Beauty Theory will soon evolve into a huge fashion discovery platform, and its innovative ability will make Ma Hua Teng shine. I have sorted out the story of Xu's entrepreneurship, which was told by a beautiful woman. Welcome to appreciate and learn from.

20 15, build a huge fashion discovery platform.

In August of 20 14, Entrepreneurship interviewed Xu Shi, the founder of American Talk, and described the transformation that took place in June of 20 1 13 (for details, see American Talk: Nirvana of a Vertical E-commerce). At that time, Taobao told Beauty that such a shopping guide website blocked online chains on a large scale, which led to a sharp drop in traffic, and had to make a decision to rapidly transform women's fast fashion vertical e-commerce. Only half a year after the last interview, the image of transformation and traditional e-commerce has long since become a thing of the past. It's too old-fashioned to see beauty in this way.

One morning in mid-March, Xu once again accepted an exclusive interview with Entrepreneurship, and introduced the layout of Beauty Theory from the second half of 20 14. "I don't want Beauty to say that it is a traditional e-commerce website, relying on expanding traffic and increasing UV to survive." Xu said, "No, we have to do something subversive." Beauty said that the total turnover of commodities in 20 14 was about 5.6 billion RMB, and it is expected to reach 1500 million RMB in 20 15 years, and it is expected to reach 100 billion RMB in the next three years. Beauty said that the core strategy of 20 15 is to lay out the future scale of10 billion RMB.

Although he often soaks in the beauty circle where fashionable women gather, in order to discover the innovation of fashion and technology, Xu is still a slovenly technical man, wearing a dark blue cotton-padded jacket and a pink belt with a badge around his neck, and often laughs. The latest book he read is Holovitz's Difficult to Start a Business, which says that there are two kinds of CEOs in the world, one is CEO in adversity and the other is CEO in prosperity. "I may have experienced too much adversity. I am a CEO of adversity. I have to keep shouting and exploring. "

There are two major trends in China's economic development in the past few years. One is the rapid consumption upgrade, users' spending power is upgrading, and they are also seeking more professional and personalized services. The other is that technology is subverting traditional industries. The rapid evolution of Internet and mobile Internet technology will reshape the pattern of the whole industry, from the mode of production to the profit model.

Xu predicts that these two trends will last for ten years or even longer. Beauty said that it is in line with this trend. In the next three years, the transaction volume will be 654.38+0.5 billion RMB, or even more.

Beauty says that the strategic core of 20 15 is to embrace all fashion lovers as never before, take fashion lovers as the center and draw circles outside the circle. "Last year, we drew a circle to give these businesses more accurate traffic. From the end of last year to the present, the main push is to draw two more circles outside, one is to let merchants directly contact users, and the other is to provide supply chain services to merchants. "

In addition to supporting merchants from three dimensions: providing accurate traffic, building a circle and providing fast-producing supply chain services, Beauty said that it will also provide financial support for merchants to help fashion lovers solve the problem of capital turnover.

"As long as you are the ultimate lover, you have fashion professionalism, and you have very good service in fashion, which is enough. Others can be handed over to the beauty platform. "

According to Xu's definition, beauty is a huge fashion discovery platform where users can find and buy fashion. This platform can also support all fashion lovers. In the end, it will be a fashion ecosystem and fashion industry chain.

The micro-circle makes the horse shine.

The so-called fashion lovers are those personal micro-shops or fashion merchants who really love fashion and understand fashion. With the continuous upgrading of consumption, users will increasingly favor professional and personalized businesses, and businesses should understand fashion. For example, businesses selling clothes should first be fashionistas themselves. And those uncles who only shout and sell goods with bare arms, but know nothing about fashion, will be eliminated by the future business world.

However, in Taobao, where explosions are rampant, businesses that really love fashion are often overwhelmed, and it is difficult for businesses and users in need to find each other. Beauty is to put this kind of fashion lovers' businesses on their own platforms, and at the same time attract young girls who are highly sensitive to fashion, so that businesses and users can accurately benchmark and provide more accurate traffic to businesses. Xu said that the ROI of beauty cosmetics is about 1: 15, while the ROI of Taobao is only 1:3 or 1:4.

In addition to giving merchants more accurate traffic, Beauty said that there is also an original function: micro-circle. Some time ago, Ma visited Meili and said that Xu showed him the function of micro-circle. Ma Hua Teng's eyes lit up, and he thought it was a very socialized shopping innovation.

At present, all e-commerce platforms are opened by merchants on the platform. It is very hard to pull down traffic in the turbulent explosion, but it is difficult for merchants to retain fans. In the United States, businesses can build groups (micro-circles) in addition to opening stores. The group owner is also a group owner, and the group is full of users, which is equivalent to pulling a group of people with the same hobbies into a circle. Users can seamlessly jump between groups and stores, interact in groups, browse and place orders in stores.

Beauty said that there was a jewelry store opened by two sisters on the platform, and soon accumulated five or six thousand fans. Every day, group owners come to share with users what good jewelry is, how to identify real pearls, and why the jewelry worn by a star is particularly beautiful ... Users study and discuss in the group every day, feeling that the merchants are very friendly and the transactions between the two sides are very pleasant and comfortable.

This kind of group or circle is actually a very simple and lightweight CRM system for merchants. Merchants can interact with users directly and effectively, hear their voices and get their feedback. Users say this dress looks better in green. If the jewelry can be slightly modified, the merchant can decide the category and frequency of the goods according to the opinions of the users. On the other hand, users find many like-minded companions in the group, and they are no longer so worried about being cheated, because the credit of the merchant will be endorsed by other users.

"Take the group as the store and the store as the group. The group is a shop where people come and go. " Xu Yirong said that micro-circles can enable businesses to obtain very loyal fan users in addition to accurate traffic, and improve fan retention rate and purchase conversion rate. For users, it can improve the sense of security, have the taste of fashion discovery and be more fun.

The birth of the micro-circle is not so smooth. In Xu's view, there are two most awesome user behaviors on mobile phones, one is group form and the other is taking pictures. "Why is playing in the 20 14 World Cup the fiercest in history?" Because of the 20 14 WeChat group, people can pull groups at any time and become more social on their mobile phones. "The other is taking pictures. Mobile phones are the eyes of people all over the world. Billions of mobile phones in the world are billions of pairs of eyes. You can look around and shoot everywhere.

However, the mobile phone Taobao shop has nothing to do with these two major behaviors. Xu's intuition is that the mobile phone Taobao shop is a product of the PC era, and Beauty said that it is necessary to use technology to create a more powerful form for fashion lovers.

Micro-circle is the result of internal quarrels and mutual PK. On the day of 20 14 Double Eleven, Beauty said that the team fought for 28 hours and achieved great success, with sales far exceeding the target. 1 1 The sales department on the floor is beginning to boil. Some people streaked, others opened champagne to celebrate. The office on the ninth floor is another scene. Xu and several colleagues are racking their brains to figure out the shape of a circle, patting each other with bricks, and shooting from 4 pm until 11: 30 in the middle of the night, "making them tearful." Later, they also went to the 1 1 building to celebrate with everyone.

Unexpectedly, the next morning, these people communicated again and suddenly found that the idea of circle form had come out. After a few minutes, they conceived the product form.

Xu said that Meili said that in the next version, the photo function in the circle will become cool and powerful, allowing users to better share their findings.

This year's Spring Festival, Beauty said to access the WeChat wallet entrance. Tencent is Murray's largest investor with a total investment of nearly $654.38 billion. "The peak traffic brought by WeChat is more than 2 million a day." Xu intends to further upgrade this entrance. "We hope to further explore the form of social shopping at the entrance of WeChat wallet, and we may also ask WeChat to open some APIs and cooperate with WeChat to carry out the most cutting-edge exploration in this area." Ma visited Beauty and said that this may mean that in the near future, a new form of micro-store will be born on WeChat.

Creating beauty with flexible supply chain

Beauty said that the third dimension of creating a new fashion ecosystem is beautiful manufacturing, that is, flexible supply chain services. Fashion lovers are mostly small and medium-sized businesses, WeChat businesses, and even post-90s designers with their own brands. In the production process, they are all very weak, and they all have to face the trouble of supply chain.

The garment industry has a high degree of production specialization. For example, a factory produces sweaters, a factory produces chiffon and a factory produces pants. A fashion lover often needs to negotiate with different factories, which is time-consuming and laborious. The clothing industry has to face a lingering nightmare, that is, inventory risk. Every merchant hopes to produce small orders and then follow them up, but small orders have no bargaining power in front of the factory. When the merchant does not have the supply chain capability, the delivery time will become particularly long, or the quality of the goods will be uncontrollable.

China is a garment factory all over the world, which has a complete link from cotton planting, spinning and weaving to printing and dyeing, and then to garment printing and processing. But strangely, on the one hand, businesses can't get the support of supply chain services, on the other hand, factories in these supply chains generally lack orders.

In July last year, Xu made up his mind to build a supply chain service platform, which took the lead in integrating factories and providing supply chain services for businesses. The order quantity of 20 pieces of clothes can be produced on the platform, and subsequent orders can be quickly followed up to control the production price and product quality for the merchants.

In addition to accepting orders from merchants, beautiful manufacturing can also allow users to reverse customization, which is a consumer-driven C2B model. Any girl can upload pictures and collect likes. After a certain number of likes are collected in Murray, Murray can arrange production.

Xu told the reporter of Entrepreneurship that there was a dress not long ago. Through user praise and two-day pre-sale, Meili said that a user model was calculated with big data, and the calculation result was that the dress could finally be sold. 550 yuan. After many days, I finally sold it for 600 yuan. Xu said this thing is awesome because there is almost no inventory.

Beautiful manufacturing can help businesses solve problems such as inventory, rapid production and stable quality, and the price is reasonable. "We can use this supply chain to support all fashion-loving businesses, WeChat businesses and designers."

In order to realize the rapid production of small batch in flexible supply chain, there are several links to be solved. The first is to be able to gather users, make them like it, encourage users to participate more, and discover user preferences through this link. The second link is to use big data for accurate sales forecasting. Xu said that the deviation of traditional forecasting methods is 50%, and that of the United States is about 10%. The third link is that the supply chain service can respond quickly, which requires the computer system to integrate all aspects of the production process in all factories, thus improving efficiency.

If there is no user participation in front and no big data forecast, it will be more difficult to produce small and fast in the back, the forecast is not accurate, the order is not accurate, and the factory is not willing to play with you. "We have strong abilities in all three aspects," Xu said.

At present, Beauty manufactures a flexible supply chain, garment processing and production are outsourced to cooperative factories, and important printing, design and quality inspection links are controlled by Beauty. At present, there are about dozens of printmakers in a * * *, and there are more than 0/00 cooperative factories/kloc. "If your order can account for more than 1/3 of the factory capacity, it will have strong control over the factory." Xu hopes that 25% of this year's 654.38+05 billion yuan transaction volume will be generated through beautiful manufacturing supply chain services.

He expected more than that. He also intends to bring designers and printmakers at one end of the supply chain, as well as users with the same needs, into a micro-circle, and everyone will discuss how to make a good dress together, and the sense of the scene will be high.

Xu likes to study fast fashion clothing brand ZRAR, and often makes an analogy with ZARA. In ZARA's Spanish headquarters, the whole city is small and medium-sized enterprises engaged in garment production and processing around ZRAR, while ZRAR is engaged in building infrastructure to allow satellite factories in the whole city to produce quickly for themselves.

Xu also imagined the beautiful future that the beauty said. "For example, we applied for a piece of land with the government in Guangzhou, set up all the supporting infrastructure, let the factory settle in, turn this area into a clothing base and promote industrial upgrading." On the other end of the phone, Meili said that individuals, WeChat merchants and merchants interested in fashion from all over the country can be gathered to help them produce with beautiful manufacturing. "At that time, Beauty said that it was the Internet open brand ZARA."

The prospect is bright, but it is difficult to shake the whole industrial chain. Flexible supply chain production is not a very new method. Ali talked about it for many years, but in the end he didn't invest much money to do it. Many colleagues in the industry have really studied it, but they dare not do it.

Xu used "very excited" to describe his mood in the face of this difficult problem. As stated in the book "Difficult to Start a Business", CEOs in adversity are generally fierce, dare to invest and pursue the ultimate. "I am a boss who is not so easy to serve." Xu said that only when everyone has a persistent spirit and reaches the ultimate level can they collide with the ultimate products.

The product of "micro-circle" needs great creativity to create new forms. "Our team really PK all night, and my colleagues didn't want to talk to me the next day," Xu said with a smile. Beautiful manufacturing is to integrate a large number of garment factories, not only need to straighten out the process with technology, but also undertake the re-education task of traditional factories.

The present situation of China garment industry is that not only small and medium-sized processing factories, but also large garment enterprises are backward in technology, and a large number of factories are still using Microsoft-era information products such as Excel tables 20 years ago.

Beauty said that she has two "printing plants", such as a small factory with a higher level of Internet technology penetration. Xu took these two printing plants as samples, polished them to an ideal state, and then exported them to other factories. Use technology to promote the combination of traditional factories and the internet, and at the same time provide them with stable orders, so that they can benefit for a long time.

Xu told the reporter of Entrepreneurship that if this part can be done well, it will provide unprecedented value to users and businesses. Now every business has been exhausted by inventory and submerged in a large number of explosions, so this situation must be broken, otherwise China will never be a great fashion enterprise.

Higo has girlfriends all over the world.

Beauty's main application is fast fashion models for relatively young girls. However, when the user reaches her thirties and forties, her economic consumption ability is relatively better, and she will be particularly interested in global brand goods. At the end of last year, Beauty said that it also laid out a global Haitao product line, hoping to connect global girlfriends and discover fashion together.

Xu told the reporter of Entrepreneurship that Higo has set up professional buyers' sisters who love and understand fashion in cities around the world. These girls are all engaged in WeChat business, helping users find and buy good things in many places, such as Paris, new york and Tokyo. Furthermore, they can even provide local escort services for users and take them anywhere. "Your girlfriends are all over the world, that's how it feels." If Aribnb is the discovery platform for global travel lovers, then Higo is the discovery platform for global fashion lovers.

Higo's goal is to recruit tens of thousands of WeChat business personnel this summer. In the process of global recruitment, one thing surprised Xu: some of the owners recruited turned out to be early users mentioned by Murray five years ago. Five years ago, Mei Yan said that when she was two or three months old, Xu was particularly impressed by several early users. One is a college student named "Little Rabbit", who was still studying design. She shared many magazines in Beauty and is a super user. Later, she went to the United States to study and stayed there, and now she returns to the United States to be a fashion buyer on Higo.

Xu Yirong said that this is a surprise. Beauty theory has been a fashion entrance for ordinary girls to pursue their dreams of becoming beautiful from the beginning, and these adult users have become guides among many fashion lovers of beauty theory. Beauty theory, like users, has always adhered to its own road of fashion lovers.

Compared with other Haitao platforms, Higo is more like C2C, arming individual buyers with fashion professional background around the world as buyers. Xu thinks this matter is very flexible. "I can easily occupy all parts of the world." For example, a Japanese town produces a particularly beautiful ski suit, and the price is only half that of China. Handsome guys or beautiful women there can buy them.

Higo also has great innovation in product form, and every buyer has a circle. At the same time, the passport of the buyer will be reviewed, and the geographical location of the buyer will be judged on the APP, which greatly reduces the risk of counterfeit goods and avoids the situation that the buyer says that he is in Paris, but he is actually in a county in Shandong.

The general Haitao mode is B2C. The problem with this model is that what you buy is not necessarily colorful and interactive. Higo's model is that fashion lovers from all over the world gather together to generate a large amount of information, so that users can have a richer experience and meet the more personalized and smaller needs of the post-90 s and post-00 s. Conversely, the new needs put forward by users will also inspire and guide buyers' new products and discoveries.

Beauty said that the strategy in the past five years was fashion discovery. It is also the strategy in the future to tap those businesses who really love and know fashion, embrace fashion lovers, try their best to combine technology with fashion and liberate people's creativity.

Beauty said that the current strategy is to invest, first release water to raise fish, make profits to all terminals on the platform, and get through all links on the platform. "Income is not a problem to consider. This year, it invested 654.38+0.2 billion yuan, and the value was given to users and businesses first. "

"If we can make several circles around fashion lovers this year, including the upward part of global fashion discovery, we should be able to see the transaction volume of 654.38+000 billion RMB." Xu said.

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