Can The "Five Year Itch" Of Luxury Goods Disappear In Sixth Years?

In " Online retailers "Two words have long been" cheap "," special sale "," Shopping Festival "Hook up today," Luxury goods At first glance, the concept of "electricity supplier" is somewhat "contrary to". From the 2011, known as "the first year of luxury goods business", the controversy and glorious dream have always lingered.

Standing in 2015, we witnessed the collapse of layoffs and fake accusations. We also saw that the capital's new boost to the industry's leading rookie was singing and promoting. The luxury electric business is coming to China for sixth years.

An ill fated track.

According to the "China luxury report" released by the Institute of wealth and quality in November 24th, the consumption of Chinese luxury goods will reach 116 billion 800 million US dollars in 2015, an increase of 9% yuan, or 100 billion yuan. China is still the largest market in the global luxury market. Behind the demand is huge market potential, and mobile Internet brings rich channel opportunities.

Chinese consumers' amazing consumption of global luxury goods

For the development path of luxury electric business, many analysts believe that in 2011, it was still the four beacon smoke, began to expand the shuffle in 2012, and entered the ebb tide in 2013.

In fact, the more famous enterprises in the field of luxury electric business, such as temple library network, glamour benefit, Shang pin network, and Xiu Xiu net, are mostly founded in 2008 after the financial crisis. The A financing base points are at the level of tens of millions of dollars. The scale of financing is not inferior to that of Jingdong, which has just completed 21 million US dollars in two rounds of financing.

Now, most of these surviving forerunners have completed over 3 rounds of financing. Among them, after obtaining the IDG capital A round of financing in July 2011, the temple library network promoted the financing at an annual rate. In July of this year, it received the latest $55 million E round of financing of Ping An Innovation Investment Fund, and glamour also announced its strategic investment in Alibaba in July, with a gold value of more than US $100 million. At the same time, in May this year, less than a week to complete the new financing of the C network ($30 million) and treasures network (A round 60 million yuan).

If we look back at the state of capital entry, we can see that the IDG capital, Xing Xing venture and Lei Jun angel investment have entered the very early stage of the capital stock network and the investment structure of Lei Jun net. The IDG capital and the Xing Xing venture capital have been followed up in the two rounds of financing.

On the other hand, in the early days, the respected network, which was also sought after by well-known fund, could not survive 2015. In 2011, 1 months after enjoying the online line, it won tens of millions of dollars of SAF Asia Fund and was also the platform of China Merchants Bank. But by the end of May 2014, the operation of the website was completely over. The massive bones behind it include a large number of large company backgrounds, including NetEase (Shang Pin), luxury Channel of sina and van guest, Jingdong's 360Top, and so on. The reasons for the closure are mostly related to the lack of financing.

　 Once gathered

Surviving luxury goods providers are also having a hard time. The Jingdong, which is also a big seller of electronic business, is now worth tens of billions of dollars. But as a "slow business", there are still few opportunities for luxury electric providers to go public. In fact, in order to ensure survival, runners on the track mostly change their positions in the pattern, hoping to control the pulse of the market as soon as possible.

For example, after the completion of the C round of financing in July 2011, there was no additional product of Shang Ping, which had been transformed into a light luxury website. At the beginning of the year, it became a layoff storm, and the temple library, which had been integrated into the E round, was transformed from the original luxury e-business website to a high-end consumer goods service platform. The reason why the C network failed earlier was the failure of the management to identify the "positioning and wobble".

On the one hand, the difference between startups and investment companies is the fate of "love and hate". On the one hand, they are elusive consumers and markets.

We can see some clues from two survey reports: a survey of 2015 luxury goods report from the Institute of wealth and quality research shows that Chinese consumers are still not enthusiastic about luxury electric business, and are still the most active young people online shopping. 41% of users said they would not buy luxury goods from the Internet, 38% of users said they would like to try, and less than 1% of them expressed a high degree of trust in online shopping.

In the same year, a survey of 10150 consumers from KPMG's joint China online shopping survey found that 45% of the respondents indicated that most of their luxury items were purchased through the Internet channel, and that the goods with a unit price of less than 4200 yuan were shown on the Internet. Compared with the 1900 yuan in 2014, the "reassurance line" increased by 121%.

Although the two reports are not the same, the difference in the wind direction shows that the luxury electric business is still unable to achieve absolute stability and superiority in the mode of operation after several years of operation.

No doubt, this is a bad track.

　 Luxury electric business "itch"

This is the seventh year of Li's establishment of temple library network.

In 2008, at the age of 34, he had been in business for ten years. In that year, he chose a Zen name to create the luxury electric business brand. The two words of "temple library" are the originator of today's consignment and pawn industry.

Although the temple library is the winner of financing all the way, the state of "low key" has lasted for seven years. "After doing business for so many years, the biggest feeling is that the atmosphere of" making the festival "and" creating concept "has become more and more intense over the past two years. Li RI theory has always believed that luxury electric business is a unique category, and more than discount and low price, much more depends on the unique mode of the website to allow users to settle.

However, the mode should be mature and even unique, and still faces many difficulties in the short term.

"Luxury goods such as bags, watches, clothing and jewellery account for less than 5% of online consumption, and 95% of the market is offline." From online to offline is not a simple O2O concept to solve. "7 years ago, on the back of my first business card was" a network of stores ". Until 3 years ago, when we used the concept of" O2O "to go crazy, I realized that we had been O2O for 7 years.

According to Bloomberg recently reported that even if the global online retail business turnover increased by 17% annually, about 40% of high-end brands are not willing to sell their products online. Many luxury brands consider that tailoring for high-end customers is an important part of the brand and an important component of high-quality experience. Although similar brands such as Chanel have begun to cooperate with e-commerce websites in recent years, the category of cooperation is extremely limited, and the most profitable packages and garments are not among them.

And the problem with brand cooperation is not only here.

With the expansion of physical stores, more and more luxury goods are starting to get electric shocks. But the question is, even if luxury goods come online, will they be able to correspond to the low cost mode of callers' characteristics?

Take Tmall as an example. The first luxury brand Coach was forced to close because of poor sales for only a month after trial operation. In 2014, Bubbery also had no promotional discounts, nor had the offline experience. Similarly, its performance was poor, and it also had a 26.4% return rate because of the "no reason to return" clause.

In fact, luxury electric business is still in the electricity supplier, but it does not have the electricity supplier gene with large and low price. In an interview with reporters, Li Rixue also admitted that even after 7 years of the temple treasury, the prices of some items would actually be higher than the price of the counters.

Line is still strong channel

In addition to facing the brand's weakness, the pressure of the supply source is more from the distributors. The traditional agent associations account for the overwhelming majority of the shares, and even have more advantages in the category and even the price. Electricity providers often fail because of the lack of brand authorization, which leads to unstable sources of goods, or because they can not get the latest and most popular styles, and become inventory or tail cargo processing centers, which affect the shopping experience.

The fierce competition has now poured into more online competitors. "One is similar luxury electric business, domestic and foreign; the two is the big Internet sales platform, such as Ali and Jingdong."

Monks and many meat are few. Therefore, "exclusiveness" has become the killer of many platforms.

Li Rixue said that each round of financing will touch more than 30 investors, without exception, the most concerned about the issue of brand cooperation is the question of "whether the brand will cooperate with you", "how does the brand cooperate with you" and "how much will they give you?"

In order to conquer more and better brands, the temple library plan has set up a brand cooperation channel. "Brand has pricing power. When selling these luxuries, it will be consistent with its brand culture and image, but we will do some preferential activities for the members of temple library, and will also combine brand promotion activities." In addition, Li Rixue mentioned that the electricity supplier channel is also actively seeking cooperation with agents.

This is a tough battle.

In 2015, in order to win the British high street brand TOPSHOP, Zhao Shicheng of Shang pin net was said to have been through "thirty thousand emails, seven hundred thousand kilometers of flight, more than 900 days waiting, and repeatedly communicated with each other".

This is also Li Rixue's primary expectation for the temple Library in 2016. "I hope that the new year, the recognition of high-end brands will become more and more high, and we can get some breakthrough and great cooperation and have some symbolic cooperation events. In 2016, we have to make at least 3 or more industrial iconic events.

Exploration and swing behind the hidden competition

But these are only traditional battlegrounds. The PK of the dominant opponent seems to have decided the first tier this year, which really makes the founder feel more anxious or grasp the future trend. Whether Li Rixue can capture the rapid change of demand brought about by the change of lifestyle and lifestyle is the biggest challenge for luxury electric providers.

In this year's strategic conference, Li Rixue announced the strategic layout of temple library Hongda. Although the company's 80%-90% manpower, material resources and financial resources are all on the electronic business board, dozens of pages of PPT undoubtedly display a rather grand commercial layout, involving consumer finance (white stripe), luxury car channel, logistics and warehousing supply chain, luxury appraisal, art auction, O2O, and even the media (the temple library media, which was just established in November).

Behind the layout is Li Rixue's prediction for the "5" of the electricity supplier. "Electricity supplier 5 should be online and offline integration, intelligent, especially the scene."

In his view, "integration" is to meet the various needs of consumers, the electricity providers no longer stay online, but when users need offline stores, there is an online shopping mall on line. "Intelligence" is to establish a database system. "The core of luxury products is the identification center, not the number of appraisers, or how many advanced identification equipment, and the most important thing is to establish a huge luxury decode database, to decode every brand and product, and store the data in our database for the whole identification service." When the database is large enough, it will provide consumers with more intelligent and more experience service, and contribute enough sales to help the channel and brand agents to win more initiatives in the game. Li Rixue thinks that although the volume of database is not comparable to that of Ali and other large platforms, it is more targeted.

The most important thing is Li Rixue's scenario. In the era of net red Photography, we should pay attention to the era of quality life scenes. The source of value of the electricity supplier is no longer satisfied with the simple operation of a single object, but from the follow-up extension of a simple demand, and it can open up more derivative demand.

"If the user comes in to book a senior hotel suite, the idea of the 5 electricity supplier is no longer the original price of 38000. We only need 25000, but we will cooperate with other brands such as red wine and flowers outside the hotel." Behind Li day's theory is the concept of life scenes, which is no longer isolated and disposable, but a full range of needs.

Temple library is also doing some social networking attempts recently, with the temple library media, want to build stronger stickiness and consumption guidance through the community, to overcome the difficulties of repurchase rate, but this is not easy. "I have always thought that high-end consumers need time to do community and participation. We can not run fast on social networking." Li learned frankly.

"Discount will never be sticky, especially luxury goods. What really allows users to settle down is your differentiated goods, services and culture." But this is a long process, so a lot of attacks and attempts to become a common practice of luxury electric business.

Each e-commerce website is trying to show its differences.

Shang pin net has launched a "professional modeling team of around 80 people. There are model make-up artists who can make 50 online models." Zhao Shicheng called it "the added value of the platform", hoping to have more voice in the supply chain through value-added services. And along this line of thinking, Shang pin also pushed the "buyer" team. In this year's "goddess new dress" star variety show, several stars were designed at tens of millions of dollars, trying to strengthen the brand image of "fashion and light luxury".

Shang pin net is aiming at light luxury.

And this year just got the charm of Ali investment, will focus on building luxury shopping flash business platform. It also announced that dozens of luxury goods suppliers and China United Property Insurance Company have been invited to "build a genuine alliance of luxury goods to guarantee every commodity."

Luxury electric business seems to have entered the bifurcation after shuffling, and the caliber of positioning, marketing and layout has begun to differentiate, but still more is in the "groping period" before the pattern is clear.

It is true that this slow business is like a difficult land to cultivate, and what seeds can be planted to bear fruit. Obviously, more bolder attempts are needed, and more stimulation points are needed to wait for the moment when the "Butterfly Effect" erupts. It is just "positioning and wobble", which eventually led to the failure of Damour's Chris in the C round of financing.

　 "Future" future

"We have been low-key for 7 years, and 2016 should be a high-profile time." At the "1217 global luxury Festival" conference at Temple library, Li Rixue said that this is the first public voice of the Temple store for four years. It seems to him that 2015 is the year when the overall situation has been decided.

Although the concept of cross-border electric business is hot, luxury business is still on the edge of the topic. But with the reshuffle of many rounds and the entry of bigwigs, the attraction of this growing cake is still expanding.

The electronic trend of luxury goods industry can not be avoided. According to McKinsey, a world-renowned consulting firm, by 2025, the proportion of luxury electric business will reach 18%. China will be a big consumer of luxury electric business. Prior to 2009, McKinsey had predicted that luxury electric providers would account for 2% of total luxury goods sales in 2015, but the actual figure in 2015 had reached 6% ($14 billion).

And Li Rixue's prediction is bolder. "In 3 to 5 years, online sales of luxury goods may be par with the offline."

But everything is not easy. In the Internet circle that loves to boast of numbers, all kinds of luxury electric business websites still keep silent about their core performance data. The only thing that can be announced is the amount of registered users' "water content" table data.

Electricity supplier profitability is a difficult problem for all walks of life. After all, investors are patient and limited. Once the fund's expiration date is over, it will be embarrassed for many luxury electric providers when the market is exhausted.

　　 Can the "five year itch" of luxury goods disappear in sixth years?

The racecourse is still there, and the running is still going on. In the sixth years of luxury electric business, is it really worth the anticipation that capital can really bring "high profile" to the "lucky ones"?