Reporter | Huang Wei
Editor | Xu Yue
The local beauty market has experienced rapid changes in recent years. In the first half of 2021 alone, there are many more brands of collective stores where China consumers can buy beauty products. More importantly, even if they can’t travel abroad for the time being, China consumers can easily buy many imported beauty products in the local market.
On November 9th, South Korea’s online beauty collection retailer "Resolving HWAHAE" announced that it had landed in Tmall International to open an overseas flagship store. Following the launch of this overseas flagship store, there are 11 Korean beauty brands such as Torriden and S.NATURE, and their entry form is "shop in shop".
Careful calculation, together with overseas beauty retailers such as Sephora overseas flagship store opened in Tmall International in the last year and overseas flagship store of Australian beauty retailer MECCA, Tmall International is providing more and more options for consumers with cross-border Haitao niche beauty products.
Introducing these overseas beauty flagship stores into the same platform system, the most intuitive result is that China consumers can buy all kinds of beauty products such as Korean makeup, Australian beauty, European and American niche beauty in one stop; These beauty products are different and can meet different consumers with individual needs.
It is worth noting that these overseas beauty retailers often have in-depth and direct cooperation with beauty brands in their respective regional markets, which can guarantee the quality of goods for consumers far away from China.
Overseas beauty retailers have entered the cross-border e-commerce market in China one after another, and the most realistic motivation behind it is the China consumers who disappeared in the overseas tourism retail market. These consumers were trapped in the local market because of the epidemic, but they directly promoted the great growth of the local beauty market.
Among them, I’m afraid that the brand of local beauty collection stores that emerged in recent two years was the first to seize the opportunity of China’s beauty consumption changing to differentiation and personalization.
Take HARMAY Huamei, a warehousing beauty collection store located in the middle and high-end market, as an example. At present, 50% of SKUs in its offline stores are overseas niche beauty brands. Zhong Taipeng, co-founder and chief operating officer of Huamei, previously told Interface Fashion that this is one of its core advantages that distinguish it from its competitors. At present, Huamei has introduced a series of overseas minority brands by means of exclusive agency and capital operation, aiming at enhancing brand differentiation and increasing the repurchase rate of stores.
In addition, consumers in the first-and second-tier consumer markets can also buy high-end overseas niche brands in HAYDON Black Hole and Bonnie & Clyde (hereinafter referred to as "BC Extreme Choice"), a more luxurious beauty collection store brand.
It is worth noting that the polar selection of Huamei and BC is an extension from online to offline after accumulating rich experience in e-commerce operation in the early stage. But the difference is that Huamei bought the gene of the store with beauty from the beginning, and then began to incubate overseas brands with the blessing of capital, in order to differentiate in the fierce competition.
The high-end beauty brands in BC’s extremely selected stores are extremely selected, and the brands they sell are high-end niche beauty and fragrance brands exclusively represented by the parent company USHOPAL Group or invested in shares.
On the other hand, Huamei and Black Hole are very similar in style positioning. Both of them transform the super-large stores into warehouse-type retail stores with strong aesthetic style, and they also tend to choose representative buildings or blocks in the city center instead of urban complexes or shopping centers.
It is worth noting that the above-mentioned two collection stores are also different from the emerging beauty collection stores such as WOW COLOUR and THE COLORIST, which exploded in 2020. The latter opened stores in many cities across the country in a short time, while the former strategically opened its first stores in key cities in different regions of the country, and usually it was "one city, one store", with a slow expansion speed.
In the business model, Huamei and Heikong both use international big-name samples as "traffic passwords" to attract price-sensitive consumers to shop and drive the sales of formal clothes, and then rely on niche long-tail brands to improve the repurchase rate.
This is greatly different from the product mix of traditional beauty retail stores such as Watsons. In addition, they strive to create a "social-friendly" store style, and continue to attract consumers by expanding the format, triggering communication and discussion on social media and attracting a large number of young people to visit the store.
With the blessing of capital, Huamei and Black Hole have been accelerating the pace of opening stores nationwide since 2021. They are more surprised and demanding in the location of stores, and after opening stores, they also drive the flow of people in the surrounding blocks, which is attractive to operators in urban blocks or business districts.
Beijing Xidan, which has been upgraded to the standard, introduced Huamei to open a large-scale store with an area of 880 square meters, and introduced a large-scale flagship store with an area of 700 square meters to the "Anfu Road-Wu Kang Road" block in Shanghai. Raffles, a new landmark project in Shanghai, which focuses on urban markets, and Chongqing, which has been vigorously upgraded in recent years, may actively introduce this type of beauty collection store.
Another foreseeable trend is that more overseas niche beauty brands will enter the China market through various beauty retailers in the future. And these brands will choose their partners according to their more specific China market strategy; If you want to deepen the China market and deepen brand awareness, some brands may choose local emerging beauty collection stores with more omni-channel operation and incubation capabilities.
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