Gambling On 10000 Yuan Women'S Clothing

Three years ago, Yu Xianli, the founder of VOA brand, wanted to open a shop in Taobao Mall (now Tmall Mall) to sell mink coats. Over the past 20 years, Yu Xianli has been accustomed to the rhythm of selling mink coats in winter and traditional silk clothes in summer. As VOA stores enter Beijing, Jiangsu and other places, Yu Xianli has set his sights on e-commerce.

At that time, Yu Xianli, who did not understand the Internet, went around to learn from the experience, but was repeatedly looked down upon. A lecturer at Taoda told him that only things worth less than 200 yuan are easy to sell online, and goods worth thousands of yuan are basically not sold, and those worth tens of thousands of yuan are even more hopeless. Yu Xianli wants to ask the agent operator to help with the operation, but the other party says he can't do it. He asked Taobao waiter again and again. Although he didn't say no, he was not optimistic.

"With so many users on Taobao, someone will always buy expensive clothes." With this idea in mind, Yu Xianli insisted that the flagship store of VOA Taobao Mall opened in 2009, and Yu Xianli and employees began to wait for customers to come.

This is four and a half months. During this period, none of the mink coats in VOA's online store were sold. Yu Xianli recalled: "The team was about to collapse and said Taobao Mall could not do it."

For offline sales, Yu Xianli insists on investing online. The turnaround was brought about by the first business. A customer bought a mink coat of more than 20000 yuan. Yu Xianli was impressed because at that time, the online payment limit for buyers was 2000 yuan, and the cash on delivery limit was 7000 yuan. It took 15 days for this business to complete payment alone.

　　 Rule joys and sorrows

In the most difficult stage of starting, Yu Xianli heard about various "ways" to get out of the dilemma: sales fraud and reputation, discount activities, distribution... He didn't want to try whether he violated the rules or not.

Yu Xianli, who believes that "everyone moves to the left, and everyone moves to the right to succeed", believes that counterfeiting will only stain the whole team and lose confidence to go on, while doing distribution will disrupt the price system. As for discount, it touches the bottom line of his VOA brand, and he even nearly does hard publicity about VOA never discount.

One track insistence was soon stimulated by Taobao rules.

At that time, the weight of sales volume in the search rule parameters accounted for a large proportion. The VOA that took the high-end customization route took off the shelves every time it sold a mink coat, and the sales volume was almost zero. In the face of adverse circumstances, the VOA team tried to make a through train. At the beginning of the search, Yu Xianli was satisfied to see that VOA appeared at the top of the search rankings. In order to break the sales impasse, he made an advertising budget of more than 1 million yuan.

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Yu Xianli remembered that a round of hard advertising brought 200000 traffic to the flagship store. I thought that the store would be as busy as other sellers who invested in hard advertising, but the customer service of VOA greeted with silence: 200000 traffic "crossed the border", no users asked for advice, and finally only one piece of sales was generated. Then, affected by the conversion rate parameters of search rules, VOA's search ranking plummeted. For a long time, "you can only rely on one piece of sales, and climb back bit by bit".

"At the technical level, we are stupid." Yu Xianli summed up the causes of various tragedies, determined to stick to the end and not touch things that are easy to make mistakes. So far, there is only one Tmall flagship store in the whole channel of VOA, which has never been on the market, participated in the "Double Eleven", or offered discounts. He insists on the same price online and offline. Yu Xianli proudly told the World Online Businessmen Manager that "none of the tens of thousands of sales of VOA in three years is fake."

　　 Expand new generation silk categories

Although the store operation appears conservative, VOA is not slow to open the situation. A month and a half after the first business, that is, half a year after the flagship store was launched, Yu Xianli got a good news: the VOA flagship store began to make money. Despite the steady growth of online retail of mink clothing, Yu Xianli still feels that business is difficult.

In the past, the mode of VOA was to import minks from abroad and make ready to wear clothes for sale. The number of mink coats in each style was very small, and customers could not afford to have money alone, but also to see whether they could fit. If directly customized, especially customized mink coats requiring special processing technology, the production and sales cycle of VOA will be longer, even up to 45 days.

The strong seasonal characteristics of mink offline sales are also shown online. At this time, expanding new categories has become the choice of sellers who are restricted by mink selling characteristics like VOA. But what Yu Xianli wants to do is not limited to breaking through difficulties.

Over the past 20 years of thinking about traditional silk clothing, Yu Xianli has come up with the idea that silk clothing is the only category that has the chance to produce a top brand recognized by the world, compared with other clothing in China, such as furs. What he wants to do in this field. In his words, to be a top silk clothing brand "has become a mission".

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But the traditional silk with a history of thousands of years has not produced a well-known brand in China? Yu Xianli believed that in the past, silk clothing was tailored, and no matter how skilled a tailor was, he could only be famous locally, serving only one village, one street, and one family. Now, the C2B mode of e-commerce, that is, the scale of customized services, can break the barriers between high-end fashion and ready to wear. He regards e-commerce as the "Tianshi" of the silk brand.

In addition, Hangzhou has a complete silk industry chain, and VOA in Hangzhou has won the geographical advantage. Yu Xianli asked himself why not many people like to wear silk now? He thinks the crux lies in silk fabrics. Traditional silk is easy to wrinkle and fade, and it is thin and easy to fade. Therefore, people always think of pajamas, scarves and cheongsam rather than fashion when talking about silk for a long time.

Yu Xianli noticed that in Europe and the United States, the technologically innovated silk fabric has overcome these problems, but the imported fabric is expensive, even dozens of times more expensive than traditional silk. The idea of localizing this kind of silk was born. Yu Xianli introduced that VOA adopted the technology of DuPont Technology in the United States and added 7.3% spandex to 19 m meters of silk fabric to produce silk fabric with good wrinkle resistance, which is called the new generation silk.

In practice, the performance price ratio of home-made new generation silk clothing is higher than that of clothing made of imported fabrics, and the price can be reduced from tens of thousands of yuan to about one thousand yuan. This cost performance advantage has been recognized by Tmall users. At the end of 2011, VOA sold silk cotton padded clothes for the first time at a price of more than 6000 yuan, which was immediately sold out.

For the first time, the VOA that sold no more than 1000 minks in three years felt the power of rapid sales growth. Yu Xianli said that in the first summer of VOA's new generation silk clothing launch this year, hundreds of customers bought more than 8 pieces.

This opportunity has attracted the attention of the industry, and Yu Xianli has set a new goal: VOA, as a pioneer brand of the new generation silk category, should continue to develop and improve fabrics, faster than others, and must maintain the first place in this category.

Yu Xianli introduced that currently VOA accounts for 90% of the sales of the new generation silk category. VOA now has a design and R&D team with more than 20 people. It focuses on design, garment manufacturing and sales, and hand over fabric customization to suppliers.

According to Yu Xianli, VOA's fabric suppliers and luxury brands such as Hermes are the industry leaders, and the precision of fabric digital inkjet printing can reach 8 million pixels. In addition, the market environment is also changing. Yu Xianli saw that the price of silk in winter was higher than that in summer for the first time because of the popularity of the new generation of silk. "People who have made silk for decades feel very strange".

　　 Innovative design taboo color

With the launch of the new generation of silk, the online sales of VOA have a tendency to surpass offline sales. Yu Xianli's confidence in e-commerce has gradually been confirmed.

The safest colors of clothing in offline VOA stores are black and white. On the online, the bold use of the bright colors of traditional clothing "taboo colors" is more likely to be favored by VOA customers. The design elements from Western Fauvism School and domestic traditional literature make VOA's clothing style unique through bright colors and strong style prints.

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"Some people are fascinated by our clothes, while others hate them". Yu Xianli believes that color is the expression of customers' emotions, so those VOA customers who need to wear serious uniforms for daily work prefer these gorgeous taboo colors. Taboo colors may only attract 10 people in shops with an offline radius of no more than 3 kilometers, while online, these niche interests can be concentrated.

Yu Xianli envisions that with the development of the new generation silk category, VOA can collect more customers' data on color preferences. He hopes that by analyzing customers' purchase behavior, he can gradually find the color that touches customers' heartstrings. In order to achieve this, VOA's visual team occupies the core position in the organizational structure. Yu Xianli revealed that the photographer of VOA is a very good photographer in the industry, and he has formed an e-commerce team.

On September 10 this year, VOA cooperated for the first time with the well-known domestic designer Wang Peiyi and the media fashion Bazaar, and made a designer show on Tmall. He proudly said that this was the "only event without discounts". Six silk garments priced at more than 2000 yuan were launched for limited sales. The rapid growth of VOA online attracted the attention of top designers in the traditional industry, which made Yu Xianli very excited.

In order to maintain competitive advantage, innovation is very important in VOA. Yu Xianli introduced that at present, there are more than 50 people in the VOA e-commerce department, and the whole structure is mesh. In the team, no matter what position you are in, as long as you have a good idea, employees can take the lead in doing this, and take full responsibility for the process and results. Yu Xianli's only requirement is not to shake the brand positioning, specifically not to do things that cannot improve the customer experience, and adhere to the price positioning, not to sell low prices.

　　 High price logic of VOA

Selling mink in winter and silk in summer, VOA's online sales characteristics this year are like returning to Yu Xianli's familiar offline business. He remembered that in the first year of selling minks on VOA, the average customer price was up to 22100 yuan.

After joining the silk padded jacket last year, it dropped to more than 10600 yuan. This summer, the customer price of the new generation silk clothing is more than 800 yuan. The overall sales volume is consistent with his plan to reach 100 million yuan in three years in 2009.

Three years ago, facing millions of women's low-cost clothing peers on Taobao, Yu Xianli stubbornly believed that only high prices could survive, and that VOA could find high consumption customers. In the eyes of many people, this choice is almost a gamble. Fortunately, Yu Xianli bet correctly. Why can VOA sell so expensive? Yu Xianli's answer is: "What we sell is not clothes, but a feeling. Clothing is the carrier of this feeling."

The customers gathered by VOA are a special group. Yu Xianli has a sentimental description of this: most of the customers are women aged 35 to 49 years old, and most of them are engaged in such serious occupations as civil servants, teachers and doctors.

Their charm is different from that of young women. What they need is a sense of quality and prestige. Women in this age group may face a new stage of life: children who have devoted many years of hard work grow up and go out to wander; At the peak of her career, her husband is busier than herself. She needs to look back and care for herself; Price will not be considered in consumption, but must be refined. VOA should give customers a feeling of being cared for.

Yu Xianli described that VOA's customer service is slow, and it takes a lot of thought to answer customers' questions. A customer may need a whole week to receive. VOA doesn't have after-sales service. One customer is responsible for the whole customer service. The assessment of customer service is based on the conversion rate, return rate and evaluation of customers, rather than the response speed. At the same time, automatic response is explicitly prohibited.

The high price of VOA first rejected some customers, and the unique service mode of customer service also rejected some customers. Yu Xianli introduced that no one in VOA was responsible for doing activities. He could not imagine how VOA customer service would serve if the event brought hundreds of thousands of customers a day. "If you receive 1000 people a day, do you still know who they are?"

Yu Xianli revealed that VOA employees are very valuable in the industry. What he can do is to give employees good treatment as far as possible, so that they feel that doing things in VOA is more meaningful than simply making money. In this case, the sense of mission is more important. He made no secret that some members of the team had worked in the successful Taobao brand.

The reason why they choose to join VOA is that VOA can bring them a higher sense of achievement than the products sold for less than 200 yuan in the past. "We have sold more than 10 million women's clothes on Tmall, and the DSR score of the top 100 sellers is the highest," Yu Xianli emphasized.

After three years of development, Yu Xianli verified his original idea: online users really deserve to be served by VOA, and their consumption ability can also support VOA. Therefore, his one track idea has become more and more vital: "We don't need to do much, we can survive by selling one by one."