end brands, adopted the "isolation" approach, and did not let the outside world know the relationship between the new brand and the original brand at the outset. Usually, high-end brands are easy to drive low-end brands, while consumers are excluded from high-end brands based on low-end brands.

　　 Mix and match: innovation and brand transformation

In recent years, the United States has made a very noticeable change: rapidly accelerating the pace of opening stores. Since May 2009, the United States and the United States have opened three flagship stores nationwide, covering an area of 5000 square meters, far exceeding the previous flagship area of about 2000 square meters. Zhou Chengjian said that the United States will also open 50 to 100 flagship stores in the country.

At the same time, the United States by the franchisee based mode into a proprietary store oriented mode. From the data point of view, from 2001 to 2007, the annual compound growth rate of the United States direct stores was 33.44%, significantly faster than the annual compound growth rate of 29.95% of the franchised stores.

Whether it is "rob a distributor's job" on the channel or directly own entities on the store, this series of actions obviously do not conform to the "light assets" strategy that the US state has always been adhering to, and its assets seem to be slowly changing "heavy".

Perhaps, a kind of "mashup" mode, which is different from the pure light assets, and integrates the brand "fast fashion" operation of ZARA and H&M, is slowly forming. {page_break}

Analysts pointed out that in recent years, the "light assets" growth mode of channel links has become increasingly scarce in the face of powerful business groups.

On the one hand, franchising is only a small number of entrepreneurial SMEs start the market at low cost, and try to maximize the possibility of "channel financing" through the form of "investment". For the garment enterprises with light assets operation, the difference advantage of chain operation is gone, but the competition is increasingly fierce. Take the United States for example, in its 3 billion 157 million yuan sales in 2007, the franchise system with a weight of up to 87.16% accounted for only 62.2% of the sales volume. Obviously, the control of franchising channels is inferior to that of direct chain stores.

On the other hand, with the vigorous development of the commercial real estate industry, the rents of domestic shops continue to grow, and the opening of large stores, flagship stores or image stores has become the mainstream. With the development of enterprises and the continuous growth of financial strength, the focus of enterprises' resources and management will be transformed into the "heavy assets" growth mode. Powerful enterprises will adopt the way of purchasing property rights to obtain stable store resources. For example, ZARA and other large garment enterprises in foreign countries usually use direct stores as the main sales mode, so as to obtain stable store resources.

However, it needs to be pointed out that the US state is only taking the road of "partial heavy assets". From the point of view of the whole production process, the United States is still adhering to the strategic mode of "light assets", and has better integrated the entire supply chain by means of advanced information technology. According to incomplete statistics, the cost of development and construction of information platform and management system software has been less than 100 million yuan over the past years, covering mainly the manufacturer resource management system (MBFAC-ERP), the group internal resource management system (MB-ERP) and the agent resource management system (MBAGT-ERP).

Zhou Chengjian said, "when everyone is doing the virtual business mode, I will start to change and ask for industrial upgrading. And the future competition of garment industry will be the competition of the whole supply chain.

However, on the basis of "industrial upgrading", the essence of "outsourcing" has not changed. At present, the United States of America in the fabric, accessories and clothing production links, still all use outsourcing OEM, there are 96 fabric suppliers, 84 accessories suppliers and more than 300 garment manufacturers, mainly in the Yangtze River Delta and Guangdong province. At the same time, in terms of logistics, the United States did not change the nature of its outsourcing.

"Change" and "invariance" complement each other and bring the United States to a road of "mashup" with partial heavy assets.

　 Marriage movie: brand marketing opens a window

If Metersbonwe's cooperation with Transformers 2 is just testing water, the strategic agreement with DreamWorks opens another window for Metersbonwe's brand marketing.

In March 8, 2010, Metersbonwe announced the signing of a 3 year strategic agreement with DreamWorks Animation Studios, the first Chinese enterprise to collaborate with Hollywood in brand marketing cooperation.

After finally achieving the goal of "Transformers 2" project, "investing 1 yuan, earning 1 yuan", this time, the United States no longer satisfies only one film, but obtains exclusive cooperation of all the films of DreamWorks, and it will produce more interaction and resources cooperation with the film company.

Signing strategic cooperation with DreamWorks is only the first step in the United States. According to reports, the company also signed a 5 year strategic cooperation agreement with the Shanghai art film studio and obtained the authorization of the Japanese Sanrio Co "Hello Kitty" for a period of 3 years.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder and chief executive of DreamWorks, said they were impressed by Metersbonwe's motto "do not take the unusual road" because this motto also applies to DreamWorks. The image created by DreamWorks encourages people not to follow the crowd, to publicize their individuality and to go their own way. These characteristics conform to Metersbonwe's slogan and make the cooperation between the two sides seamless. Moreover, Metersbonwe's live show with interesting and imaginative power has injected life into cartoon characters through the carrier of costumes, so that they are very excited.

The United States predicts that the cooperation with DreamWorks will lead to sales of 200 million yuan, and will be promoted in more than 2000 shops. As an empowerment, DreamWorks hopes to reach the platform of the United States in the country, so that the famous characters like kung fu panda 2, which will be released next summer, will enter thousands of households from the big screen.

According to the introduction, in order to better display the products of strategic partners, Smith Barney also introduced MTEE series, nearly 10000 products, defined as the company's most creative series, as a platform, in the series of costumes, show animation, trend events, environmental protection, illustrations and other themes. Mei Bang has invited Ma Yun, Han Han, Tan Yuanyuan and others to invite them to be the dream personalities of the brand.

Mei Bang emphasizes that MTEE is not an independent brand, it is only a series of companies, and other product lines will be developed in the future. In addition to constantly adding new cultural connotations to Metersbonwe brand, another brand ME&CITY is also moving towards ZARA and H&M, from the fashion design concept and the shelf time.

In the US's stage of development expectations, its market share will account for 3%-4% in the next 5-10 years. At that time, the United States will truly usher in the era of brand internationalization and market internationalization. It will also wash away the brand traces of "light assets strategy" and transform it into a benchmark for capital driven brands.