Between personality and business.
Text丨Sun Haining
Editor丨Qian Yang, Huang Junjie
As the founder of gold jewellery brand YIN Yin, Wu Yin's paranoia began with the knowledge of gold and continued to design, products and beyond.
Unlike traditional gold jewellery brands, she is reluctant to use gold as a symbol of wealth, feeling that this treatment is too practical. She thinks of Kim as "the fragments of stars that fell from outer space to Earth after a supernova exploded, burying them for hundreds of millions of years."
Different perceptions of gold lead to different ideas for solving problems. She feels that gold, whose materialized properties are stable to close to eternity, can not only be made into straightforward amulets and zodiac models, but also have a deeper connotation and carry a more modern design. The main use scenario of YIN Yin should not be weddings and festivals, and the product should not be priced by gram weight, but a portable work that expresses personality, attitude and emotion.
YIN Yin has persisted in this unique and paranoid idea for ten years, and has entered the current top ten in the K gold category of the Tmall industry, and it is also the only new brand. The average price of online customer orders on Tmall is nearly 3,000 yuan, and the annual sales volume has maintained a 100% growth rate in the early days, and now the growth is stable at 30%. Especially after the pandemic, she feels that this is a healthy pace of growth.
Of the new consumer brands that sprung up during the same period a decade ago, YIN Yin or Wu Yin were paranoid about being the first to aim for better gold jewellery, and she saw the need – or rather paranoid belief that it existed – much earlier.
These paranoia seem anachronistic in the market, both when it was founded a decade ago and now. After consumers who came with cash asked about the gram weight, they were puzzled that YIN's price far exceeded the price of gold; There are also consumers who don't know the Chinese characters named for a certain series of the brand, and joke that "I can't buy your stuff without culture". When dealing with customers, the team always has to explain.
Foreign jewelry brands such as Cartier and Tiffany do not need to answer similar questions. They have a way of making dreams with a lot of money, and they have a history that has been passed down for hundreds of years, so that consumers are willing to accept the premium. But YIN does not have the capital of a luxury brand, and the growth period of ten years is not a long time span.
YIN chooses 18-karat gold, which is tough and resistant to deformation, rather than 24-karat pure gold, which is softer and retains its value. Wu Yin did participate in the push to make gold more fashionable, but after gold regained heat, it did not bring direct benefits to YINYIN. Most of the opportunities in this boom are brands positioned as 24-karat gold, such as the long-established gold that hit the market just two days ago.
But Wu Yin feels that the old shop gold is a good example of inspiration for her. "They're not sold by gram weight multiplied by the price of gold, they're priced piece-by-piece. It's all on gold, talking about emotion, and doing a good job as a brand. ”
Wu Yin and YIN do not cater to the needs of value preservation, believe in good design, and believe in emotional value. This cannot but be said to be a kind of paranoia.
Even the design itself has to face brutal competition. Products similar to YIN's first Mobius ring have already been put on the shelves of other gold jewellery brands.
There are many problems in front of him, and Wu Yin is in a dilemma, on the one hand, "constantly meet the needs of users and accept market feedback", and on the other hand, "make more artistic design expression".
Many independent designers are creative, but it is difficult to convert a unique aesthetic into a sustainable income; When the brand grows up, the original position may be shaken to cater to the public. YIN is hidden in the middle, and I want to hold on to it as long as possible.
Express yourself with gold
In 2014, Wu Yin and his partner Yin He took their own hand-drawn three views and walked through the streets and alleys of Beijing to visit the gold shops of the front store and the back factory, looking for suppliers, but they were frequently refused.
Previously, they worked at Ogilvy & Mather to provide clients with brand strategy and integrated marketing solutions, and developed a gold jewellery brand outside of work. The motivation for starting a business is very simple: as white-collar workers of a foreign company with some spending power, the two of them cannot buy ideal gold jewelry in China.
Wu Yin and Yin He don't see their needs as an exception. China's real per capita disposable income has more than tripled in more than 30 years since the government opened up jewellery sales in 1982, but traditional jewellery brands are still cramming their counters with the old "dragon and phoenix fortune" category, "which doesn't feel like a young woman wants to wear it." The two also don't like fast fashion, and the more aesthetic luxury jewelry is expensive, and it is difficult to have a cultural expression that they fully understand and identify with.
With no track and no outlet, they scraped together 100,000 yuan, took the common "YIN" in the name as the brand name (the corresponding Chinese is "hidden"), and determined the rules for naming products with the Chinese characters pronounced "yi, yin, ying", and found 45 alternative words in the sea of words in one go.
The first product they conceived was the company's eponymous ring, the Hidden, a 1.2 mm wide single ring that was modeled after the topological symbol "Möbius ring" – a one-sided loop with no beginning or end. They are drawn to its meaning of "infinite possibilities".
In 2014, the first YIN Mobius ring bachelorette ring
Goldsmiths do not believe that anyone is willing to spend money on such special-shaped designs, and goldsmithing is charged according to craftsmanship, and they are more willing to take orders with more patterns, intricate inlays, or even the same style of luxury goods. After visiting nearly 10 gold shops, there was finally a young master who was willing to try.
The Möbius ring is obtained by twisting the normal ring, which is not complicated at first glance, but the width of the ring is too thick and the corner is too fast, which may form a "small mountain bag" at the turning point, which is an eyesore and awkward. After months of grinding with that master and twisting ten versions of the sample, the two of them got a ring that was satisfactory to the curvature.
In June 2014, the product went live. In the following years, they followed their shared interests in astronomy, geography, science and art, and other fields, and each time they launched a new product, the two happily went out to travel, and without much effort, the brand's sales doubled year after year.
At the same time, the narrative of "consumption upgrading" began to spread. Since 2016, traditional gold jewellery brands such as Chow Tai Fook have launched more design-focused sub-brands MONOLOGUE and Chow Sang Sang's "Personalized Aesthetic Jewellery" EMPHASIS is also planning to open its first store in mainland China.
YIN Yin's opponents have increased.
Previously, YIN lacked a sense of self-protection, and was copied by the first cooperative factory from the product packaging, and the new design that was not released even appeared in the plagiarist's store first. Because of the missed time to register the patent, the Möbius ring has also become a "public ownership concept" that can be launched after the traditional gold jewelry brand fine-tunes.
With a team size of less than 10 people and a revenue of several million, YIN has a hard time controlling piracy. After the sense of crisis intensified, Wu Yin decided to get rid of the operation mode of a small studio and become a real commercial brand.
"Beauty and strength can protect their own design, small and beautiful can not live." She told herself.
Design Principles & Inspiration Document
Around 2018, YIN closed Taobao and buyer store channels and settled in Tmall; In terms of supply chain, small and medium-sized factories with large and medium-sized factories with experience in luxury OEM are gradually replacing small and medium-sized workshops with unstable products. After the brand operation, the company's products should have a fixed new cycle and a unified styling style, which requires a new design person in charge to oversee it.
Wu Yin avoids traditional goldsmithing backgrounds when hiring, and she believes that these people are used to starting from the supply chain, looking for ready-made design templates, and then finding a story to frame them, which is not in line with YIN's creative approach. She recruited the designer of "One-Way Calendar", and Liu Xiaonan, who had served as the design director of One-Way Street, joined the team and was responsible for the design.
There is a long document in YIN Yin that records the inspiration for the selection of topics, which are divided into four categories according to "cosmic astronomy", "physical geography", "humanities and arts", and "scientific symbols", and most of the content is contributed by Wu Yin. They are born in a dozen hours of flights, undisturbed trail runs, long ski runs, or bursts of travel thinking and late-night chats.
Rather than fanciful dotted ideas, Wu Yun is more accustomed to conceiving topics along a logical line: "For example, when thinking about plant-related topics, you can start from the clues of 'the most important cash crops in the east and west', or you can organize the 'vegetation that grows at different altitudes'. ”
Then there's digging deeper into the list of ideas – wheat can represent the "pillar of life" and black pepper symbolizes "rich taste." Wu Yin would do a lot of homework, first going up the source, then back to the present, writing a long essay and a whiteboard sketch about why YIN Yin wanted to do a certain topic. Liu Xiaonan said.
Wu Yin suggested that Liu Xiaonan start with the "Ying" series of Luban locks - this is a topic that the team has been brewing for a long time, and wants to try something in the field of folk gold jewelry.
Chinese have the custom of giving gold locks to newborns, but YIN Yin hopes to break through the traditional shape and gift-giving scene of long-life locks. After determining the Luban lock as the basis of the modeling, the team decided to engrave the six gold bars that make up the lock body on behalf of the "six arts of the gentleman" - ceremony, music, archery, royal, calligraphy, and number - seals, so that each simple gold bar has an independent meaning, and can form a small mortise and tenon structure when put together, which can be worn by self or given away.
YIN 隐 " 迎 " Revival 鲁班金锁系列
The Luban lock project made Liu Xiaonan perceive the hazy aesthetic consensus of YIN's team's creation. Soon after, Wu Yun threw a copy of "The Company on the Surfboard", which wrote the story of Patagonia's entrepreneurship and product philosophy, and proposed that Liu Xiaonan summarize the company's design principles according to YIN Yin's style.
"It's hard work." Liu Xiaonan recalled. This is the first time that YIN has formally defined product design principles in words, requiring the entire team to be clear about what they want to do and what not to do, and the determination of the principles also requires a very strong abstraction ability. In the end, she "took the plunge" and Wu Yin summed up more than a dozen principles. One of them is a design approach that is "leading, in-depth, easy to understand, and interesting", as well as "extraordinary ingenuity in minimalism". They serve as a guideline for future discussions on the design.
Ahead of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, YIN wants to release a new sports line. Starting from the implication that "the highest state of sports is the unity of nature and man, leaving a perfect trace in nature", the team selected skiing, diving and other sports, but could not find a highly recognizable, moral and easy-to-understand shape.
The team is also not willing to simply satisfy consumers like a trendy brand, and makes a skateboard necklace straightforwardly. This violates the "absolute red line" of the design principles: "original, leading, not doing", and hiding subtle details.
Repeated "speculation" made YIN miss the node of the Winter Olympics. In the aftermath, Wu Yin and Liu Xiaonan asked themselves: "Is our design ability unable to keep up with inspiration?" But they insisted on solving the problem in their own way, rather than reluctantly launching a series and "wasting" an alternative Chinese character for the sake of hot spots.
Gold jewelry or jewelry?
In 2019, when YIN Yin was planning its first offline store, Wu Yin was advised to open next to Chow Tai Fook and Chow Sang Sang, "People who don't like their design may come to your brand, so that they can pick up some traffic." ”
Wu Yin didn't think so. Because the customer base is very different. "YIN's core users are the more avant-garde, literary and artistic, and middle-class users in first- and second-tier cities." She doesn't think they'll be approaching the traditional jewellery store area at all.
As a small brand that has only been open for one year on Tmall, it is not easy to draw a line with traditional gold jewellery brands and settle into high-quality commercial real estate. YIN Yin also hopes to "protect three and compete for two", first squeeze with the third-tier high-end brands, and then gradually migrate to the first and second floors occupied by luxury brands.
This requires YIN to introduce himself to the mall's investment department, and the first step is to make a choice – should YIN be classified as "gold jewelry" or "jewelry"?
The word "gold jewelry" may evoke the idea of "old design by gram weight"; Although it is called "jewelry", it has a sense of luxury, but it deviates from the starting point of YIN's hidden gold-based creation. "Light luxury" and "light jewelry" are pseudo-concepts of expensive and bad in Wu Yin's view: "Is light cheap or bad quality?" ”
Since its inception, YIN has had a tendency to stay close to luxury jewelry. In the promotional video for the company's first Mobius ring, a bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume appears alongside the ring.
After the branding, YIN was determined to be more "jewelry" and relied on its positioning as a "jewelry brand from China" to convince Beijing WF Central, a Hong Kong-owned high-end shopping mall that took seven years from land acquisition to opening and invested more than US$1 billion, to keep a shop on the third floor for itself.
YIN 隐上海静安嘉里精品店
Less than half a year after the store opened, YIN Yin got its first financing in 2020 to further upgrade the brand's visual system, changing the original black and white theme color to a "more luxurious" gradient gold.
But this tendency makes Wu Yin feel more and more uncomfortable: "If you want to tell the story of jewelry, you have to create a dream, a dream that is alienated from consumers." It is also unrealistic to challenge Western luxury brands in the positioning of jewelry.
The new version of the vision system ended up taking just over a year. IN 2022, YIN YIN DECIDED TO MOVE CLOSER TO GOLD JEWELLERY AND RETURNED TO THE MAIN COLOR OF BLACK AND WHITE, "AFTER THE PACKAGING RETURNED TO BLACK AND WHITE, CONSUMERS SAW THE GOLD ITSELF AT A GLANCE. Liu Xiaonan explained. The font of the logo has been widened, "from slender and feminine to powerful." The WF Central store has also been renovated and moved into black volcanic rock slabs as a backdrop, making the style more rough and rustic.
YIN Hidden logo changes from 2014 to 2024
Wu Yin summed up this turnaround run as "to reach the jewelry positioning in other people's cognition, and the hidden core of YIN is still to design gold jewelry, which is not enough to integrate knowledge and action". It made the team more willing to take the time to figure out what to and shouldn't do for YIN as a brand before any attempt. This in turn gave rise to YIN's most cutting-edge product to date.
“理想之爱”， YIN 隐的情感观
After the brand's second year of existence, YIN Yin added a men's ring and pair ring line at the urging of users, but the team didn't want to fall into the trap of "man to woman". In the first three years of Tmall, YIN Yin participated in both the 520 ("I Love You") promotion and the 525 ("I Love Me") brand event. When the brand was upgraded in 2020, the team that believes in sexual diversity simply removed the distinction between male and female rings, and only the size difference.
On the basis of these single actions, Wu Yin hopes to summarize YIN's hidden emotional concept - "ideal love" - as a reference for product development and brand marketing. The conclusion of the team discussion was: "Be self-consistent and don't hurt others." Respect the diversity of sexual orientations and intimate relationship states, and give equal care to each state. ”
The emphasis on "diversity" and "equality" in the emotional outlook has first caused more discussions and system adjustments within the company: if YIN Yin treats all emotional states equally, should employees have the same marriage leave as their first marriage? Originally, the company allowed employees to apply for diamond rings and in-app purchase discounts for rings when they got married, so what about long-term intimate couples who do not have a marriage certificate? These discussions are also self-questioning of whether they are sincere enough.
A bold idea also came out – the end of the emotion should be as memorable as the beginning. YIN Yin decided to make a commemorative separation and return to the single ReSingle product line, and the main promotion is a "rebirth diamond ring". Team members don't expect it to sell much, but take it as an expression of the brand's attitude.
After several collisions, the design team decided to use the "jade jue", a token used by the ancients when they said goodbye, as the basis for the modeling. On the notched shank, the diamond body can slide, representing the exploration of the future path of freedom; The diamond is made of a marquise-shaped lab-grown diamond, which has a sharp shape that symbolizes courage, while the lab-grown diamond is in line with the state that "grows under high pressure and becomes hard and radiant" after separation.
YIN 隐 " 熠 " ReSingle 系列视觉产品设计
Before the product was officially launched, YIN Yin launched the "Diamond Ring Rebirth Transformation Plan", inviting users who have experienced separation to sign up and send idle diamond rings after breakup and divorce to YIN Yin for transformation. Over the course of half a year, Wu Yin and his team interviewed the participants of these events, and the stories they collected convinced the team that the "Rebirth Diamond Ring" had emotional value and healing significance.
After the product was launched, it caused a controversy about the concept of "making goods for the sake of selling", but Wu Yin did not waver: "Instead of worrying about people who do not have this need and perception at all, it is better to understand and meet the sincere needs of the people around you first." ”
Shen Wei is one of the people who is moved by the product and the idea, and "feels that every 'rebirth' story is real and powerful." After leaving ByteDance, she moved to galleries, environmental organizations, and folk art start-ups, and disliked the products launched by some large companies for the vassal feminist trend.
In her eyes, consumer companies are divided into three categories: one is white label manufacturers with no brand awareness; One type has a brand, but the brand position will sway with the demand for selling goods; The third type of company only uses the product as a carrier, carrying the story and values they want to express. She wants to work in a third-class company.
After reaching out to Wu Yin, she decided to start with a brand podcast with the YIN Yin team, and was ready to invite ReSingle users as guests. In her opinion, YIN's consumer education threshold is not low, and one of the purposes of doing podcasts is to speak out. However, she also has some concerns in her heart: "I wonder if it is interesting and can make money be a win-win situation?" ”
Trade-offs under commercial pressure
Gold prices rose to recent highs, driven by risk aversion, driven by the huge uncertainty during the pandemic, as more people replaced consumption with savings. The revenue and cost side have been hit simultaneously, and YIN has more and more needs to make products easy to sell.
In the early days, YIN Yin pursued brand expression when designing new products, which was summarized by Wu Yin as "making works first, then products, and then goods." Now the order is reversed, when the team sets up the project, they first disassemble the consumer needs, determine the reasonable category, positioning and pricing, and then match the appropriate ideas from the topic bank.
According to the feedback from the e-commerce operation side, necklaces and bracelets are more "correct" categories than bracelets and rings, because they have no size, which can reduce inventory pressure and also have gift-giving attributes. After listening to the suggestion, Wu Yin decided to redesign the "Cause" series. It was shaped by the Greek letter Φ, which represents the golden section, and there were bracelet and ring products, but at that time "it didn't sell very much".
Hidden "cause" series gold ratio
During the iteration of the product, the design team added the red model, modified the main category to the bracelet, and made the same shape like Van Cleef & Arpels' "four-leaf clover", repeated three or five times on the bracelet - all elements that the team found during the research that consumers were happy with, and also made the revamped "Cause" series a hit last year.
Marketing is also changing. Each product may contain two or three ingenuity, and the threshold for understanding is not low. The same introduction to the Möbius Ring, the copywriting on the YIN hidden Tmall store adds up to nearly 300 words, while another traditional gold jewelry brand only has one sentence "Infinite loop of love, the starting point is you, and the end is also you."
Not every customer who buys jewelry is looking for meaning beyond styling. When introducing the Möbius Ring, Liu Fang, the manager of the Wangfu Central store who has been a teacher in the education industry, originally talked about the symbols of topology and the meaning of infinite eternity. After a few rounds of rhetorical iterations, she now uses the "simple, atmospheric, and fluid" appearance as the beginning of the conversation, saying that "with a slight twist, the world becomes different."
"But streamlining the language doesn't mean giving up on conveying the meaning behind the look to the customer, and you can't give up what you should insist on." Liu Fang said. As long as the customer is interested, she is willing to tell the full design story. This is one of the paranoia that YIN implicitly retains. Although often dismissed by team members as too long, Wu Yin still insists on writing his own product copy.
The values embodied in the product should also be "correct". During this year's Spring Festival, only one bank outlet outside Beijing's Third Ring Road sold 600 pieces of transshipment dragon ball bracelets, which is higher than the monthly sales of many of YIN's hidden products. But Wu Yin insisted on not making a transfer bracelet that simply catered to the mentality of "lying flat and making a wish". She believes that beauty should be achieved through hard work: "Individuals and companies will have short-term emotions and business ups and downs, and YIN Yin's works should help users transcend short-term small emotions and obtain long-term peace and tranquility."
However, she is also trying to adjust her "paranoia". "Making red rope is my bottom line." She smiled and said, "Why not let someone else have the blessing of the red string?" There is no need to insist on this. ”
Wu Yin has experienced ups and downs in his mentality. She once compared YIN Yin with other consumer brands established at the same time, and the peer pressure made her feel that she had to open new stores, get financing, and update the brand "visual blockbuster" every year to be considered not to be left behind. But after experiencing the pandemic, inventory handling, "pop-up" closures, layoffs, and watching other brands grow and die quickly, Wu Yin is more at peace, "no longer chasing a formula that seems to be right." ”
In the second half of this year, YIN Yin will most likely no longer expand more luxury shopping malls, but plans to set up hidden studios in Shanghai alleys, open a "slow pop-up" store in Aranya that is half exhibition and half selling, and return to the way of market activities and community operations. Wu Yin joked that in the tenth year of YIN's establishment, the customer acquisition method has returned to ten years ago, back to the normal speed that a brand should be, but "the team's capabilities have been fully upgraded."
She also cherishes YIN Yin's paranoia even more: "This is not narcissistic paranoia, but the funds and energy are limited, and YIN Yin can only attract and influence those who are most suitable and should resonate with the most." The rest of the users can't take care of it, we have to do our best first. ”
YIN Yin started out in a second bedroom in the hutong, and the first official office location was a two-storey studio next to the 798 Art Park, and then moved to an office building near the Guomao business district, and moved back to the hutong last year when the company was at its most difficult.
THIS IS NOT ONLY A RETURN TO THE PLACE, BUT ALSO A RETURN TO THE MENTALITY FOR YIN.
Title Picture: YIN Hidden.