The Former "Shoe King" Is Becoming A Real Agent.

Thanks to its scale advantage, BELLE once sat on the throne of China's "shoe king".

But now, with the market saturation and the impact of the electricity supplier, BELLE's invincible scale game has become a flexible way to deal with market changes.

This month, 3~8, BELLE's

Business revenue fell 5% to 9 billion 836 million yuan, and retail outlets dropped by 424.

However, contrary to the declining trend of self operated footwear business, BELLE's agency sales campaign,

Business revenue increased 16.1% to 9 billion 524 million yuan, and 95 new retail outlets.

The former "shoe king" is becoming a real agent.

Previously, the scale of stores has always been the advantage of BELLE.

In the craziest 2011, BELLE opened 2~3 stores every day on average.

By constantly opening new stores and expanding the number of terminals to fill the blank market, BELLE also capitals on the strength of capital to acquire mature, large-scale retail networks of its peers, and then integrate them into a part of themselves.

Through continuous integration and merger, BELLE has formed a strong retail network.

By the end of 2011, BELLE's footwear business increased by 1958 retail outlets.

With the expansion of the number of outlets, BELLE's business revenue has soared, increasing by nearly 5 billion yuan a year.

The net profit margin of corporate sales rose from 12.8% in 2008 to 14.7% in 2011.

Even when the number of new outlets dropped to around 1000 in 2013, BELLE's revenue increments were 3 billion 400 million yuan and the net profit margin was 12.4%.

With a huge brand community, it has realized the full coverage of urban female consumers from age to price, which helped BELLE to eat a large number of terminals in the expansion era.

In terms of footwear business, BELLE Group operates 13 brands, including BELLE, Staccato, Teenmix and so on. At the same time, it also operates 7 brands, such as BELLE, BELLE and so on.

Through its many brands, BELLE opens many stores or counters in the mall, and often rent the 1/3 or even more than half of the footwear area. This monopoly of resources leads to many competitors losing the opportunity to compete with one another.

But with the saturation of the market and the impact of the electricity supplier, the superiority of BELLE's pride in expanding scale and assembling capacity has become a shackle on its way forward.

Although BELLE has many different sub brands, and every brand launches 300~400 new shoes every quarter, but in the pursuit of scale, these products are very similar in style, which makes consumers' cognition of brand vague and sticky.

In recent years, Q, a fashionable women's shoe brand in the market, has made great efforts in the fine operation of products.

Q designs more than 30000 pairs of new shoes every year, from which 1800 models are selected to market, and products are strictly checked from design links.

It packaged women's shoes as a fashion accessory and jumped out of the old path of women's shoes.

In 2012 and 2013, BELLE group's sales net interest rates fell to 13.2% and 12.4% respectively.

Even in 2014, sales net interest rate rebounded to 15.5%, and it also benefited from the increase in net profit of agency brand and apparel brand rather than the growth of self operated footwear business.

BELLE is the largest dealer in sports brand in China. Its agency includes 7 sports and clothing brands including Nike and Adidas.

In recent years, with the prosperity of sports industry, BELLE has fully enjoyed the incremental bonus from Nike, Adidas and other sports tycoons.

In the 3~8 months of this year, the gross profit of BELLE footwear business fell 4.2% to 6 billion 716 million yuan, while the gross profit of sports and clothing business rose 24% to 4 billion 260 million yuan.

This means that the sports and clothing businesses dominated by Nike and Adidas have occupied the majority of the profits of BELLE group.

According to the analysis of the North Institute of Commerce, although the sports and clothing business can bring higher growth rate, these businesses are mostly agents brand, and the gross profit is smaller than the self operated brand.

In addition, BELLE agents' trump card of sports category Nike and Adidas are more and more dealers in China. BELLE can not rely on improving the performance of agent brand to seek overall growth.

Once this incremental dividend reaches the end, the decline in net interest rate of BELLE group is only a matter of time.

After the online shoe business has reached a deadlock, BELLE has turned to the Internet to try to ease the pressure on inventory.

In July 2011, BELLE set up the shoe B2C website purchase network, to explore a series of e-commerce pformation.

In November 2012, excellent purchase network promoted platform strategy.

At that time, it was the peak period of the development of the three party footwear vertical electric business, such as Le Tao, hi Le, and so on. After the excellent purchase online, BELLE ranked the top three of the B2C website with its capital and source advantage.

Xie Yunli, the head of the electricity supplier, announced that BELLE would invest 2 billion yuan to develop an independent mall and make a move that shocked the industry: monopolize BELLE's shoes online and cut off the supply of other footwear B2C websites.

With the conversion rate higher than peers, in 2013, the excellent purchase network completed 1 billion 100 million yuan sales, becoming the largest footwear business platform in China.

In the same year, the excellent purchase network was renamed the excellent purchase fashion mall, and began to expand from footwear to clothing and clothing category, introducing DKNY, CK and other international brands, to fashion business pformation.

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BELLE hopes to make the self operated footwear business successfully integrate online and offline through the excellent shopping mall.

Consumers only need to place orders online, and stores next to the line can deliver goods nearby.

Just as the excellent shopping mall moves towards the blueprint of the sketch in an elegant way, its interior has undergone major personnel changes.

Xie Yunli and COO Zhang Xiaojun, general manager of excellent shopping mall, have left their jobs because of the confusion of internal management since the implementation of CEO rotation system since August last year.

After experiencing the pain of staff turnover, the excellent shopping mall in 2014 has been revised many times, especially the mobile terminal has been optimized, and the annual subscription amount has reached 2 billion yuan, for the first time, it is close to breakeven.

According to the "double eleven" battlefield bulletin published this year, as of 12 noon, the purchase order of BELLE shopping mall and BELLE exceeded 800 thousand orders, the paction amount was nearly 300 million yuan, and the order quantity of excellent purchase platform increased by nearly 40% compared with the same period last year.

Although the excellent shopping mall has developed in the past two years, it has never been able to open up a mature business model in the vertical electric field.

As the footwear platform, Le Tao and good Lok have long gone, but the development of excellent shopping mall is still slow.

The most important reason is BELLE's swing to make brand or channel.

According to the staff of the excellent purchasing electricity supplier, in order to balance the channel conflict between the line and the line and avoid duplication of goods from different channels, BELLE has many special shoes for its shoes, which can not be bought online.

At the same time, in order to avoid price confusion, the price of BELLE's products will converge under the same line, while the old products will focus on online discount.

For BELLE, the electricity supplier channel is simply handling the inventory platform for a long time.

Last October's performance press conference, BELLE CEO Sheng Bai Jiao was bluntly pointed out that for the electricity business "did not want to understand before, so far, it is still not very clear".

In fact, BELLE does not belong to the initiative to expand e-commerce business, the reason why the introduction of excellent purchase, to a large extent, is worried that competitors will seize the opportunity of the electricity supplier and passively accept the challenge.

This determines that the sales pattern of BELLE, which is mainly offline and supplemented by online, will not be broken.

Against this background, it is obviously not realistic to expect the electricity providers to feed their businesses in the short term.

In August this year, the excellent shopping mall announced cooperation with some Korean brands, launched the Seoul station, and formally joined the ranks of cross-border e-commerce providers.

But from now on, BELLE's online and offline are relatively independent, and have not realized the original vision of integration.

However, BELLE has begun to adjust the supply of e-commerce channels.

Under the pressure of stores, from the fall of this year, BELLE's footwear brands first appeared in the Tmall / micro-blog flagship store in the words "new products in autumn and winter" and "synchronized new counters" in 2015. In terms of price, it also changed the style of thousands of dollars in the past, priced at 300~800 yuan.

In addition to the adjustment of Tmall flagship store, this year's "double eleven" period, excellent shopping mall has also added a large number of new products, including Seoul station for the first time to join this year's "double eleven" big promotion.

With the multiple choices of various electronic business platforms and the entry of high-quality brands from abroad, BELLE's products have gradually lost their performance price ratio and competitiveness.

After the slowdown in the growth of its own footwear brands, BELLE also wanted to seek new profit growth points by increasing the proportion of sports and apparel business.

In August 2013, BELLE invested nearly $100 million to acquire Japanese clothing retailer Barok.

Barok is a fast fashion brand retailer specializing in young Japanese women, with MOUSSY, SLY and many other brands, and 90% of its stores are located in Japan.

Unlike the popular Korean or European and American women's clothing styles on the market, Barok represents the trend of women's clothing in Japan, which is unique to the domestic women's clothing market.

The acquisition of Barok is conducive to BELLE's long-term goal of entering the domestic apparel and accessories market, and can be used to expand the development of shoe brand in Japan.

Just a week later, BELLE signed a takeover agreement with Italy brand Lennox in an attempt to enter the high-end fashion market.

The reason why BELLE's cross-border strategy has been carried out so rapidly is its confidence in channel discourse power.

Take the new century (59.16, 2.22, 3.90%) department store as an example, its total of more than 70 footwear brands, BELLE's brand accounted for 13%, contributed more than 30% of sales.

BELLE's brand of women's clothing will directly benefit from the influence of its footwear brand, and has a strong voice in shops and rents, which is similar to the way BELLE sells other clothing brands.

These two acquisitions are important steps for BELLE to "whole category" and "big retail". The direct result of the cross border women's clothing is performance pressure.

2013 semi annual report shows that BELLE's revenue grew 11.1% over the same period last year, net profit fell 3.4% compared with the same period last year, and high-speed growth is facing collapse.

The core of BELLE's operation mode is to increase business performance through new store growth, and increase new categories to replace new channels.

When the scale advantage of self operated footwear business is lost, cross-border has become the first response to its dependence on epitaxial growth.

However, due to the macro-economic downturn and fierce competition in the apparel industry, BELLE's structural adjustment results are not satisfactory.

In September 2013, BELLE spent 1 billion 280 million yuan on the acquisition of the Dragon world and tried to enter the high-end men's shoes market.

However, the acquisition is not optimistic about the outside world.

The reason is that as early as 2007, BELLE bought Jiangsu's sum 1 billion 600 million yuan.

As the first brand of domestic men's shoes, the market share has been ranked first for many years since 1993. However, brand influence has gradually weakened due to the lack of management and other aspects.

After BELLE took over San Da, it did not improve.

It can be seen that although BELLE is experienced in women's shoes, it is not good at the men's shoes market.

In addition to entering the electricity supplier, cross-border women's clothing, BELLE in recent years are emphasized in the three or four line market, and developed a fast fashion shoes brand 15mins, terminal classification.

But obviously, as the latecomer of the fast fashion women's shoes market, 15mins has a long time to learn in brand strategy and product innovation compared with the brand of Q, which has an annual growth rate of 70%.

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In fact, due to the slowdown in macro-economic growth, the overcapacity of manufacturing industry and the impact of electric business, the domestic footwear industry is still in the doldrums.

Sales decline and layoffs are not unique to BELLE.

According to Daphne's first half of this year's earnings report, the company's turnover fell 13.9% to 3 billion 602 million yuan over the same period last year, net profit plunged 98.5% to 2 million 87 thousand yuan, and Saturday (17.30, 0.00, 0.00%) reported in the first half of this year, the company's operating income fell 3.81% to 845 million yuan over the same period last year, and net profit fell 18.91% to 27 million 24 thousand yuan.

BELLE, the biggest shoe maker in China, seems to be losing its performance.

Eat all and you will starve to death.

Wen Wen / Cheng Weixiong, founder of Liang Qi brand

BELLE, once the "shoe king", is going downhill along with the constant adjustment of the retail market structure. The performance of BELLE in the pformation process confirms a common saying: it is difficult for a ship to turn around.

In fact, the reason why BELLE can achieve today's status is mainly based on the merger of agents. That is to say, BELLE's success is based on the success of the "general agent" mode.

Nowadays, the wholesale Consciousness Orientation of BELLE's "general agent" is still dominant, and the intensive excavation of retail business is missing. Therefore, Nike and Adidas are still the main business of BELLE.

BELLE's proxy brand has been growing vigorously for many years, but its proprietary brand and acquisition brand have not been able to have a good market performance.

In 2013, GEOX, the Italy men's shoes brand, decided to break up after the five year agency expired with BELLE.

During the period of agency, through BELLE's efforts, GEOX's network in the domestic market expanded from more than 90 to 340.

The abrupt stop of cooperation means that BELLE's five years' investment is difficult to get long-term benefits. In the words of analyst Ma Gang, "retailers are most afraid of raising the market and not playing with the brand."

In the past, BELLE has won many terminal channels with its huge brand community.

However, with the increase of brand, BELLE's products have been seriously homogenized.

In addition to brand and price differences, the other differences are not obvious, that is, product tonality does not reflect brand attributes.

BELLE has also lost its way.

If there is no fundamental change in the channel, BELLE's future development will be very worrying.

The construction of the whole channel, many brands of BELLE under the exploration line, also need to speed up the integration of online and offline businesses. Secondly, most of BELLE's channels rely on large and medium sized shopping malls, and now the market competition is fierce. BELLE's channel advantages have become a burden. Thirdly, BELLE has rarely done anything in the street shops. Although it has reduced investment, it has also lost its brand display space. Only the display at the shopping mall level is still too complicated. Fourth, BELLE failed to grasp opportunities when shopping centers were rising, whether it was multi brand store or single brand store in shopping centers. First, we should pay attention to online and offline.

In addition, BELLE's brand positioning is also more confusing.

In the past, as long as the market expansion could cover many problems, today, consumers are becoming more rational.

No meticulous control will be eliminated by emerging consumers.

The next thing BELLE needs to think about is to be a real retail brand and to pform retailers, and to do well in the pformation of agents.

This pformation is painful, and the previous multiple contradictions can be ignored.

Meditation is the right way to do well, otherwise it will never be able to find the right path.