Author | The clouds are flying
Edit | Truffles
Li Jiaqi finally started to make a brand.
On June 15, the Tmall flagship store of Beauty Wrist was officially launched. That night, a variety of products such as laundry pods and latex mattresses with the "Mei ONE Preferred" logo were launched in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room. Mei ONE Preferred adopts the method of co-branding with the factory, and each product is marked with the words "Mei ONE Preferred × Small Nest", "Mei ONE Preferred × para", "Mei ONE Preferred × Fan Mo" and so on.
Li Jiaqi introduced in the live broadcast: "China now has a very strong supply chain capacity, and we hope to gather these high-quality products hidden behind the Tmall flagship store and bring them to everyone." ”
As early as 2018, Li Jiaqi registered his own brand trademark "2+7", and Li Jiaqi himself also expressed his hope to create his own brand and make it China's Estee Lauder. Now, Li Jiaqi and Meifang have finally taken the first step towards their own brand.
Meifang once revealed to the media that Meifang ONE is the best way to apply years of practice and accumulation to the creation of goods, to match better production capacity and merchants, and deeply participate in the cooperation of the supply chain. "At present, the products preferred by Beauty Wrist are mainly in the life category, and the expansion of the future category is still being planned."
01. Frequent customers on the sales list, and self-operated brands have become the standard configuration of overheads
Li Jiaqi is not the first super-head anchor to deploy his own brand. In the past few years, several major super-head anchors/live broadcast rooms (hereinafter referred to as "super-heads"), including Simba, Make a Friend, Dongfang Selection, and Crazy Brother Yang, have successively laid out their own brands.
The earliest layout is Simba. As early as 2017, Simba began to lay out its own brand, and in 2018, it promoted the sanitary napkin brand cotton password in the live broadcast room. In the 6 years since it was listed, the total sales of cotton code have reached 3 billion yuan.
Last year, Simba personally led the team to launch the food brand Jianfeng Diner, and achieved GMV of 113 million yuan and 975,000 orders for the first live broadcast.
It is reported that at present, Xinxuan under the leadership of Simba has launched dozens of self-operated brands, covering personal care and beauty, daily necessities, clothing, shoes and bags, household appliances, mother and child, food and fresh food and other categories, of which nearly 20 brands have sales of more than 100 million yuan.
In addition to bringing goods in the live broadcast room, Simba's self-operated brand has also begun to deploy offline channels. The relevant person in charge of Xinxuan revealed that in the future, Cotton Password plans to launch chain convenience stores and large supermarkets, and Jianfeng diners may open offline stores this year.
She was followed by Wei Ya. In 2021, Qianxun, the MCN organization to which Wei Ya belongs, and star Nicholas Tse jointly established the food brand Fengwei Pie. After several years of development, Fengwei Pie not only deployed mainstream e-commerce platforms such as Douyin, Tmall, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, but also settled in offline channels such as Hema Fresh and RT-Mart, covering more than 15,000 stores in 160 cities across the country.
According to the data surveyed by Euromonitor, according to the retail sales of barbecued sausages in retail channels in 2022 and 2023, the retail sales of barbecued sausages with sauce in Fengweipai ranked first in the country for two consecutive years.
At present, Fengwei Pai is gradually building a three-dimensional sales channel, and plans to try to sell in overseas regions and channels in the future.
Also in 2021, Make a Friend launched the footwear and apparel brand Reloading, which mainly produces and sells more cost-effective footwear and apparel products through classic designs with expired appearance patents and big-name OEMs. In 20222, Reloading's annual cumulative GMV reached 200 million yuan.
It is understood that the Make a Friend layout of its own brand adopts a horse racing mechanism, first let more than a dozen brands try together, and then leave the brands with better performance. At present, in addition to Reloading, the self-operated brands that make friends also include the home furnishing brand He Ma, the accessories brand Joshua Tree, etc.
In addition to conventional consumer brands, in December last year, Make a Friend also launched a new live broadcast room brand factory for sale. The business model of the factory is similar to Taobao's Tao factory, which directly cooperates with the factory and sells industrial belt products through live broadcasts.
At present, Make a Friend has laid out at least 9 factories on Douyin to sell live broadcast rooms, covering food, tea, life and home, plus-size women's clothing and other categories.
In 2022, Dongfang Selection and Crazy Brother Yang will rise one after another, and begin to lay out their own brands successively.
At the very beginning, Dongfang Selection determined the strategy of self-operated brands, self-built supply chains, and focusing on agricultural products.
Oriental selection is also the most obvious overhead of the self-operated label. In 2022, the year of its popularity, the sales revenue of Dongfang's self-operated products accounted for about 15%. At present, the GMV of some of Dongfang Selection's popular self-operated products in Dongfang Selection App has accounted for more than 40% of the GMV of the whole network.
According to the latest data released by Dongfang Selection, from December 2023 to May 2024, the GMV of Dongfang Selection's self-operated products will exceed 3.6 billion yuan. Up to now, the total number of self-operated products selected by Dongfang has exceeded 400, of which more than 100 products rank among the top three in the Douyin product list. At present, Dongfang Selection's self-operated products have sold more than 100 million orders on Douyin.
According to the latest financial report released by Dongfang Selection, self-operated products have been promoted to one of the three major strategies of Dongfang Selection.
Crazy Brother Yang will start to accelerate the layout of its own brand in 2023.
In January 2023, Xiaoyang Zhenxuan was officially launched, and launched a number of popular products such as garbage bags and toast bread. Up to now, the cumulative sales volume of Xiaoyang Zhenxuan's Douyin flagship store has reached 31.97 million, of which a garbage bag priced at 9.9 yuan has sold a total of 14.76 million orders.
From May 2023, Jiaorunquan, a skincare brand closely related to Crazy Brother Yang, began to explode on Douyin, and entered the top five of Douyin's beauty monthly list for four consecutive months from July to October of the same year. The official account "Jiaorunquan Investment Promotion Department" revealed that the current monthly sales flow of Jiaorunquan will reach 2-300 million yuan, and a total of 30 million orders will be sold on the whole network in 2023.
Tianyancha data shows that the trademark of Jiaorunquan belongs to Hefei Hongwen Biological Co., Ltd., and Lu Wenqing, a partner of Three Sheep, and Du Gang, CEO of Three Sheep, have been its direct beneficiaries.
With the blessing of Crazy Brother Yang, Xiao Yang Zhenxuan and Jiao Runquan not only frequently appeared in the live broadcast room of Crazy Brother Yang and his apprentices "Brother Zui" and "Seven Bosses", but also received systematic traffic support from Three Sheep.
In November 2023, Crazy Brother Yang spent more than 30 million yuan to launch a star concert. This concert named after Xiao Yang Zhenxuan not only accumulated more than 65.72 million live views, but also made Xiao Yang Zhenxuan's official Douyin account increase more than 4.05 million fans in one day.
With the help of the three sheep slicing team, Jiaorunquan's sales data has also increased greatly. With the self-developed app "Zhongxiao Er" as a platform, Three Sheep has organized tens of thousands of editors to release videos in real time to promote and sell related brands.
According to the statistics of Xindou, a Douyin data tool under Xinbang, in the past 30 days, video sales accounted for 31.61% of Jiaorunquan's Douyin sales.
02. Why do the overheads fall in love with their own business?
Why do overheads deploy their own brands?
First of all, in the matter of branding, the overheads have a natural advantage.
There is traffic in the overhead, which can ensure that the brand has a basic sales volume, and is not afraid of not being able to sell; The overhead has data to know which products are better to sell, which categories are more profitable, and which supply chain users have the best feedback. The most authentic first-line consumption data allows the overheads to save market research and trial and error, and can directly find the brand track with the highest success rate.
The relevant person in charge of Qianxun told the editorial department of Xinbang that at first, Qianxun mainly played the role of a channel, and the main task was to help users screen good products, and then slowly began to change to a bridge to help brands open up the market and expand their influence, but with the development of business, when they could not help consumers find the corresponding products, they began to have the idea of doing their own brands.
The extreme development of China's OEM industry has also greatly lowered the threshold for brands, for example, the tea merchant in Anxi, the "thousand-year-old tea town", once told the editorial department of Xinbang that if the anchor wants to make a tea brand, the local tea merchant can provide one-stop brand service, and the anchor only needs to be responsible for sales.
Many times, overtaking the brand has become a natural thing.
Secondly, compared with live streaming, branding is considered to be a more imaginative and vital thing.
Huang He, the founder of Make a Friend, once told the editorial department of Xinbang that it is relatively stable to be a channel (anchor, MCN), but his imagination is very poor, and it is not a business that is more and more valuable, and there is no threshold, which is very insecure. "There's only one thing that is more valuable, and that's branding."
Du Gang, CEO of Three Sheep, also mentioned in an interview with "Jiupai Finance" that live broadcast cannot be done for decades, but brands and products can live for a long time. "Although Brother Xiao Yang is young, he will also be sad about what he will leave for his child when he grows up."
Compared with simply doing channels, the overheads are invariably doing some heavier things. In 2022, Dongfang Selection will build its own independent App, and the membership mechanism will be launched in the follow-up, and at present, more than 9% of its self-operated new products will be launched on the Dongfang Selection App. In 2023, Dongfang Selection will also spend 17.52 million yuan to expand the roast sausage factory in Jiaozuo, Henan.
Finally, as live e-commerce enters the second half, the overheads begin to look for a second growth curve.
The relevant person in charge of Xinxuan mentioned that he hoped to explore more business increments for Xinxuan through the layout of the new consumption track. "Simba hopes to prove himself in food, and this is something that Xin Xuan is willing to put a lot of effort into doing."
In fact, in the influencer industry, there is no shortage of successful cases of self-operated brands. Overseas, there is Jeffree Star, a brand created by Sister J, a top YouTube beauty makeup, and Li Ziqi, a snail noodle brand of the same name founded by Li Ziqi in China.
From live broadcast to branding, in the next few years, the overleaders may start a new round of competition in this new track.
03. Traffic dependence, product overturning, where is the difficulty of self-operated brands?
Although the enthusiasm of the overheads to do their own brands is high, they also encounter many problems.
According to a marketing return analysis conducted by Kantar, a consulting firm, only 30% of a company's sales come from its short-term traffic, and 70% of its sales are contributed by its brand equity.
Real brands often have their own brand stories, product designs, and are able to penetrate multiple online and offline channels. But an objective fact is that most of the self-operated brands of the overheads come from the traffic watering of the overheads.
Some industry insiders believe that some of the over-the-top self-operated brands are closer to OEM in nature, and they are labeled white-label products produced based on the logic of explosive products in the live broadcast room. "This allows them to eat more upstream profits in addition to commissions."
In addition to the single traffic channel, because the complexity of the brand is much higher than that of live streaming, brands need to solve a series of problems such as products, operations, and management, resulting in a lot of pitfalls for the overheads.
Last year, the suppliers of a number of products launched by Xiao Yang Zhenxuan, such as shaqima, sauerkraut rice noodles, and toast bread, were required by the Market Supervision and Administration Bureau to order rectification. Previously, Wang Hai, a professional anti-counterfeiter, has also been on the hot search on various platforms many times for the fight against counterfeiting of Dongfang's self-operated products.
In order to make up for the shortcomings of brand experience, some overheads hope to lay out the brand through investment and shareholding.
In recent years, Qianxun and its chairman Dong Haifeng have invested in two listed brand companies. In 2020, Dong Haifeng invested 150 million yuan in the electrical brand Delmar, accounting for 2.84% of the shares; In 2022, Qianxun subscribed for a 0.86% stake in skin care brand Juzi Biotech for 168 million yuan.
In August last year, Crazy Brother Yang and A-share listed companies reached a cooperation to establish a joint venture company to jointly establish a new brand, tentatively named "Mengshiqing".
It is reported that in this kind of cooperation, the production and operation of the brand are more responsible for the cooperative brand company, and the super head does what he is better at, such as live streaming and online marketing.
For Chaotou, compared with being comfortable in the field of live streaming, the brand is almost a new track, which requires a completely different dimension of ability. If live streaming is the ultimate of short-termism, then only long-termism can win the final victory.
Now most of the overheads have a good starting point, and as for whether they can really become an influential brand, they still need to continue to work hard.