"Buy 1 get 1 free! 100 million coupons for free!"
Some time ago, Bawang Chaji gave away 100 million buy one get one free coupons for hot drinks.
As soon as the news came out, the whole network boiled: "The average cup is about 10 yuan, it's too cost-effective", and netizens placed orders one after another, rushing to gather wool.
The entrance of the Bawang Tea Ji Shop was full of customers waiting to pick up the food, and the long queue went around twice, and the pick-up table was full of black milk tea.
But the grand occasion of Bawang Chaji is not only at this time, before that, the opening of the first store of Bawang Chaji in Beijing was also a long queue, and the explosion lasted for a month.
Nowadays, when the milk tea industry is generally going downhill, Bawang Chaji, as the new "milk tea Internet celebrity", is swimming against the current and maintaining high sales growth.
And its development is rocket-like.
In 2017, Bawang Tea Ji was born, and in just a few years, the number of stores has increased from 0 to more than 3,200, with a growth rate of 133.4%.
In 2021, Bawang Chaji also got two rounds of investment within 3 months, with a total amount of 300 million, which is a dark horse of milk tea that cannot be ignored, and now its market valuation has reached 3 billion yuan.
With such rapid development, how did Bawang Chaji do it?
At the beginning of the establishment of Bawang Chaji, from product positioning to packaging design, it all relied on "imitation".
Before the advent of Bawang Tea, there were two completely different subdivisions of milk tea on the market.
A kind of milk tea is rich in flavor, containing rich ingredients such as taro paste, soy milk, mochi, and pulp, which makes it difficult to tell who is the protagonist for a while.
The other kind of milk tea is completely opposite, which is called "refreshing milk tea", "light milk tea", "raw leaf fresh milk tea", etc., and there are many names.
Its taste is lighter, and there are no various ingredients, it is simple milk and tea, and later, it launched the form of "tea + cream" and "tea + milk foam", making the combination of tea and milk more fashionable.
In this track, Chayan Yuese, which was established in Changsha in 2013, is one of the pioneers.
At that time, foreign netizens would make a special trip to Hunan, just to buy a cup of its milk tea, and joked: "Changsha is full of tea and pleasant colors, a few hundred meters away from a store, but every store has to queue up!"
Seeing the success of her predecessors, Overlord Chaji seized the opportunity and "debuted" with the trend.
In November 2017, its first store opened in Kunming, and Chayan Yuese has also become the imitation object of its all-round model.
In terms of product taste, both are a combination of "Chinese tea" + "fresh milk".
In the tea base matching, they also have overlapping places, from the tea base of the two best-selling 5 products, it can be seen that both use "white peach oolong" and "osmanthus oolong".
In the name of the product, the tea face and pleasant color include "Gardenia Fairy Coconut", "Qingmo Guanyin", "Mountain Gardenia", and the corresponding "Gardenia Raw Coconut", "Youlan Latte", "Lingnan Jiali" and so on.
The most obvious similarity is the logo design and brand positioning of the two companies.
The logo of Chayan Yue is a red background "Chinese style beauty picture", and the brand positioning is "New Chinese Fun Life", while the logo of Bawang Tea Ji is a red background "Drama Beauty Picture", and the brand positioning is "New Chinese National Style Tea Drink".
However, although Overlord Chahime has been imitating, its expansion ambitions have long been planted.
In 2018, Bawang Chaji was deployed in Haikou, Chengdu, Dalian, Guangzhou and other places, and at the end of the year, it opened a store in Nanjing and Beijing.
A year later, Bawang Chaji went abroad and opened its first store in Malaysia, and after receiving more than 300 million yuan in financing, it opened 619 new stores, more than the previous three years combined.
By this year, Bawang Chaji has 2,283 stores across the country, with a valuation of up to 3 billion yuan.
Regarding the rapid expansion of Bawang Chaji, the founder Zhang Junjie once said:
"The most important foundation in the field of milk tea is that the scale must be large enough, and only with scale can there be opportunities to be on the table. ”
As a latecomer in the tea industry, Bawang Tea Ji can catch up with the latter, which is inseparable from the help of standardized production, large-scale strategy, franchise mechanism and other aspects.
The founder, Zhang Junjie, believes that milk tea, like coffee, is addictive, and through smoking, it can make milk tea easier to store and circulate.
Fruit tea, not to mention its own loss, also needs cold chain distribution and more refrigerator storage, which invisibly increases production costs and is a test for the management and operation of enterprises.
In this regard, Zhang Junjie once said: "Everyone knows that the fruit tea track is good, but I am a person who is particularly knowledgeable about current affairs. ”
With a category that can be standardized, then Bawang Chaji has created a single product that can be standardized - Boya Juexian.
It is the company's best-selling product, which can reach about 35% of sales, and its raw materials are only tea, milk and sugar, which is very suitable for industrial production.
In the production process, in order to maintain the same level of quality, Bawang Chaji adopts a fully automatic machine production, and there is always an error in manual labor, so that the machine can ensure the quality of milk tea.
According to reports, Bawang Chaji has its own tea garden, and the tea has been standardized and distributed, and in production, the automatic equipment can control the taste difference of each cup of popular tea to one thousandth.
With such a small gap, Bawang Tea Ji can completely do it, and different stores produce exactly the same milk tea, forming a "streamlined" production, which also ensures that the brand can replicate countless identical stores and gradually scale up.
The automated equipment also improves the store's ability to respond quickly.
In 2022, orders for Bawang Chaji Nanjing store exploded on the first day of opening, and many consumers gave a lot of bad reviews due to the long waiting time and poor experience.
But after only one day, Bawang Chaji solved this thorny problem, and at the same time, the sales volume increased to 4,000 cups in a single day.
This is the credit of automated tea making, which liberates the redundant labor force and allows these labor forces to do service work or small program order guidance, and improve personnel utilization.
In addition, in terms of business model, Bawang Chaji adopts direct sales and franchise at the same time.
Its pace of progress is to first conduct an overall survey of the selected area to understand the local economic level, population size, market volume, etc.
Then plan the layout of 1-3 years, set up branches, establish teams, open direct stores, and finally open franchises.
Of course, in terms of store size, it also has its own strategy.
It will first open a large store of more than 200 square meters to improve the influence and competitiveness of the brand, and then continue to copy about 60 square meters of mainstream stores to do large-scale promotion, narrow the distance with consumers, and bring a better experience.
From the location of the store, Bawang Chaji knows how to avoid competitors and open stores differently.
According to the data, 53% of Bawang Chaji's stores are opened in shopping malls and other shopping places, 24% of the stores are opened near the community, and the store opening rate of other big brands in shopping places is generally about 30%.
From the distribution of the city, the overlord tea girl is not "joining in the fun".
The largest number of stores were opened in Guangdong, Zhejiang, Sichuan and other places, and the selected cities were mainly new first-tier (about 32.6%), second-tier (about 21.45%), and third-tier (about 18.14%).
Zhang Junjie once said:
"Changing the location of the city can enhance the brand awareness of users in second- and third-tier cities, which will bring a wave of growth dividends to the brand. ”
In this way, the brand not only avoids the strong competition in the first-tier cities, but also creates more room for marketing.
The homogenization of the milk tea track is serious, and if Bawang Chaji wants to stand out, she naturally has to put more effort into marketing.
After Bawang Chaji "debuted" by imitating tea and beauty, it began to imitate other big brands.
In 2021, the brand launched a new logo, using the "simple color matching + strong visual impact" mode, and netizens found that this is similar to the Starbucks logo.
In 2022, on the occasion of its 5th anniversary, Bawang Chaji launched a new packaging design inspired by the Ancient Tea Horse Road in Yunnan, which is the same as Dior's classic bag, both in terms of style and illustration style.
This year, Bawang Chaji has launched several new packaging, which are similar to LV's patterns, GUCCI's colors, and Chanel's camellias.
Imitation of big-name design, can make each package quickly out of the circle, if you do original design, the effect and finished product can not be controlled, imitation is of course the most preferred.
And this also brought a wave of discussion to Bawang Chaji, some netizens scolded Bawang Chaji's plagiarism, and some fans stood up and said that these big names usually plagiarize a lot.
Regardless of whether netizens praise or scold, Bawang Chaji has gained huge traffic, increased its popularity, and is more likely to be chosen by ordinary consumers.
At the same time, Bawang Tea Ji is also emerging in an endless stream in terms of promotion.
Every time a new store opens and a major festival, Bawang Chaji will launch a "blind box cup tearing cup activity", in the lower third of the milk tea cup, you can tear the teacup, and the event prizes are placed inside, including coupons, cosmetics, perfume samples, hanging ornaments, etc., and the most expensive products can reach 1,000 yuan.
In 2021, the average daily sales of stores in the "Double Eleven" event will be 25,000 yuan, and the highest sales volume will be 38,000 yuan.
In addition, when the 2,000th store in the world opened, it invited 2,000 fans to drink for seven days, and at the fifth anniversary, it invited about 210,000 people to try the new product for free.
MORE THAN 5,000 CALORIE CALCULATOR GIFT PACKAGES WERE GIVEN AWAY IN CONJUNCTION WITH KEEP, AND MORE THAN 5,000 OPENING GIFTS WERE LAUNCHED IN CONJUNCTION WITH XIAOHONGSHU.
Not long ago, the sixth anniversary celebration of Bawang Chaji gave away 300,000 free coupons for Boya, which caused the whole network to boil.
On Xiaohongshu, there are more than 670,000 notes about Overlord Chaji, and netizens ridiculed: "Boya Absolute String buy one get one free, the staff's hands are going to shake out of Mars!"
The company has also conducted many talent tests on Xiaohongshu, with about 1,600 of them, while Chayan Yuese only has 102 of them.
At the same time, Bawang Chaji also took advantage of the popularity of the short drama to shoot a national style short drama to match her Chinese style image, although the plot of the short drama is old-fashioned, but because of the exquisite costume and fast rhythm, it has also won some praise.
Overlord Chaji also "dares to be the first".
In recent years, consumers' demand for food ingredients and health management has increased, and Bawang Chaji has disclosed the calories of its milk tea before all milk tea brands, and has also set up a "low-burden sugar control zone" on the menu, so that consumers can drink milk tea without burden.
Through hot marketing, the brand awareness of Bawang Chaji has been rapidly improved, but this does not mean that it is restless.
Shang Xiangmin, the co-founder of Bawang Chaji, once said something like this:
"In the future, Bawang Tea will be like Starbucks, (consumers) will not only buy because it tastes good, but because they agree with the brand concept. ”
But from all aspects, if Overlord Chaji wants to become an "Oriental Starbucks", she still has to face many challenges.
Boya Juexian is the star product of Bawang Tea Ji, which has sold more than 100 million cups, but this is also its only popular model, which has obvious drawbacks in the homogenization of the milk tea industry.
Other milk tea brands enhance their competitiveness by constantly launching new products or developing diversified new products, such as Shanghai Auntie, Tea Baidao and other brands, all of which have fresh milk tea, lemon tea, fruit tea, fresh milk tea and other types to meet the diverse needs of consumers.
And when there is a hit in the market, other brands will follow the market and launch new products to seize the market, for example, when the freshly made yogurt was hot before, brands such as Heytea and CoCo immediately came up with yogurt products.
However, Bawang Tea Ji focuses on "original tea and fresh milk tea", and the product flexibility is limited, which makes it difficult to maintain the freshness of consumers and has poor anti-risk ability.
And Bawang Tea has almost completely abandoned the category of fruit tea, which limits the brand's imagination in the future to a certain extent.
The milk tea market is a fiercely competitive and rapidly iterative field, and new brands such as Ma Wuwang, Jasmine Milk White, and Tea Li Yishi continue to pour into the track.
Secondly, Bawang Chaji has always been around other big brands, although the popularity is maintained well, and it often appears in the field of vision of consumers.
However, if the brand wants to develop in the long term and achieve internationalization, it is not feasible to rely on imitation and plagiarism alone, and it also needs to have a clear brand positioning and unique brand culture.
In addition, the franchise cost of Bawang Chaji is basically 80-1 million, which is higher than Luckin Coffee, but the brand influence of Bawang Chaji has not reached the strength of the head.
When the brand popularity fades, the sales of Bawang Tea will become a big problem.
To this end, Zhang Junjie chose to develop the market in Europe and North America, hoping to gain a foothold overseas and seek increments by replicating the successful experience in China.
Looking back on the entrepreneurial history of Bawang Chaji, Zhang Junjie said:
"To live, do things first, live well, and then build momentum, and live big, to follow the trend." ”
Nowadays, Bawang Chaji is adhering to the continuous momentum to seize the traffic, but the popularity of "Internet celebrity" will always fade, and if the brand wants to continue to develop, it is still necessary to return to the essence of the product and meet the fundamental needs of consumers.
In the long run, we can make our Chinese milk tea based on the local and go to the world.
- END -
Resources:
DT Business Observation: "Overlord Tea Lady, Crossing the River with Pleasant Tea"
Si Rui's insight: "How to face the "ambush" of the milk tea industry
Food Research Exchange FTA: "Crazy opening 1,000 stores, why is Bawang Chaji so popular?"
Daily People: "The money that the tea face didn't make, the overlord tea queen earned"
Author: Tinglan
Editor: Willow Leaf chatter