The rise of the top of a sub-category on Xiaohongshu: the repurchase rate has exceeded 70%!

On the competitive platform of Xiaohongshu, the start-up brand "Heweiyang" stands out with its amazing growth rate and high repurchase rate, becoming the leader in the tonic category. The article reveals how brands innovate in traffic acquisition, supply chain management, content creation and user interaction, providing valuable experience and inspiration for other brands.

In less than a year, it has become the top of the nourishing category on Xiaohongshu! Monthly sales have exceeded one million, the repurchase rate of flagship store users is as high as 55%-60%, and the repurchase rate of fans exceeds 70%!

This is the achievement made by the startup brand "Heweiyang" on Xiaohongshu. It has to be said that Xiaohongshu is still a fertile ground for the rise of startup brands!

In the view of brand founder Ouyang, for a brand to rise from 0 to 1, after choosing a niche track, it needs to solve two difficult problems: traffic problems at the front end and supply chain problems at the back end.

The experience and lessons learned from becoming a top blogger and IP in a vertical track a few years ago have successfully helped the brand solve the current traffic problem. As for the back-end supply chain, for Ouyang, taking this path is like "skinning a layer of pain"!

It is worth mentioning that creating a single hot-selling product is also an effective way to quickly increase brand awareness. After establishing the brand, Ouyang successfully created a number of hot-selling products and summarized several major characteristics of hot-selling products: medium to high customer orders, high profits, high repurchase rates, high consumption rates, and a wide range of applicable groups.

After talking with Ouyang, Jianshi found that their approach to incubating brands from 0 to 1 on Xiaohongshu can provide some good reference ideas for everyone. By the way, there will also be a topic at Jianshi's Shanghai Annual Private Domain Conference on December 5 to discuss Xiaohongshu's growth approach in depth. Welcome to sign up at the end of the article. Next, let's walk into the conversation with Ouyang. As follows, enjoy:

Founder of Heweiyang Brand

Ouyang, the top health blogger/buyer of Xiaohongshu

1. How do startup brands rise on Xiaohongshu?

Jianshi: How is the sales volume of Xiaohongshu flagship store at present? How is the user repurchase rate?

Ouyang: Currently, our flagship store is ranked first in the nutritional supplement category on Xiaohongshu. We have a stable sales volume of more than 100,000 yuan per day and a monthly sales volume of one million yuan. The repurchase rate of flagship store users is between 55% and 60%, and the repurchase rate of fans is over 70%.

Jianshi: It’s been one year since the brand was founded, and these numbers are pretty good. Is it difficult for a new brand to rise on Xiaohongshu?

Ouyang: It is definitely difficult. But relatively speaking, Xiaohongshu is still a fertile soil for the growth of start-up brands. Our brand has done well in two aspects: front-end and back-end.

Because I have a strong IP, I solved the traffic problem and saved a lot of promotion fees. If there is no IP, brands need to spend a lot of money to find top influencers to promote their products, and also invest a lot of manpower, material resources and time costs to establish connections with influencers.

Usually, top influencers will not choose to cooperate with start-up brands. If you don’t have sales, reputation, or feedback, you will need to spend more money to cooperate with a tail influencer, which will cost a lot and you will basically not make any money in the first six months or even a year.

I used my own IP to promote products, and after I achieved results, the company gradually established a business department, and then cooperated with influencers. Influencers were willing to promote products only after seeing good data and good reputation, so the difficulty of having an IP and not having an IP is very different.

Jianshi: That’s right, the front-end traffic problem is actually solved by your IP, so what problem does the back-end need to solve?

Ouyang: The backend is the supply chain. As a start-up brand, it is difficult to survive without a strong supply chain.

At first, I sold goods through my own store. I opened three stores and had a monthly GMV of over 10 million. Later, I closed them because I wanted to open a flagship store. But when I opened my own store, I started to get involved in supply chain. It is no exaggeration to say that working in supply chain is a "tear of blood".

The whole process has to go through many levels, because there are many links. For example, when the order volume is large, how to ensure timely delivery? How to fill out and review the order? How to use the warehouse system? How to expand the warehouse? How to do warehouse management? How to find a suitable supplier according to your own design concept? What if the customer service is too busy when there are too many inquiries... Every problem needs to be solved.

Later, we started recruiting, and then we slowly recovered. At present, the team has more than 30 people, including store broadcast, customer service, note-taking team, etc. We changed warehouses four times in one month, from 50 square meters to 1,000 square meters now. We also established our own factory in Jiuhua Mountain, realizing self-production and self-sales, and selling from the source.

Therefore, there are two main challenges for the growth of start-up brands: first, without IP, a lot of financial resources will be spent. Second, it will be difficult to build a supply chain from scratch.

Jianshi: It is indeed quite difficult.

Ouyang: It is difficult for a startup brand to grow, but it is not difficult.

As long as you have a small IP, your brand will be easily accepted by Xiaohongshu fans. The threshold is relatively low, and it is normal for an amateur to make 1-2 million yuan a month, or even more, but it will be more difficult to develop further.

Therefore, Xiaohongshu has a low threshold and is easy to get started, but it is difficult to do well, make it big, and last for a long time, because it ultimately needs to be standardized and definitely requires a team.

2. How to build a personal IP with more than 500,000 fans?

Jianshi: Your personal account has more than 570,000 followers. How long did it take you to accumulate this?

Ouyang: This account "Ouyang Hui Shiyang" has accumulated nearly 500,000 fans in just half a year, becoming the leader in the niche. In the later period, the platform will not give too much traffic to big bloggers, and my focus is no longer on the increase of account fans, but on monetization. The monetization ability is much stronger than before, such as live broadcasting and notebook sales.

Three years ago, I also created another health management account, which had 300,000 followers. So I have been a blogger for three years, and I have accumulated some experience, mastered the sense of the Internet, and my editing efficiency is also improving. I also have the endorsement of a graduate student in traditional Chinese medicine. When I post my works, I will also label each work to enhance my professionalism, and constantly use content to verify my account name, so this IP was established quickly.

If you want to become a big IP or top blogger on Xiaohongshu, you must first become an in-depth user of Xiaohongshu. Only by in-depth understanding can you know the tone of the platform and user preferences.

I have been a heavy user of Xiaohongshu for 5 or 6 years. I found that to be a Xiaohongshu expert, one must be sincere, useful, diligent, and not pretentious. Many big IPs on the Douyin platform also want to enter Xiaohongshu, but they can't find the right tone because they don't understand the popular trends and user preferences of Xiaohongshu.

Jianshi: How do you choose a track?

Ouyang: My track is positioned in the sub-field of Chinese health care, "food health care". Although the health care track is already very popular, most of the content is very general Chinese medicine health care content, without new perspectives. So I chose the sub-field of food health care. People are now very concerned about their health problems, and almost no one was doing this track at the time.

Jianshi: When creating an IP, what is the frequency of content updates?

Ouyang: I basically update every day, even 2 to 3 times a day, and they are all 5-10 minutes long videos. At that time, I did it with a very altruistic mentality, and did not make short videos of 1 minute. Although the completion rate of these practical videos is not high, the conversion rate and fan stickiness are very high.

So the number of fans grew very fast in the early stage. After posting 2 or 3 videos, I started live broadcasting. The live broadcast was just to talk about practical information and answer questions, to get closer to users and strengthen my personality. It was also very efficient to seek attention and increase fans in the live broadcast room. My first live broadcast attracted 3,000 viewers and more than 1,000 people became my fans. This formed a strong linkage, which made the account fans grow faster.

The follow-up is continuous updating, which is also very important, because once a blogger stops updating, he basically can’t get up again.

3. Why did you decide to start a brand?

Jianshi: What was the opportunity that led you to start building a brand? Was it based on some data that you verified in the early stages?

Ouyang: Actually, when I first created my account, I didn’t think about creating a brand. But as the number of fans grew rapidly, the stickiness and loyalty of fans were very high, and the proportion of active fans was as high as 98.7%. So when I started to sell goods, I didn’t dare to sell other people’s products, fearing that I couldn’t guarantee the quality of the products and would harm the interests of fans.

So I started to push myself to build a supply chain. At first I only sold things in my own store, but later I found that sales and word of mouth were getting better and better. I felt that this could become a sustainable business. If I could gradually build a supply chain and expand channels, I could start building a brand.

Therefore, when I found that my sales were increasing, my fan base was becoming more and more solid, I had the manpower to maintain the supply chain, and my channels were relatively stable, I started to work on the "Heweiyang" brand and opened a flagship store in December last year. After that, we gradually turned to corporate operations and team operations, and no longer worked alone.

In addition, the health track is a very competitive track, but I chose the food and health sub-track. China is a big country with a population of more than one billion. Even if you are doing a very small and beautiful business, it will definitely have some scale.

Jianshi: What are the core differences between being a brand now and being a blogger before?

Ouyang: Most of the energy of IP is put into content update. The gameplay is also very simple, which is the linkage of social network, live broadcast and notes. First accumulate traffic and build popularity, and then accumulate sales of personal stores.

There are several points to note when building a brand:

First, the flagship store’s live broadcast must not be interrupted. It needs to be broadcasted by multiple people in rotation, and the live broadcast must adapt to the tone of Xiaohongshu, and have a sense of girlfriends and high-end. In addition, the rankings of live broadcast brands are becoming more and more segmented. If you want to stand out, your positioning must be clearer.

Second, the content should be well prepared, such as live streaming slices, pictures, texts and videos.

Third, the flagship store should do a good job of "increasing sales". First, find experts to cooperate with and let more people help promote the products. Second, create a matrix account. One flagship store can be bound to 6 accounts, and GMV growth can be achieved through the note trailer.

Fourth, make good use of the Xiaohongshu traffic platform. Xiaohongshu traffic is particularly "demanding" for materials, so we can't invest as madly as other tracks, we can only invest slowly. Now we have spent tens of thousands of yuan, but the highest ROI can reach more than 40, and the lowest new customer is 5, the effect is not bad.

4. How to implement the explosive product strategy?

Jianshi: How do you implement your hot-selling product strategy? What are the characteristics of hot-selling products?

Ouyang: We currently have several hit products. Those with sales exceeding 10,000 are basically hit products, and most of them are made in our own factory. The way for a brand to quickly gain popularity is to make a single product a hit, but when creating a hit product, you need to pay attention to the following:

First, we need to avoid existing hot-selling products. For example, if we want to make a product that nourishes the spleen and stomach, there was already a brand on Xiaohongshu that made a hot-selling product, mainly "Bazhen Powder", which received more than 100,000 orders, so we focused on another product that nourishes the spleen and stomach, "Si Shen Soup".

The second is to develop new products. We launched a certain category in November last year. At that time, few people sold it, and it was not particularly competitive or comparable. We sold it during a live broadcast at the place of origin, and found that it sold well, so we launched this product. Later, we found that the repurchase rate was also very high, so we began to focus on promoting this product.

The characteristics of a hot product are: medium to high customer orders, high profits, high repurchase, high referrals, high consumption rate, wide application groups, fast effect feedback, and many positive feedback. So we will spend a lot of energy to promote it and make it a hot product. If multiple parties work together to promote a product, it will easily become a hot product.

For example, posting notes, hanging cars, or posting 20 videos a day, half of which are for promoted products, and the live broadcast time is also mainly focused on this product.

In addition, we will also give users gifts for posting their orders, such as 5-10 yuan cash coupons. After users post their orders, their notes will simultaneously display "Author's sharing after purchase", which is actually a portal to the product link, and users can place orders smoothly after reading it. In this way, the entire potential can be created, and a hot product will emerge. Of course, the key is that the product must be really good and really useful, otherwise it will not be a hit.

Jianshi: Do you have any of your own techniques for content creation?

Ouyang: It is not easy to come up with particularly stereotyped content in this field. The content on the brand side is mainly product-oriented, and some pictures, texts, videos, and live broadcasts will be released to highlight the product usage, functions, user feedback, etc.

We have also added traceability-related content. Because our popular products are all made in our own factories, we have enough traceability materials to continue to release. We can go to the factory to shoot raw materials, product production methods, and user feedback, etc., and the content released cannot be imitated by others.

Jianshi: How to design vertical linkage to improve conversion?

Ouyang: The core is a positive and virtuous cycle, with notes at the front end planting seeds and live broadcasts pulling them out at the back end. For example, if you post 10-20 notes a week before the broadcast, there will be users slowly entering the live broadcast room. After the broadcast starts, when there are users entering the live broadcast room through notes, the system will have different push algorithms based on whether you are a commercial live broadcast room or a chat live broadcast room, and then push the stream to you.

In addition, if you attach a reservation to each video note and guide users to make a reservation for a certain live broadcast, then on the day of the live broadcast, the explosive force will be relatively large. We have tested it many times and found that there is a positive correlation between the number of reservations and the sales of the day. The live broadcast room can also guide users to join the community, and then by updating the notes each time and then posting them to the community, a positive and virtuous cycle will continue, and the growth of GMV will be relatively stable.

Jianshi: What plans do you have to increase people’s repurchase rate?

Ouyang: We will continue to expand on Xiaohongshu, and we will be more inclined to trace the source. We will also start to develop some sub-brands, such as children's food and nutrition. Our children's market brand is expected to be launched in the next month. Because most of the fans are mothers and housewives, they also have children, so we will enter this market, which is equivalent to getting fans to repurchase.

Jianshi: Will Xiaohongshu be your main platform in the future? How long will the platform dividend last?

Ouyang: Xiaohongshu will still be the main focus, while JD.com and Tmall will mainly rely on search traffic. We will invest heavily in private domains and video accounts in the future.

At present, Xiaohongshu is still in a relatively good bonus period for brand incubation. However, brands need a "human touch" and it is best for brands to have a human touch. Being too "brand-like" will not be very popular.

Natural traffic is very attractive, and it is still possible to achieve monthly sales of 10 million without spending money. However, Xiaohongshu’s investment traffic has begun to increase, and once it matures, the bonus period will be at most one or two years.