Layoffs, store closures, Changsha net red brands suffered a "Xiaoice period", is the new consumption cold wave coming?

According to the New Consumption Daily (researcher Liang Youyun) in the | of the Financial Associated Press, Changsha, as a "new consumption city", has given birth to a number of new consumer Internet celebrity brands such as Cha Yan Yue, Wen He You, Lemon Season, Hutou Bureau Standard Chartered Cake Shop, and Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau.

In the past two years, major Internet celebrity brands have begun to expand out of Changsha to the whole country, but they have encountered development bottlenecks.

Among them, the tea face in the past year can be said to be walking in the cusp of public opinion, the aura of internet red milk tea is fading; Wen Heyou quickly encountered cold in Guangdong after trying to get out of Changsha, and recently it was exposed that the Nanjing project was adjusted; the Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau was also suspected of drastic layoffs and adjustment strategies, but it was quickly denied.

In the competition of "you sing and I appear", the traffic heat of the explosive models is fading, and the operation of new consumer brands is gradually entering the second half. Some brands "cold" is the beginning of the early bubble hype bursting, who is the "IQ tax" and who is "long-term" will be verified in this process.

The head brand is constantly in turmoil

In February 2022, the head of the new consumer brands Wenheyou and Momo Dim Sum Bureau were exposed to the company's internal adjustments, and accompanied by a large proportion of layoffs. Among them, Wen heyou was rumored to have laid off more than 60% of the staff in the department, and the proportion of layoffs in the brand department of the Momo Dim Sum Bureau was rumored to be 40%.

But soon, the top executives of the two brands appeared to refute the rumors.

In the face of the media's exposed layoffs and deduction of wages, Wenheyou CEO Feng Bin responded that the company currently has thousands of people, and the layoffs involve dozens of people, which is not a "large-scale layoff". The reason for the layoffs is that some projects have not been done, fine-tuning will be carried out in the new year, and new projects are also being recruited.

On the other hand, Wang Yuxiao, founder of Momo Dim Sum Bureau, also gave a similar response: the news of the layoffs is not true, and it is only a normal department adjustment at present. Specifically, the total number of employees in the company is about 1,000, the adjustment ratio of the back-end department is less than 20%, accounting for less than 2% of the total number of employees, that is, the number of employees involved in the adjustment is about 20 people.

In addition, Wang Yuxiao also said that the company's stores in Beijing and other areas have made excellent progress in countering the epidemic. On February 19, the WeChat public account of the Mo mo dim sum bureau released a job advertisement, saying that the company was "very short of people" and that it would expand the enrollment of 200 people in Beijing and Wuhan changsha in February.

Although in the breaking news about the Mo mo dim sum bureau, it was also mentioned that the performance of some stores had declined significantly, but with this public recruitment announcement, it seems that it has successfully survived the storm. On the other hand, Wen Heyou's "difficulty" does not seem to be good.

Just in September 2021, Feng Bin publicly stated that in the next five years, Wenheyou will open about 20 urban Wenheyou, and launch projects including Chongqing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Beijing within the year. But as of now, in addition to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Wenheyou has not opened a third city store outside Changsha.

According to reports, the layoff adjustment involved in this time is the most likely to open in the near future, the Nanjing project is one of the projects launched by Wen heyou after a new round of financing in July 2021.

Guangzhou, Shenzhen Wenheyou, which were previously opened, also after the punch card heat, the passenger flow declined rapidly, and only a few months after opening the store, there were settled merchants who withdrew. In September 2021, Wen Heyou began to upgrade the two stores and renamed them "Laojie Oyster Market", close to the local food culture.

However, Guangzhou Wenheyou, which invested 200 million yuan in the early stage of opening and completed the transformation, still failed to reproduce the grand situation of Internet celebrity punch cards in the early days of opening.

Sun Hongda, a nut capital, once said that marketing is only a process of landing consumer insights, but how much effect marketing can play and continue to do a good job of the brand is essentially due to products, supply chain capabilities and consumer insights.

Feng Bin also reflected on this, he said in an interview with the media that the biggest loss in Guangzhou is that while wanting to do the local culture of Guangzhou, he is reluctant to throw away Hunan cuisine, and a large number of centralized marketing and exposure are also easy to cause aesthetic fatigue.

Wen Heyou has long proposed to benchmark Disney and create a "museum + theme park", but for now, this method is only effective in Changsha, and the "Wen Heyou" who left Changsha still seems to stay in a food city full of gimmicks.

Waist players work silently

However, not all Internet celebrities have fallen behind the market: lemon tea drink brand Ji Liang, snack collection point snacks are very busy, hot halogen brand Sheng Xiang Ting has achieved steady expansion in China.

Draft:New Consumption Daily Data:Tianyancha

According to public data, in the first half of 2021, the amount of new consumption projects disclosed in Changsha exceeded 23 billion yuan, far exceeding the sum of the whole year of 2020, and also accounted for nearly 70% of the total consumer investment in the past five years.

In January 2022, Lemon Season, which focuses on new lemon tea, received hundreds of millions of yuan in investment from ByteDance, Shunwei Capital and Tencent Investment. Also from Changsha, Lemon Season has received two rounds of financing in only 1 year of establishment, and the participating institutions are "star-studded", and some commentators have even praised Lemon Season as the next tea color.

According to public information, at the beginning of its establishment, Lemon Season adopted a rapid expansion strategy, quickly opened hundreds of stores in Changsha through direct stores and franchise stores, and even expanded its territory to Yiyang, Zhuzhou and even Shanghai around Changsha. It is expected that the number of stores nationwide will triple in the lemon season in 2022, and 3,000 stores will be opened in central and east China by 2023.

Judging from the current situation of the contraction of the business of other tea brands, this expansion plan can be called "crazy", but from the perspective of the financing process, ByteDance and Shunwei Capital have participated in the investment twice and are still optimistic about this brand.

The snack collection store brand "Snacks are busy", which is mainly for second- and third-tier cities, also has a side-by-side expansion rate. After receiving a 240 million yuan A round of financing from Sequoia China and Gaorong Capital in May 2021, the brand's valuation reached 2 billion yuan, and this valuation was supported by the number of more than 450 brand stores.

According to the official website, less than a year after the financing, the number of stores in the country where snacks are very busy has exceeded 800, and "2 new stores are opened every day".

It is reported that snacks are very busy offline stores are mostly hundreds of square meters of large stores, which can accommodate bulk, import, packaged snacks, beverages and other categories, and the store SKU is more than 1800. The main cost performance of store goods, suppliers are mostly good shops, three squirrels and other snack listed enterprises of cooperative manufacturers.

In regional markets that lack out-of-the-loop marketing, new consumer brands that are more niche and more vertical are "growing wildly".

"The consumption track has always been very hot, not something that has happened in the past two years." In the past two years, more attention has been paid to the capital level than to consumption itself. Sun Hongda commented on the popularity of the new consumption track in the past two years.

Yan Tao, founder of Fengcheng Consulting and an expert on the whale platform, said, "In the past two or three years, there are still many bubbles in new consumer brands, and blind expansion under the ripening of capital, but they do not make money themselves." Nowadays, fierce competition, high marketing costs, slowing brands, squeezing out bubbles, and self-hematopoiesis are all inevitable requirements in the new environment. ”

Influencer marketing is too much, and to achieve "long-term ism" or to cultivate internal skills

The success of the marketing of Internet celebrity brands in 2021 once made the network circulate the ridiculous passage of "5000 Little Red Book KOC Evaluation + 2000 Zhihu Q&A + Get Li Jiaqi = a new consumer brand".

Today, capital also tends to calm down.

Shen Meng, executive director of Chanson Capital, once summed up the rise of new consumer brands to the media: standardization is easy to copy, can expand rapidly, and through short-term centralized marketing bombardment, forming rapid growth in performance, which is conducive to achieving listing.

The new consumer brand representative "Naixue's Tea", which has been successfully listed, also roughly follows this development path, and according to the latest financial report data, the company's adjusted net loss in 2021 is about 135 million yuan to 165 million yuan, while the net profit of the brand in 2020 is 16.643 million yuan.

At the same time, the traffic is becoming more and more expensive, the lack of conversion rate of live streaming with goods and upside down money, and the news that it is still difficult to broaden sales channels after KOL launches occurs from time to time.

"When the market returns to rationality, Internet inertial thinking will make these brands end up in a chicken feather." Shen Meng said that when the guidance of the capital market began to focus more on technology, and the performance of new consumer brands was generally weak after listing, the investment attractiveness in the consumer field quickly disappeared.

The attractiveness of bright packaging and unique store decoration for consumers is declining, and the industry rookies have gradually realized that truly unique products are the core competitiveness after experiencing the "listing is the peak".