Case 1: Xue Weicheng: Bedroom supplies make billions of wealth.
In the 1980s. Xue Weicheng, from Nantong, Jiangsu Province, an industrial and commercial family, began to buy pillowcases sewn by rural people very early and shipped them to the city to sell to department stores.
Typical entrepreneurial grassroots hero
The market is pried open a little bit, and the business is getting bigger and bigger. 1985, Xue Weicheng sold pillowcases to Northeast China, Tianjin, Shanxi and other places. Shopping malls look at samples and place orders, and organize production at home. Department stores in many cities, large and small, have become his partners.
In those years, was it the same? Running a business? There are countless people in Nantong, but why is Xue Weicheng the most successful today? In fact, he is not smarter than others, but more persistent, more dedicated and more diligent than others. Business methods are similar, others pay nine points, and Xue Weicheng always pays twelve points.
1992, the two brothers moved the increasingly prosperous factory from the countryside to Nantong city, and hundreds of employees went into battle to transform the enterprise from top to bottom. Business has taken on a new look. This year, the business of sheets and bedspreads of the Xue brothers has reached nearly 4 million yuan. Also this year. The two brothers took advantage of the trend and began to plan to attack Shanghai, the commanding height of the market. Shanghai is not a fun place, and countless businessmen have failed from there. At that time, there were many Guangdong brand products for sale in Shanghai shopping malls. The new Xue brothers have no brand, but they are desperate to fight for status and popularity with Cantonese people in the shopping mall. There was a difficult and dangerous infighting between them, which ended in the failure of Cantonese.
Did Xue Weicheng untie the reporter today? Defeat the strong with the weak? Mystery:? In fact, the quality and design of both sides are similar, and the quality of selling is also due to other subtle differences. Due to different regional cultures and language barriers, Cantonese people who always look up rarely communicate with the people below, and rarely take into account the feelings of front-line counter staff when dealing with problems. Therefore, the relationship between Cantonese people and Shanghai salespeople and counter leaders is very poor, but the key to sales is front-line salespeople. Therefore, no matter how Guangdong people do public relations, the actual sales are not good. ?
Then the Xue brothers are different. They put? Treat all your partners as your own partners and family? . Treat each other sincerely. Salespeople try their best to get on well with everyone in the mall, from top management to leaders, to cleaners and warehouse keepers, and they should respect and be friendly without discrimination. Invisibly, they won a harmonious and benign business environment.
? Does mop have anything to do with our sales? Yes How can you do business if the cleaner wipes your counter with a mop as soon as he sees a customer? Cantonese people are rude to them, so they treat them like this. Our respect and sincerity won their support. So once there is business at the counter, they will leave quietly even if they are cleaning. ?
? In addition, the owner of the mall. At that time. New goods are piled up and delivered by the warehouse. If the warehouse staff has a bad relationship with you, he will put your goods at the bottom. On a Sunday, a counter in a big shopping mall can sell 30 thousand, and a smaller shopping mall can also sell 20 thousand. If your goods are pressed in and you want them in front, he will say they are crushed. If you can't get it out, you will sell 65438+ 10,000 less a month! ?
Two examples, see the big from the small. When did the Xue brothers? Partner? Concept, so penetrated into every level and detail of business, there is no reason why business is not smooth. It also proves that they are more focused than others. Think deeply and comprehensively about everything. Like this? Partner? With what? Focus? Idea is one of the important cultural genes for the success of business in Luo Lai.
The brand originated in Italy
1September 1992, Xue Weicheng, an expert in shopping malls, went to Italy. He needs to find inspiration there.
Although the products sell well. But the brothers still think something is wrong. How to make consumers want to buy a bed sheet pillowcase that every household can make by themselves? Who should the product be sold to? What kind of brand should I be? With many doubts, Xue Weicheng hopes to find inspiration in Italy, the most developed country in the world's home textile industry. Sure enough, an unintentional lingering in the church gave him a clear idea.
At that time, Xue Weicheng visited St. Kyle's Cathedral in Venice. This church is sacred and elegant. Walking around it, Xue Weicheng was suddenly fascinated by the strangeness of European art. The color inside the church was very bright and intense, which looked extremely exaggerated, but when combined with the people in the church, it showed an intoxicating beauty. This is a unique aesthetic application in order to create a whole spiritual atmosphere.
? Can this European aesthetic feeling be applied to the design of bedding? Just when Xue Weicheng realized something, the church echoed with the voice of Cipriano, a famous musician in the 6th century. De? Lorai's pastoral music. After the music, Xue Weicheng and the church music director exchanged their inner feelings. Changle said:? Home textile is definitely an art of life, and any art form should consider people's feelings. Everyone has a need for artistic enjoyment. If you inspire people's artistic temperament, you will succeed. ?
At that moment, it seemed like an epiphany! Xue Weicheng suddenly felt that the sky above him was clear. He finally realized the orientation of his career, making middle and high-grade bedding in European style. Start one? Let consumers pursue the art of life? Home textile brand. This style and concept is absolutely blank in the domestic market! After returning to China, Xue Weicheng used Italian musician Cipriano? De? Luo Lai named this brand. At the same time, it also adopted the profile portrait of Lacny, the goddess in charge of textile industry in ancient Greek mythology. As an auxiliary graphic of the brand, it strengthens the cultural connotation of European style. At this point, the Luolai brand was born.
Make it bigger! 1994 Luo Lai took out nearly 400,000 yuan. CI identification system was first designed in domestic home textile enterprises. Since then, the concept of brand management has penetrated into the blood of Luolai people. And then Luo Lai joined in? National Needle and Cotton Textile Expo? Wait, a lot of exhibitions. The novel and atmospheric image and excellent product quality attracted shopping malls from all over the world to attend the conference? Treasure hunt? Our textile manager expressed surprise at this. ? Since then, we have gained a good reputation in the industry. ?
At the same time, Luo Lai stepped up its marketing efforts. In full swing, they moved to the national market and adopted the general office marketing model of all industries at that time, flattening. It is equivalent to the direct retail of manufacturers, and the profit space is huge. In the early stage, we set up offices in Beijing, Taiyuan, Hangzhou and other areas 10. Office building and shopping mall transactions, cash on delivery, retail price of 500- 1 1,000 yuan/set, accounting period of 30 days. Just a few months. Shopping centers in provincial capitals are covered with Luo Lai products.
Soon, a new home textile brand, Ran Ran, rose, and sales all over the country increased. Between 1995 and 1996, Luo Lai successfully grasped the momentum of the Shanghai market in the previous two years. Partner, focus, Excellence? Our concept has created brilliant achievements in various places. Eight offices in Beijing, Wuhan, Taiyuan and Hangzhou beat all their rivals in the competitive sales, a home textile product of major local shopping malls!
1at the beginning of 997, Xue Weicheng, who was full of ambition, decided to go out and open up a blank market in person in order to expand his victory. Specializing in hotel textiles. Hotel bedding business is big, and the profit is considerable. Luo Lai is in the care of his brother. Who knows what the state-owned system of hotels is like? Obstacles Xue Weicheng outside the system has different ideas, and business negotiations always end in discord. After a year's hard work, the business still hasn't progressed. At this time, a crisis that Cheng had been worried about for a long time suddenly broke out, and the whole office business collapsed like an avalanche!
Luolai strategic transformation
The drawbacks of the office model will be devastating if they don't break out. Here's the thing: 1997 or so. Sustainable development of social economy. The China market has changed from a seller's market in short supply to a buyer's market in oversupply, and the goods are unsalable, and shopping malls generally start to postpone payment, and Luolai office is not immune; At the same time, after years of operation, the office has a large backlog of goods, and all the profits have become inventory. In this way, day after day, liquidity is stretched.
Especially 1997 and 1998, the chain stores Zhengzhou Asia and Qiancun Department Store closed down one after another, and other shopping malls were so nervous that it was completely difficult to recover the payment for Luo Lai. That's a
? Years of war? Beijing Qiancun Department Store closed down, and a supplier couple jumped to their deaths in public. Luo Lai can only pull back more than 800,000 yuan of washing machines and watches. 1998, the sales of Luolai in that year was more than 30 million yuan. The book profit is more than 2 million, but there is actually no cash profit, and the working capital is running out.
The situation is imminent, and the enterprise may close down at any time! Xue Weicheng, who is being troubled by hotel textiles, is shocked into a cold sweat. He decided to shorten the front line, stop the hotel project, and return to Luolai to fight side by side with his younger brother. ? At that time, I realized that the sales model must be transformed. Then the two of us went around looking for ways to save Luo Lai. ?
They found that a colleague in China, using the franchise chain model of specialty stores, did a very good job. This model has a very obvious decompression effect on funds and management, and the two brothers immediately decided to try to open a shop. 1999 65438+ 10, the first luolai home textile shop opened in Renmin road, Nantong. In the peak season, it was upgraded to 700- 1200 yuan. The retail price of this set was the most expensive in the industry, but the on-site transaction was hot. Far better than shopping malls.
Excited, the two brothers immediately decided to transform the office into a franchise chain model. Buy out office supplies. Can become a local franchisee; At the same time, franchisees are required to walk on two legs in specialty stores and shopping malls to complement each other; And A_R does join, and it will never be wholesale. This consolidated the gold content of Luolai brand and laid the foundation for becoming the first in the industry in the future.
Despite the difficulties, these offices were successfully transformed within one year. At the same time, Luo Lai began to recruit franchisees on a large scale. Run around! ? Shortage of manpower, more than 20 cadres were sent to various regions of the country to start intensive investment promotion.
At the beginning of investment promotion, the company had no money to advertise, and the salesman made strange sales promotion entirely by his own ability. With tenacious spirit, they traveled all over the local cities, sweeping from one end of the city to the other, trusting their own shops and persuading their bosses to join them. In order to make franchisees succeed as soon as possible, they help to do store design, publicize posters, sell goods during the day and train at night. Many people can't eat this bitterness, and if they leave, the second echelon will make up for it.
With the opening of new franchisees such as Guiyang, Dali, Changsha, Nanning, Chenzhou, Yangzhou and Wuxi, by the end of 1999, the sales of dozens of franchisees had reached more than 37 million yuan, and Luolai finally realized a real profit of more than 3 million yuan! Luo Lai's strategic transformation is finally on the right track. Franchise chain management system. Gradually formed.
Rebuild competitiveness
In the interview, several executives said. For Xue Weicheng and Xue Weibin, two big bosses? Admire from the heart? . The wealth-making ability of Luolai brand will not only turn executives who have followed for several years into middle class. It also doubles the wealth of franchisees. The personal assets of a franchisee in Hebei increased from 10 years ago to10,000 yuan. Today it has become 8 million! This kind of franchisee? The story of wealth growing dozens and hundreds of times? , has long been too numerous to mention.
At present, the franchisee system of Luolai is being further constructed, and correspondingly, the social image is also being comprehensively improved. Over the years, Luo Lai has accumulated good brand recognition, and large-scale public relations and public welfare activities have pushed Luo Lai's reputation to a peak. Luo Lai has always believed that doing public welfare is the social responsibility that enterprises should undertake, while Xue Weicheng has a core value: let more people enjoy the fruits of enterprise development. ? Therefore, just as two sides of a coin repay social activities, it can naturally enhance the public image of the brand; Luo Lai, which is willing to pay, has ushered in a new platform.
In 2004, Luo Lai began to devote himself to public welfare undertakings. Donated more than 4 million yuan of materials immediately after the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008; Was established in July of that year? Lorelei Warm Fund? Allocate special funds to help poor orphans every year. And expand this activity to the participation of members of Luolai. com, and start it at the same time in more than 500 specialty stores nationwide/KLOC-0? You buy it once and I donate one yuan? Public welfare activities, collecting money for the fund all the year round.
Case 2: Why do Internet people make bedding? Sell home textiles online for 30 million a year.
Yi Feng is a typical elite entrepreneur, and she chose the most challenging field-vertical e-commerce brand.
Out of Yi Feng's office is the sample room of You Man Home Textiles, which is filled with all kinds of pillows and quilts. ? We sleep together. ? Her husband, who is also the co-founder of You Man Home Textiles, can't help but stay by? Tucao? ,? Do you know how she is? Destroy? Mine? For more than half a month, there were twenty or thirty pillows and a dozen quilts in the bedroom, and they were woken up every two hours to remove the pillowcase for the pillow core and quilt, saying that it was necessary to have such an intensive experience to tell the pros and cons. Sometimes I'm so sleepy that I can't remember what it feels like, and I have to sleep again the next night. This is how the two of us and the backbone of the operation department choose products. Now I'm an expert. Asking three questions can help people choose a very suitable pillow. ?
The couple have worked as bedding consultants for many clients, such as Xu Xiaoping, one of the angel investors in You Man. After Zhenge Fund invested in Yuman, Yi Feng and her husband once visited Xu Xiaoping's home and found that his bedding was just ordinary, so they carefully selected a set of their own products and sent them there. A month later, when I saw Xu Xiaoping again, he came up and boasted: I didn't know how hard my life was in the past twenty years until I used your products. ?
This company, which was founded in August 20 1 1, chose Song Qinghe Zhenge from seven angel organizations in April last year. Two weeks after all the money arrived, Zhengela went to start the A round of financing. At present, the financing is coming to an end.
Why do Internet people make bedding?
After studying for a master's degree in biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Yi Feng turned to TMT because he felt that he was not suitable for research. 1999 Zhang Fan, who was admitted to Stanford Business School and co-founded Sequoia Capital China with Shen Nanpeng, is a classmate of Stanford MBA. 200 1 After returning to China, he returned to Silicon Valley from the bottom because he was not satisfied with McKinsey's top-down CEO thinking, and shuttled between Chinese and American Internet companies for 10 years.
When she was still in Silicon Valley around 2006, she targeted the e-commerce market in China and recommended it to many VC friends. When she started her own business, e-commerce became her best choice. There are about three kinds of people who do e-commerce in China: the first is to do shopping malls, such as a comprehensive or vertical B2C platform filled with price wars; The second kind of selling goods, such as distribution and shopping guide under various platforms; The third is branding, such as? Taobao brand? . Most of the first two kinds of Internet users are good at grabbing users, while the latter is dominated by traditional industries and Taobao shops. According to common sense, since Yi Feng has accumulated so much Internet experience, it should be a platform or service. However, she thought in the opposite direction Since few people understand the Internet and are willing and able to use the Internet as a brand, that's her chance.
Of course, this is not the whole basis of judgment. First of all, she thinks that the era of being a comprehensive platform has passed, but she doesn't want to be a vertical platform that burns money. In addition, she is tired of engaging in the virtual economy for a long time and wants to be grounded, so she chooses the vertical field as a brand. Moreover, she attaches great importance to fashion and quality of life, and is obsessed with and particular about home and daily necessities. After returning home, I found that the domestic market could not meet my needs. She is used to using bath towels made in Europe and America, which are especially big and soft, and converted into RMB 400-500, such as Ralph Lauren. The same thing sells for one or two thousand in Guangxin Tiandi, and there are few choices. Other supermarket goods in the domestic market, which cost tens of dollars, are thin and hard, and she can't hold them at all.
After her investigation, she found that home textiles are a large market of more than one trillion yuan, which is highly dispersed. The market share of the top ten brands is limited, and the annual sales of the largest one is only over 2 billion, so users' awareness of brands is not high. The progress of the internet in the industry is not as fast as that of clothing. Almost all e-commerce companies are traditional brands, which means that both the market and e-commerce companies have opportunities.
? Home textiles are very skin-friendly. Good fabric and bad cover feel completely different. As long as you have tasted it, you will know that it tastes hard. And how expensive home textiles are, only you know, unlike clothes worn outside, you can show famous brands to people. The quality of home textiles in China lags behind Europe and America for many years. But with the improvement of living standards and consumption power, the satisfaction of external vanity, the pursuit of internal feelings will certainly catch up. ? Speaking from her own experience, she said frankly that she was optimistic about the space of home textiles in consumption upgrading, and said that what she wanted to do was to use the Internet to erase the channel cost and directly face consumers, so that consumers in China could enjoy the same quality of life as those in Europe and America at affordable prices.
Discussion on financing by confinement
The background of the core operation team in You Man is similar to that in Yi Feng: some have been engaged in the Internet for more than 10 years, and some have been engaged in retail for more than 20 years. Some returnees, some terrapin. Shareholders and investors also have two industries and two identities.
As soon as Yuman registered, Yi Feng found herself pregnant. The initial stage of the company happened to be her whole pregnancy. Angel round financing was negotiated when she was confined to the moon. But last year, Yuman had sales of 30 million, with a growth rate of 300%.
At present, the main sales channels in You Man are B2C platforms such as JD.COM, Tmall and Store 1, and different products are launched according to the age, region and customer unit price of the audience on each platform. You Man has not promoted its own official website, but has begun to lay out offline. However, the functions of official website and offline are more for display for users to see or experience, rather than as the main sales channels.
For operating brand e-commerce, Yi Feng feels that they have something in common with the past Internet platforms: they are 2C businesses, and they all need to do personnel management, scheduling, online bug testing and fault repair. More vendor backups are equivalent to server redundancy. What the quality control team does is the past testing, and the logic is the same, except for a group of people in traditional industries. Facing these newcomers, she thinks that what she lacks relatively is the ability of brand marketing and supply chain management, which is also the reason why she deliberately introduces shareholders with retail background and VC. At present, her most important job is equivalent to the product manager of an Internet company: the purchasing manager of an ordinary e-commerce company has the right to place an order, while in You Man, she takes a group of purchasing managers who have been in the home textile industry for many years to place an order, even if the SKU exceeds 1000.