(Source: Oriental IC)
Economic Observation Network reporter Gao Ruoying Zhang Xiaoquan, who has a 400-year history of scissors brand, has repeatedly overturned the non-main product "kitchen knife" and related issues.
Following the "kitchen knife can not shoot garlic" and "the method of cutting vegetables that has been learned for decades is wrong" caused an uproar in public opinion, since Zhang Xiaoquan launched the "broken knife summoning order" on July 18, some netizens have successively posted their own Zhang Xiaoquan's "broken knife" on social platforms.
On July 21, a netizen in Jiangsu posted a video of himself chopping chicken legs with Zhang Xiaoquan's kitchen knife two months ago, the knife handle was broken, and the knife body flew out. A woman in Maoming, Guangdong Province, cut taro with Zhang Xiaoquan's kitchen knife, and the body of the knife was directly broken in the taro.
How did this small probability product quality problem in which Zhang Xiaoquan sold more than 60,000 pieces, but the "customer complaint rate was only 0.018%", evolve into a public crisis event affecting long-established brands?
Break: The "Impossible Triangle" of Craftsmanship
The protagonist of this quality incident, "Dragon Sparrow Cutting Dual-purpose Knife", is a product that Zhang Xiaoquan went on sale in 2018. According to the product introduction, this knife is made of "50Cr15MoV stainless steel, with high strength and good wear resistance".
Why can the stainless steel knife body be broken? Zhang Xiaoquan speculated that the reason may be related to the high hardness of the product, improper use by consumers and other factors, the toughness of the tool with high hardness will be relatively poor, and the uneven force during the horizontal shooting is easy to break.
Wang Liang, who has more than 20 years of experience in steel forging kitchen knives, told reporters that the hardness, toughness and wear resistance of a kitchen knife are selected and combined from hundreds of steels, and in a sense, there is indeed an "impossible triangle" that has both three. This means that in order to enhance the performance of creating a product, the producer may sacrifice a corner of the triangle.
This is actually a choice of questions in the process, behind the process trade-offs, is the result of the brand's continuous subdivision of product positioning.
Zhang Xiaoquan general manager Xia Qianliang once said in an interview that the consumer price of many mainstream knives is still between 8 yuan and 20 yuan, in his understanding, "that is not called a kitchen knife, that is called iron pieces." Xia Qianliang's "confidence" in selling the average price of Chinese household kitchen knives for the next 5 years is precisely through the continuous subdivision of the use scenarios and functions of kitchen knives, such as subdividing into kitchen knives, bone choppers, multi-purpose fruit knives, slice knives, etc., and constantly expanding the sales scope of this category of knives. This is also the product playing method of international mainstream tool companies.
From 2018 to 2020, Zhang Xiaoquan's products of more than 300 yuan accounted for the proportion of sales, from 5.53% to 6.71%, and the gross profit margin of products has always been stable at more than 40%.
Sherlock: Traditional craftsmanship and industrialization
But in Wang Liang's view, functional segmentation does not mean the lack of product quality. The selection of steel and the forging process are two important factors in ensuring the quality of the tool.
"The connection between different steels needs to be forged repeatedly, and experienced masters will adjust the strength, duration and timing of tempering according to the sparks splashed during forging. The selection of good steel will make up for the defects in the master's craftsmanship to a certain extent. But if neither is available, the product is prone to quality problems. Wang Liang said.
As an industrial enterprise that produces all kinds of knife scissors and modern life hardware, Zhang Xiaoquan's knife products of "the first share of knife and scissors" mainly come from OEM production. Its prospectus shows that in 2020, the overall output of Zhang Xiaoquan tools is 6.598 million, of which 1.463 million are self-owned; OEM output is 5.135 million, accounting for 78%. The combination of knives and set knives and scissors, the product positioning of self-produced products and OEM products is basically the same.
Zhang Xiaoquan's largest foundry is Yangjiang Kitchen Music Industrial Co., Ltd. Guangdong Yangjiang is also one of the most important production bases of China's hardware tools, and there is also a saying in the industry that "the world's knives and scissors look at China, and Chinese knives and scissors look at Yangjiang".
In October 2021, Zhang Xiaoquan was officially put into production in the intelligent manufacturing base in Yangjiang, Guangdong Province, with an annual output of more than 30 million pieces of various products. Previously, in May 2020, Yangjiang Jinhui also acquired Wang Mazi, a century-old store in Beijing. At this point, the three famous domestic knife and scissor brands Zhang Xiaoquan, Wang Mazi and Eighteen Sons have gathered in Yangjiang.
The knife enterprises in Yangjiang, after years of development, have carried out industrialization transformation in order to change the dilemma of small knife and scissor workshop production and low technology content of process technology. Zhang Xiaoquan is also one of the first enterprises to apply robots, with automated production equipment such as open-edged robots, welding robots, and water mill robots.
Automated production lines are conducive to promoting the standardization of traditional skills and ensuring the stability of product quality. But at the same time, industrialization is not achieved overnight in the transformation and integration of traditional handicrafts.
Wang Liang, who has visited many large local supplier automation lines in Yangjiang, said that compared with the traditional handicraft furnace forging tools, the automated production line often uses electromagnetic heating, and the timed heating of the good tool will be transmitted to the next process. In this process, the time is fixed, from the appearance it is difficult to distinguish whether the material of different components is heated in place, whether it is forged in place, if it is quenched without fire, the steel cannot be well integrated, and the tool is prone to quality problems.
"Brand knives with a price of about 200 yuan to 300 yuan on the market cost less than 20 yuan in Yangjiang." In Wang Liang's view, the tools under the industrial assembly line have stability and cost advantages, but the quality is also uneven, which is related to the manufacturer's in order to control the cost and will not use good steel, and it is also related to the difficulty of unifying the finished product testing standards.
Wang Liang has seen a production workshop, there is only one worker on the fully automated assembly line, he is responsible for pressing the button, the production line can produce thousands of knives a day.
OFF: Productism
The non-main product "kitchen knife" overturned, and the disaster of Zhang Xiaoquan, who has a 400-year history of scissors brand, is not a cold day.
Zhang Xiaoquan brand was founded in the first year of Ming Chongzhen (1628), the craftsman Zhang Xiaoquan led his son Zhang Jinggao to Hangzhou Dajing Lane to produce ancestral scissors. Due to the use of Zhejiang Longquan good steel as raw materials, and after careful production, the scissors are fast and durable. The "Zhang Xiaoquan" scissors were listed as tributes during the Qianlong years, and won the second prize at the Panama International Exposition in 1915 and the first West Lake Exposition in 1929.
In 2006, "Zhang Xiaoquan" was recognized by the Ministry of Commerce as the first batch of Chinese time-honored brands. In the inheritance of scissors craftsmanship, Zhang Xiaoquan has a say.
But in the category of kitchen knives, Xia Qianliang uses Michelin chefs to "educate" consumers, and Zhang Xiaoquan does not seem to have the right to define industry standards.
Taking the product introduction of Jingdong's official website as an example, Zhang Xiaoquan's knife is slightly higher positioned in the "Quanjin", black gold series and Jiangshan series, and the longest length of product promotion is "imported steel" and the introduction of the performance of various components of high-carbon steel. The introduction to the forging process is not exhaustive.
"If the products are all OEM production, there is really nothing to introduce the process." In Wang Liang's view, the quality of Zhang Xiaoquan's scissors is indeed very good, but the production process of the knife is not comparable to that of scissors.
Someone once asked Zhang Xiaoquan whether his benchmarking brand was a double liren. In 2019, Zhang Xinxia, the daughter of Zhang Guodong, chairman of Zhang Xiaoquan Group, said in an exclusive interview with Family Business magazine that Zhang Xiaoquan was actually targeting Japan's Beiyin Group.
Founded in 1908, Japan Bayin Co., Ltd. started by manufacturing portable knives, and its products include beauty tools and supplies, household cooking supplies, stationery, industrial blades, medical scalpels and other series.
In Zhang Xinxia's view, Beiyin Group is a magical existence, many famous japanese knife brands are under its umbrella, with different brands to cover different consumer layers, the product line is very complete.
After going public in 2021, Zhang Xiaoquan also adopted a similar strategy. In addition to fist scissors, Zhang Xiaoquan also dabbles in knives, kitchen accessories (cutting boards, electronic scales), water utensils cups and pots, tableware supplies, beauty care (nail clippers), pots and pans, etc.
Zhang Xiaoquan, a century-old brand, is no longer just synonymous with the category of "scissors".
When Xia Qianliang said to "educate" Chinese consumers, Zhang Xiaoquan wanted to benchmark Beiyin, and its general manager of Shanghai Beiyin Trading Co., Ltd., Watanabe Okuming, said in an interview at the 2021 Expo, "Taking household kitchen knife products as an example, at the beginning, Beiyin sold mainly Western-style slender kitchen knives, but the actual sales situation in the Chinese market proved that the traditional Shape of Chinese kitchen knives is still more favored by Chinese consumers, so the company targeted the design and production of more styles of Chinese kitchen knives for the Chinese market." ”
Watanabe Said that with the continuous expansion of sales in the Chinese market, Beiyin will also actively develop and improve products that are more suitable for Chinese consumers, and improve its products and sales strategies according to the habits and preferences of Chinese consumers.
On the road of "education" or "service" to consumers, Zhang Xiaoquan seems to have gone to the opposite path of brand development with companies that want to catch up.
Zhang Xiaoquan can do a good job of scissors, why can't he make a kitchen knife? Zhang Xinxia seems to have given the answer in the above interview.
She said that the inheritance of scissors forging skills is the skill of old craftsmen, which lies in the fact that the quality of scissors can be judged by touching them with their hands, where the difference is, and whether they need to be reworked, but the average person cannot see it with the naked eye. In the face of the mechanization process, in the process of digital processing of the opponent's process link, whether the scissors produced by the machine are the same as those of hand, or it is up to the teacher to check. However, it takes a long time to train a new craftsman.
However, to quickly realize the value of the century-old brand of Zhang Xiaoquan, how to balance the accumulation of time carrying the precipitation of brand technology, and the consumer's expectations for the quality and innovation of the century-old brand will become the "impossible triangle" that listed company Zhang Xiaoquan will face next.