The Four Chinese Brands In 2018 And Their New Future.

2018 is a difficult year for many people.

In the environment of slower economic growth and conservative consumer decision making, enterprises need to find new ways to reform themselves, introduce more products that meet consumers' needs, or change the way of dialogue with consumers, so as to achieve more efficient user contact.

Against this background, the consumer new voice has observed 4 Chinese enterprises that have successfully established their brands in the past 20 years, actively resolved their own historical problems, and integrated the structural optimization of the supply chain and sales channels.

It is also important that Chinese consumers' enthusiasm for local brands is gradually increasing. For these products with "Designedin China" (though controversial), they have greater consumption desire. So these companies also respond to such emotional needs in different ways.

In terms of products, these companies are actively embracing young consumers, such as Lining's "China Lining" series embracing the national characteristics and trend elements, and the design concept of Taiping bird's "Taiping youth". They are welcomed by more young users who want to design labels and pay attention to the quality of consumer goods.

In terms of organizational structure, these companies are streamlining operations and improving operational efficiency. For example, Bosideng phased out multi category strategies and focused on down jacket.

In 2018, the Internet was no longer a choice, but a necessary channel for enterprise development.

This refers not only to the business of electronic commerce, but also to the integration of online and offline businesses and embracing new retail businesses.

At the same time, their position is also gradually clear: Hai Lan's family accepted Tencent investment, and Taiping and Ali set up a strategic partnership of goal 20 billion. Lining and Bosideng also maintained close cooperation with ALI.

It is foreseeable that this year, more enterprises will join their path. To become a real Chinese brand and get the recognition of consumers, there are still a lot of problems to solve.

Bosideng

Bosideng finally arrived in the year of victory: its semi annual report showed that the group's strategy of focusing on the down garment industry has achieved further success: the group's income reached 3 billion 444 million 200 thousand yuan in the first six months ending September 30, 2018, up 16.4% over the same period last year.

The down jacket business has further become the main thrust of group growth, accounting for 51.5% of revenue and 24.1% of its revenue in the off-season.

The difficulties encountered by Boston in the past few years are mainly from the unstable strategy of expansion.

In 2009, Bosideng proposed three pformation strategies: four seasons, internationalization and multi branding, and established men's clothing, women's wear and children's wear brands, and began to expand overseas.

Such a strategy has not been effective.

The first reason is that other brand lines have not succeeded in reversing the image of brand aging, and have no way to break through barriers such as Zara and UNIQLO.

Second, on the way of internationalization, Bosideng also did not identify the location. From the second year when it opened overseas in 2012, the supply chain was moved back to China, and finally ended with the closure of the flagship store in London.

In 2013, the outbreak of bird flu caused the soaring prices of raw materials for Down garments, which also created additional pressure on Bosideng.

Since 2016, Bosideng has carried out hard reforms on the one hand, cleaned up inventory, reformed channels and abolished unprofitable brands; on the other hand, it has been upgrading soft power, reshaping brands and upgrading product design.

After its 2017 annual report in June, Bosideng held a press conference in July, announcing the two venture.

At the conference, Rui Jinsong, executive director and senior vice president of Bosideng, released the new brand LOGO, and announced the strategic plan for the next 3-10 years: Bosideng will accelerate the channel shuffle, and optimize the 70%-80% structure of the existing 3000 stores in the next 3 years.

From 13000 stores in 2013 to 3000 now, Bosideng is now improving its efficiency.

In terms of products, it is hard to deny that Boston didn't get inspiration from high-grade brands such as goose and eiderk in Canada. In the past two years, Bosideng has introduced many down jacket series.

Starting from high performance, there are GORE-TEX series, special waterproof, windproof, breathable film fabrics, and very cold series, with technical elements reduced, but the filling is still grey goose down, with a 90% cashmere content.

Starting from the precise consumption crowd, Bosideng has launched a series of designers who are close to fashion designers and close to popular culture.

Bosideng's inventory level also returned to its health status, and continued the strategy of separating direct and wholesale orders.

Direct store is specific to single store operation, according to the needs of shops in the early stage, according to the TOC mode in the later stage, the order is produced according to the sales response, and the dealers make different order structures according to different sizes.

In addition, Bosideng has cut the first level distribution process this year, and now it can use the group distribution center to distribute the stores directly.

In 2019, Bosideng will also set up the Northeast reservoir area, thus completely abolish the retail companies warehouse and realize the direct distribution of stores in the whole country.

Bosideng believes that this move can further reduce the cost of warehousing, and more centrally manage the safety stock.

Of course, this does not mean that Bosteng has completely lost ambition for the internationalization that he had hoped for. In December last year, a number of Chinese consumers discovered on micro-blog that the hero of the movie "where the magic animals are", Eddie Redmayne, the winner of Oscar's best actor, and Amelia Clark playing the "dragon Mama" in the American play "power game", put on Bosideng's down jacket on the streets of London.

Lining

As a leading player in China's sports brand, "lost Lining" found a new breakthrough in 2018: fashion + national sentiment.

On fashion week in New York, the fashion sense is closer to the first-line sports brand. The sweater, T-shirt and sportswear printed with the logo of "China Lining" are back to the consumer's perspective.

After the founder Lining returned to the company in 2014 and started the process of "putting things right", Li Ning Co gradually emerged from the previous crisis of inventory and positioning errors.

Lining restarted the slogan "everything is possible" and began to change to "Internet + sports life experience provider".

The following year, Lining began to turn around to lose money.

Like Bosideng, when the main business was in crisis, Lining adopted a focus strategy, reorganizing channels and closing stores.

At present, according to the mid 2018 earnings report, Lining's core dealers have been reduced by 1, with a total number of 6898 stores, and the tide of closing stores has been gradually easing.

As of June 30, 2018, the group's total revenue reached 4 billion 700 million yuan, up 17.9% over the same period last year.

Such growth is mainly attributable to the slow growth of e-commerce revenue, the increase in market recognition of product identity, and the enhancement of dealer channel operation capabilities and terminal sales capabilities.

Meanwhile, Lining group's new business, represented by the brand of children's clothing, Lining YOUNG, is also developing in an orderly way.

In February 2018, Lining's "Enlightenment" series of sports fashion show launched in New York fashion week impressed Chinese consumers.

Chinese elements such as Suzhou embroidery and cranes were applied to all kinds of sportswear with red and yellow colors, and the market value increased by nearly 6 billion in the next 40 days.

In June, Lining boarded the fashion week in Paris with the theme of "China Lining".

This can be said to be the phased achievement of Lining's reform in the past two years.

In 2017, Lining's CIO (Chief Information Officer) Zhu Yuangang said in an interview that becoming a "fast company" has become an important goal for Lining.

Correspondingly, Lining is improving the efficiency of supply chain, speeding up the cycle of new products, and realizing the integrated management of supply chain.

In the interview with Sanlian Life Weekly at the end of 2018, Hong Yuru, vice president of the vice president, pointed out that the "chao chao" product of Lining's fire in the market today is still completed by Lining's original design force instead of a group of new people.

He frankly, Lining in the past product design aging, the problem is not from the designer's ability, but the company's brand strategy unclear positioning.

In addition, he believes that the best way to improve brand recognition is to make good use of Chinese elements: "Chinese culture and elements are very fashionable, which we did not use in the past.

A Chinese brand is not recognized in Chinese or in English. "

Beginning in the second half of 2017, Lining set up a special department to promote new retail sales, and continued to push forward in 2018.

Prior to that, according to the new retail business review, Lining has completed the basic data paction infrastructure: first of all, the quality of goods on line and offline is the same, followed by the online and offline products SKU is consistent, and finally achieved consumer data online and offline access, so that they can online purchase orders, offline delivery.

In order to speed up the circulation of goods by dealers, Lining established a comprehensive channel settlement platform.

Dealers can directly deliver to consumers' homes by adding additional products in the central area under the premise of completing their growth targets.

This makes "scan code purchase" and "off shop purchase" more convenient, and also allows store shopping guide to include the off store paction into its own performance, further strengthening the link between offline experience service and online paction.

Pacific bird

Taiping bird, which first came out of the stock crisis, has achieved steady growth in 2018. In 2018, the focus was on deepening the new retail pformation, refocusing shopping center channel optimization, and promoting brand image through large-scale activities and advertisements.

According to Taiping bird's third quarter earnings report, the company achieved 4 billion 888 million yuan in the first three quarters of 2018, an increase of 13.14% over the previous year, and a profit of 282 million yuan, an increase of 69.72% over the previous year.

The core brand of Taiping bird, PEACEBIRD women's wear and PEACEBIRD Menswear, are still growing steadily, occupying the company's main revenue, totaling over 73%.

But it is worth noting that the business cost of women's clothing has increased by 18.31%, and the business cost of men's clothing has increased by 20.09%, resulting in a decline in gross margins.

At present, Taiping bird owns PEACEBIRD menswear and women's clothing, Lok Ting brand, mini Peace children's wear brand, girl dress brand MATERIAL GIRL and so on.

In 2018, Taiping bird expanded its children's clothing and home brand: Taiping bird set up Ningbo Baini Fashion Fashion Co., Ltd. to carry out the cultivation of the French children's wear PeTiTAvRiL, which is run by the Lok Chai brand. The price gradient is lower than miniPeace, occupying more markets. In addition, Taiping bird adds capital to Taiping bird nest to provide fashionable and practical products to the new generation users, so as to achieve the goal of enriching user experience and enhancing user stickiness.

In sales channels, Taiping bird takes shopping centers, department stores, street shops and online sales as the four channels.

Taiping bird is constantly optimizing the two traditional channels of street shops and department stores, while closing some street shops with low comprehensive benefits. In addition, because shopping centers can meet the needs of one-stop shopping, consumers are developing rapidly in recent years. Taiping bird is following the trend and is increasing investment in shopping center channels. But in the first half of 2018, there were 107 shopping centers in the net shopping center.

But in the third quarter, taking into account the slowdown in macroeconomic growth, Taiping bird adjusted the expansion plan set up at the beginning of the year, and appropriately controlled the scale of opening stores.

In the first three quarters of 2018, the Pacific store grew by 6.18% over the same period last year, including 1407 outlets, 3007 franchisees and 17 stores.

The control of Taiping bird for terminal stores is constantly strengthening.

At present, Taiping birds will set up direct stores in municipalities directly under the central government, provincial capitals and economically developed cities.

In the semi annual report, Taiping bird's direct revenue (including online and offline) accounted for 74.12% of the brand clothing business revenue.

Second, the Pacific bird is further standardizing the management of all kinds of stores, including the expansion of store development standards, store decoration, store operation and shop staff training.

The third is to apply the DRP information system more widely, collect and analyze store operation data in real time, and guide the store operation.

In January 11th this year, at Alibaba ONE business annual meeting, Taiping bird and Alibaba signed A100 strategic cooperation to further deepen the new retail pformation.

We plan to achieve a 20 billion sales plan for online and offline sales by 2020, of which online sales are worth billions of dollars.

This cooperation has continued the strategic cooperation between Taiping bird and Alibaba in 2017.

In the interview with "first finance", Zhang Jiangping, chairman of Taiping bird, said that Taiping's more than 4000 stores will be upgraded to a new retail wisdom store in the future.

After the cooperation, Taiping bird will also cross the electricity supplier through Ali's retail network system and open the sea business at low cost.

In February 2018, Taiping bird had ascended to New York fashion week's Tmall fashion day under the leadership of Ali to enhance its brand image. In April, the Pacific bird participated in the Alibaba's "Ali night" in Sydney, promoting the Taiping bird fashion in Australia.

Brand crossover is an important means for Taiping bird to enhance its brand image.

In 2018, the cooperation reached by Taiping bird included: Taiping bird dress and Pepsi Cola, Taiping bird menswear and Coca-Cola, Huahua company, miniPeace and Disney, and MATERIAL GIRL and Nike brand UMBRO.

Hai Lan's home

According to the current data, it may be difficult for the Hai Lan family to slow down the growth rate in 2019.

According to the third quarter earnings report released by Hai Lan home in the end of 10 last year, it achieved 13 billion 40 million revenue in 1-9 months in 2018, an increase of 4.66% over the same period last year.

Hai Lan home's semi annual report released in August showed that Hai Lan's home revenue in the first half of the year was 10 billion, an increase of 8.23% over the same period last year, and this growth rate was 7.06% last year.

In 2018, one of the most noteworthy things done by Hai Lan House is probably the equity paction reached in February with Tencent, which sold 5.31% of the shares to Tencent at 2 billion 500 million yuan.

This may be directly related to the new retail sales of Tencent: by the year June 2018, Hai Lan's home has opened 6097 stores in the country, and the main brand, Hai Lan House, has opened 4694 stores, and they can be found from big cities to small towns.

For Tencent, such data volume is large enough and diverse, and can achieve comprehensive data connection with richer users.

Compared with other clothing brands, Hai Lan's family's desire to promote online and offline integration and precise consumer operation may be more intense.

This is a long way to make long boards: it is impossible to let go of any opportunity to enhance operational efficiency, which is stronger than operations and strategic abandonment of deep product development.

But with which giant, it seems interesting: compared to the new Ali retail which is strongly inserted into the product design process and hopes to influence the organizational reform of the company, Hai Lan's home finally chose a more moderate Tencent focused smart retailing with user data below the aggregate line.

The problem facing Hai Lan's home is that the "Hai Lan's home" mode has brought great success to it. The malpractice of this mode is gradually emerging and is hard to eradicate.

The success of the "Hai Lan House" mode is that the home of Hai Lan has adopted a way of light assets and heavy operation, which sells goods to the upstream and sells goods directly to the shops, so that the suppliers can bear the risk of new goods being pressed. In the lower reaches, the financial type is joined, and the franchisees need to pay the rent and decoration costs, and turn in the fee to the Hai Lan home every year. They do not choose the power of SKU in the store and the store site, but they can return the unsalable goods.

This also caused the inventory of Hai Lan's home to be dangerous at the outside.

In the third quarter, the inventory of Hai Lan's home has reached 9 billion 700 million, but from the 2016 and 2017 earnings reports, through the two acquisitions and sales of the two subsidiaries "Hai Jia" and "Bai Yi Shun Shun", the capacity of Hai Lan's home to clean up inventory is actually not bad.

Another result is that the development capability of Hai Lan's home is not strong.

This makes Hai Lan's home facing the problem of brand aging, and can not carry out a strong reform at the end of the product.

Unlike Lining, Taiping bird and other brands, Hai Lan's home does not form its own brand identity in product design.

For Hai Lan's home, it is also their strong point to solve the problem of brand aging and start with advertising marketing.

In 2017, Hai Lan's home opened more intensive brand renewal strategies, such as replacing the spokesperson for Lin renewal, inviting Xu Shunying, a well-known planner who built the brand "ideology" in advertising, to work on his 2017 autumn and winter advertisements; inviting designer XanderZhou to join in the production of joint names.

In the same year, the home of Hai Lan also created four new brands, the young men's clothing brand HLAJeans, the light luxury commercial men's wear brand AEX and the women's clothing brand OVV, as well as the living home brand Hai Lan preferred.

According to the 2018 half year report, the revenue of the four brands fell, and did not produce the effect of boosting the group's performance.

In addition, in the semi annual report, Haolan's main brand still contributed more than 80% of the revenue to the group. Although the growth rate of the women's clothing brand lived 55%, it modeled on the expansion mode of haolang's home and laid a large number of shops in the two or three line cities, with a gross margin of 29%, down 9 percentage points from the same period last year.

It can be said that the change of Hai Lan's home is still in its early stage.

At present, they are optimizing sales channels, such as continuing to optimize the stock store structure, highlighting the benefits of stores, and trying to adapt the company's multi brands to shopping centers in order to adapt to the consumption trend of one-stop shopping experience.