The Jedi Survival Of "UNIQLO"

With the rise of the tide of the country and the tightening of the market, many fast selling brand brands have encountered development bottlenecks, and sales have dropped sharply.

Fast fashion brand positioning is usually young and fashionable rather than high-end.

Therefore, the target group is a young person with a certain spending power.

This group is quick to accept new things, but often less loyal.

In order to get out of the predicament, H&M, ZARA, UNIQLO and other brands have been vigorously layout the electricity supplier, but can such a way bring new vitality?

1, declining clothing industry

In the context of the overall upgrading of Internet technology, all walks of life have been driven by positive changes.

Fast wear apparel industry is no exception, since 2016, the overall industry began to show a weak growth trend.

For fast fashion brands, the expansion of stores will directly affect annual sales and profits.

But between 2016 and 2017, ZARA opened 12 new stores in mainland China, down 29% from a year ago.

UNIQLO parent company Xun marketing group has closed down 4 domestic stores.

H&M has also abandoned the goal of adding 10% to 15% new stores in China every year.

The market is enveloped in a gray atmosphere.

At the same time, the rapid rise of pure e-commerce clothing brand has made a great impact on the traditional fast selling clothing brand.

The difference between the two lies in the fact that the former can make use of the most efficient technological means to adapt to the development, while the latter can hardly realize the complete operation of the online and offline business and traditional system.

Under the influence of multiple internal and external factors, the fast wear apparel industry ushered in a major crisis of development.

For the whole fast wear industry, how to cater for the development of the Internet era, update ideas and adjust marketing thinking is very important.

In this regard, AndrewRoss, an analyst at clay bank, also predicted that "e-commerce will occupy 30% of the sales of clothing and footwear in the mass market in 10 years."

But even after two years of e-commerce layout, the past 2018 is still not easy for fast fashion brands.

Topshop, NewLook, Forever21, Esprit and other brands are facing a near bankruptcy crisis, and even the industry giants such as ZARA and H&M are also experiencing a slowdown in sales and poor performance.

In the 2018 fiscal year, the ZARA parent company Inditex group grew by 3% to 26 billion 100 million euros, a further slowdown compared with the 9% increase in the 2017 fiscal year, while net profit rose 12% to 3 billion 400 million euros, the lowest growth rate in nearly 5 years.

H&M annual revenue growth of 5%, net sales increased by 3%, but profits fell 21.8% over the same period.

Based on this dilemma, the major brands in the digital pformation, the layout of the electricity supplier, are more firepower.

2, the incoming electricity providers, each shows great powers.

Recently, Tmall general manager Hu Weixiong, on the "Tmall food trend reward", revealed that in 2018, Tmall's fast opening industry turnover increased by nearly 4 over the same period, and the growth of new customers increased by 20% over the same period last year.

The trend of younger cosmetics industry is more obvious. Young people rush into Tmall. After 00, the number of new customers increased by 3 times in 3 years.

Behind such data, there are numerous fast fading brands actively entering the electricity supplier industry, trying to reverse the declining sales of offline stores, and find new vitality on the online business platform.

In the past fast wear market, Japan's UNIQLO, Spain's ZARA, American GAP, Sweden's H&M and other brands almost occupy the head position.

However, with the intensification of market competition and the rise of new brands, these traditional fashion brands have been challenged.

The incoming electricity supplier is undoubtedly a good recipe to save sales under the downward trend of online sales.

From the point of view of the way, small programs and e-commerce platform play an important role in the fast selling clothing brand.

UNIQLO water test WeChat small program store, launched the intelligent shopping guide Xiao you and small superior species grass society.

Through trial, the reporter found that the small grass planting club is attracting consumers through KOL fashion.

Gap's approach also has the same effect. First, the on-line small program mall is composed of 9 plates, namely, "scanning code for clothes", "online shopping mall" and "member welfare".

The preferences of small programs are different from those of offline stores, but consumers need to register as GAP members before they can purchase normally.

H&M has also recently opened a new fashion question and answer community - Itsapark.

This platform promotes consumption by enabling users to communicate around fashion.

However, there are more than H&M products on the platform, as well as competitors such as Asos, Topshop, NewLook and so on.

At the same time, from the website design point of view, Itsapark also looks very much like a social media platform.

Users can ask questions or answer them in pictures, videos and texts. There are also influential KOL in many fields.

H&M seems to want to create a social e-commerce platform with content driven consumption.

ZARA also increased the layout of the electricity supplier sector this year. It launched the global online shopping platform zara.com/ww, covering 202 countries and regions in the world.

Meanwhile, ZARA's parent company Inditex has sold a lot of real estate to expand its business.

In fact, ZARA made clear the expansion goal of the e-commerce business in the early days: to open all the brand e-commerce business in the world in 2020, including the country whose brand has not yet set up a physical retail store.

ZARA's ambitions in the field of e-commerce are obvious.

The development trend of Singapore brand Charles&Keith in the field of electricity supplier is also very rapid. In the overall development of fashion and clothing industry, the trend of decline is fast.

And the way Charles&Keith adopts is different, through the micro-blog, Xiao Hong and other platforms and industry KOL cooperation grass planting way to promote sales.

On the one hand, let KOL match itself to improve the attractiveness of a single product.

On the other hand, the way of sending coupons through cooperation is to stimulate consumers' desire to buy.

In recent years, the gimmick of the "big name brand of shoe bag brand" has opened up.

From the layout of the above several fashion brands, we can see that whether it is to build its own platform or join hands with the e-commerce giant, the incoming e-commerce has almost become an important part of its brand development.

But the effect of taking the electricity supplier road is not immediate. As Zhang Peiying, the honorary consultant of luxury China Alliance, told the media about the layout of GAP's electricity supplier. He thought that "GAP online small program mall wanted to further expand online channels, but at the present stage, consumers have not yet acquired WeChat shopping habits, so GAP may not be able to stimulate growth through this channel."

In fact, whether it is to expand sales channels or increase commodity category, is a performance of declining sales performance.

Whether long-term development can achieve results or not depends on the development strategy of enterprises.

3, can not give up the electricity supplier channels how to achieve the best solution?

Not only is the development of offline stores facing shackles, the competition of online traffic is also showing a white hot situation.

The fast fading apparel industry should not only adopt the way of "going with the flow" for the digital pformation layout.

Follow the wind of the building of the explosive money, the homogenization of community operations, the big price war sales strategy, is not a good way to restore the development of the decline.

Ryui Masa, founder of UNIQLO, once mentioned that UNIQLO is positioned as a technology company rather than a clothing company.

Therefore, simple design and sales, coupled with simple technology applications, are not in line with long-term industry development.

On the contrary, we can improve the digital layout by means of science and technology, and bring better service while reducing expenditure.

In addition, Oonyang Ko, a special researcher of the e-commerce research center of the network society, told reporters about other issues of fast selling clothing brands in the layout of the electricity supplier.

Yun Yangzi said: "the essence of the electricity supplier is a channel, and it has a large market channel.

When the brand develops to a certain stage, this channel is almost impossible to give up.

He also believes that the impact of online channel development on the offline is obvious.

Under normal circumstances, online channels are laid by brands themselves, while agents are common under the line.

At the same time, the development of the two models will bring some contradictions, and there is a game of interests.

At the beginning, many brands used online shops to clear up the deal, the lowest price, and the strategy of goods on the line.

But in this way, online sales are much better than offline sales.

Therefore, the contradiction between brands and agents is becoming increasingly fierce.

Nowadays, many fast fashion brands are aware of this problem and ensure the same price on the same line.

Such a way will be a major trend instead of low price competition in the development of fast fashion brands.