Month: March 2022

Hongmin International Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Hongmin Group”), located in Huadu District, Guangzhou, is one of the many foreign trade shoe companies whose orders have been greatly reduced this year due to the impact of the epidemic. In April of this year, the company began to adjust its direction, hoping to recover lost orders in the domestic market. However, from building a factory to building a brand, Hongmin Group needs to face problems such as unfamiliar markets and different production rhythms.

A person who is responsible for investigating the situation of Guangzhou shoe companies and submitting reports to government departments told the reporter of Economic Observer that the survey in the early stage of the impact of the epidemic showed that 80% of the orders of more than 150 small and medium-sized shoe companies were cancelled, 20% were postponed, and some About 40% of enterprises are expected to lose 100,000-500,000 yuan this year, about 30% are expected to lose 500,000-1 million yuan, and about 10% are expected to lose more than 2 million yuan. As of September, most companies have restored 40% to 60% of their orders, and the overall pressure is still high.

On the afternoon of September 24, Hong Wenjie, the person in charge of the company’s domestic project DEAL brand, was interviewed by a reporter from Economic Observer.com and talked about some of the changes they have experienced in the past few months-

Economic Observation Network: How did you start preparing for the DEAL project, and what is the current progress?

Hong Wenjie: Our group is an OEM enterprise with more than 20 years of experience. It started with a single store, and then moved to wholesale stalls and then to factories. Now it is a mid-to-high-end brand of men’s and women’s leather shoes and casual shoes. The brand customers include ALDO, le saunda, etc. The main exports are the United States, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom and other regions, with annual sales of nearly 10 million pairs.

In fact, the chairman wanted to open up the domestic market since last year, but he was undecided at that time, because it was relatively simple to do foreign trade, and he was used to it for so many years, so there would be a lot of hesitation about the change. At the beginning, I just wanted to try it out, and the resources given to the brand did not match. However, under the influence of the epidemic this year, the company’s orders have been greatly reduced, forcing us to officially launch our own brand DEAL from April.

The positioning of this brand is light luxury but the price is close to the people. It is about 200 yuan to 300 yuan. At present, it is mainly a series of small white shoes. It has developed more than 30 types of shoes, and it took about three or four months.

Economic Observation Network: What are the differences between switching to the domestic market and previous operating models?

Hong Wenjie: In the past, Hongmin took orders, produced them, and shipped them out. It was very simple, but to be a brand is completely different from a factory. It is a brand new approach.

In terms of building a team, China’s shoe-making industry is not yet very open. Compared with Japan, Europe and the United States, the overall style series is still relatively small, and the generation of shoe-making people is relatively old. The new one is actually very difficult. The original people in the group are not suitable for us, and it is not easy to recruit senior talents from outside. We hope to find some young people with design school backgrounds and works, but such people usually have better choices and are easy to change jobs.

So, in the end, we decided to use brand new people. Now, about 40 of the more than 50 people in the team are new recruits, and most of them have just graduated, which is more suitable for our long-term training.

In terms of production, this year is a big challenge for us. We used to be To B, and we ordered and shipped batch by batch, but now To C, if we don’t want to carry inventory, we must adjust the production turnover and sell The rhythm of replenishment after completion is different from the rhythm of shipping at a fixed time, which is more difficult.

Also, there are too many homogeneous products in the market now. To put it in a nasty way, if you sell a product well, someone will copy it in less than a week. It’s too fast. If you can’t react to it yourself, you can’t compete at all. This is a phenomenon that is currently not good in the Chinese market. But on the other hand, it takes too much energy for a shoe to go from 0 to 1. The future market requires us to be able to respond quickly, which is also a challenge.

Economic Observer: After the product is made, what is the next focus?

Hong Wenjie: The rest of the time in the second half of the year will focus on marketing, including some visual advertisements, inviting young stars to endorse us, and cooperating with Internet celebrities and live broadcasters on major social platforms to conduct marketing activities such as live broadcasts. As before, Hongmin will attend the Canton Fair, and this year we plan to go to Shanghai Fashion Week.

But I personally have reservations about live broadcasts. In the first half of the year, everyone rushed to do live broadcasts. The boss also felt that it was a vane and hesitated whether to rush to do it. We also know in our hearts that this is a cure for the symptoms but not the root cause, but there is no way to do it.

But in the long run, the traditional low-cost live streaming will do great harm to those who want to be a brand, and it will be even worse in a year or two. Our e-commerce partners also advised us not to look for anchors outside, but to develop our own team of anchors.

buy men shoes at shoes for men.

In the era when merchants emphasize supply chain management and restaurants mainly use heating packs for meals, as consumers, why is the KPI of offline consumption so important? It is to do data work for businesses.

The so-called commercial hegemony means that if the merchant needs to add new products, the user must authorize WeChat information. If the merchant needs to have enough activity in its own APP, then the user must download, log in, and pay with one click.

The user is a brick, and the merchant needs to force it to move. Don’t talk about service and respect, it hurts money.

01 Self-checkout

I have never encountered a QR code that neither WeChat nor Alipay can scan.

Until I met the self-checkout payment code of Yonghui Supermarket.

As usual, I came to checkout at the self-checkout machine in Yonghui Supermarket. After I failed to scan the code using WeChat and Alipay, I finally noticed the prompt on my phone: “Please download the Yonghui Life APP”.

The supermarket staff said that if you want to use the self-checkout, you must download the Yonghui Life APP, otherwise you must go to the manual checkout to line up. But seeing the long queues and their full shopping carts, I chose to stand still and spent two minutes installing the Yonghui APP.

I haven’t come to Yonghui for a few months, and I can’t even link accounts. As an old customer, I deeply feel that my own traffic is constantly being tapped by Yonghui: from the earliest, you can directly scan the code to pay, then you must use your mobile phone number to log in to the applet, and now you must download the APP.

I understand the desire of retail giants for online traffic. In recent years, the retail industry has been shouting Internetization. I don’t know what Internetization is. I only know what Zhao Benshan said: “I am not a spider, I am on the web.” , and many years later I realized that merchants are spiders, and Internetization is to stick consumers to its spider webs.

For example, I went to Wumart supermarket a few days ago, which is the one owned by Duodian. The self-checkout is the same as Yonghui. It is still WeChat Alipay, or the staff reminds me that I must download more APPs. It took me another two minutes to download, log in, and jump to the Alipay applet.

Just as I was about to pay with WeChat, I found that my 36 yuan bill had strangely turned into 199 yuan. The staff came to operate for a while before I successfully checked out, and I don’t know if it was a system bug or if I ordered something wrong.

For two items, the process that could be completed in ten seconds at the manual checkout took five minutes at the self-service checkout area.

I noticed that many young people in Wumart Supermarket would rather queue up at the manual checkout than come to the deserted self-checkout area. It seems that I’m not the only one who doesn’t like self-checkout, and maybe even counting the queues, manual checkout is more efficient than self-checkout.

Decathlon has completely solved the problem of unbalanced efficiency between manual and self-service, but the way they use it is to eliminate manual checkout. This is more domineering than Yonghui and Wumart. He completely deprives consumers of choice. I often see new customers and old people in Decathlon who can’t use self-checkout, helplessly looking for staff.

Indeed, Decathlon’s self-checkout is not complicated, and it can be learned with a little familiarity. But consumers are not obliged to learn anything, they have the right to choose their more familiar consumption methods, and have the right not to provide their own data and privacy.

If I ask which self-checkout has left a good impression on me, I would say that Bianlianbee is the benchmark for self-checkout in my heart: swipe the barcode, take out the mobile payment code, go up, turn around and leave, go out Ten meters to hear the music prompt of the successful payment of the convenience bee logo. There is no need to press any buttons in the whole process, which is faster than manual checkout.

But Convenience Bee is now starting to learn badly. Late at night, when I was hungry, I went to the convenience bee to buy biscuits, and I picked one for 9.9 yuan. As usual, I clicked the barcode, flipped the mobile payment code up, and turned around.

Going out 500 meters, I found that Alipay deducted 39 yuan. I quickly went back to find the clerk, and only then did I know that if I log in to the Convenience Bee applet and pay with the applet, the biscuits will be 9.9 yuan, and if I don’t log in to the applet, it will be 39 yuan. Although it is nominally a discount, in the face of the huge price difference, normal consumers actually only have two choices: not buying or logging in to the applet. This is a beautified compulsion.

I heard that Amazon has a kind of self-checkout, you just need to go into the store and take the goods directly home, just like taking your own things. The camera will automatically detect what you bought and send you the bill.

I think this is in line with the original intention of self-checkout: to save consumers trouble.

02 Scan the QR code to order food

The most restrained service in the world is when the waiter is standing next to you, but he just said indifferently: “Please scan the code to order.”

Like the chicken pot near our company, there are a total of 5 kinds of pots and 5 SKUs, plus small pots and large pots, there are only 10 options, and the waiter also says to scan the code to place an order. Moreover, the online menu does not include bamboo shoots, bean curd skin, artemisia stalks and other side dishes added to the chicken pot. Every time a side dish is ordered and the checkout is done, the waiter still has to come over, count the plates, and calculate the total cost of the customer.

Therefore, there is a scan code ordering link, is it because the waiter does not want to write? Or practice low-carbon environmental protection and implement paperless office?

This store is pretty good. It is said to scan the code to order food, but it really only has the function of ordering food. In some shopping malls and brand stores, the first step in ordering food is to pay attention to the official account. I need to authorize my WeChat account information to the store, and then follow the store’s official account to blindly select dishes based on the name of the dishes in the online application. Just like ordering takeout, what ingredients are in the dish needs to be semantically understood and analyzed according to the dish name.

As an official account writer, I really hate that I don’t have a restaurant that can force others to follow my official account. We write manuscripts, we are chasing hot spots, and we are engaging in the community. We have to cooperate with the platform’s push requirements, customize topics, and operate various operations, but we can’t compare. The merchants who warm up the pre-made dishes and bring them are forced to pay attention.qr code generator The rise of powder is fast.

There are books that teach new retail. It is written specifically that merchants move their stores into WeChat through the public account ordering system, and customers can order food, place orders and pay online by following the restaurant’s WeChat public account. Although this is one more step than QR code ordering, the restaurant also has an additional way to retain customers. Through the WeChat public account, you can push graphic messages to customers, and you can also open WeChat takeaways, WeChat reservations, WeChat membership cards, etc. features that have a bigger marketing role.

A series of private domain traffic operation formulas, why no one asks, are consumers willing to join your membership system? Why, is the official account the key to opening the back kitchen, consumers don’t pay attention, they can’t start the back kitchen, they can’t cook, and they can’t serve food?

Of course, the main reason why I don’t want to pay attention to the public account ordering is to avoid the precipitation of user portraits caused by the onlineization of dining data. I don’t want my online data, including whether I have a loan, how many houses and cars I have, whether I have a baby, where I often do activities, and I like big waist, roast nose tendon, and spicy hot on the 15th day of the first day. There are three to five elbows.

Not only should you pay attention to the public account for meals, but also pay attention to the public account when you pay for parking. One time I made an appointment with a friend and went to a shopping mall far away from home. Before leaving, I scanned the QR code to pay in the parking lot, and even paid attention to the public account of the shopping mall first. I only visit once in a while, but also leave a trace of “visiting here”?