In the fur live broadcast room, we can see the confidence of women's clothing e-commerce

Explore the new realm of women's clothing e-commerce and reveal how to create high-end fashion "explosive items" in the live broadcast field. This article takes you into the "CHENSMCHEN" brand live broadcast room to witness how it breaks the new record of Douyin e-commerce women's clothing category with fur categories, and deeply understands the business philosophy and market strategy behind it.

On October 9, an autumn and winter fashion show with the theme of "Pleasant Fur" was held at the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center. Models with their own aura, wearing fur garments made of the world's top raw materials, exuded a unique fashion atmosphere of this season on the catwalk.

On the other hand, in the "CHENSMCHEN" brand live broadcast room that simultaneously broadcast the show online, a new record was being created. Within 8 hours of the broadcast, the number of transactions exceeded 35,000, with the highest single-hour transaction amount reaching 25 million. In the end, the single live broadcast transaction amount reached 107.5 million yuan, setting a new record for the women's clothing category in Douyin e-commerce.

However, what is more eye-catching than the new record of breaking 100 million yuan in a single event is that "CHENSMCHEN" has only been officially launched in the fur category for about a year. In today's market environment, it can still achieve a rapid explosion in the fur category with high customer orders, which inevitably makes people curious about how it was done?

1. I was selected by a women's clothing e-commerce company

Recalling the beginning of everything, Chen Chen, the brand manager of "CHENSMCHEN", said: "It was not me who chose women's clothing e-commerce, but women's clothing e-commerce that chose me."

Chen Chen has worked in physical clothing, is proficient in display design, and has a unique aesthetic vision and outstanding dressing taste. It can be said that she has almost all the conditions to run a women's clothing e-commerce. In 2020, offline business encountered a "black swan". At that time, there were friends in the e-commerce industry around her who suggested that Chen Chen transform into a live broadcast e-commerce.

But Chen Chen was not tempted. "One reason is that I don't have much experience in the e-commerce industry. Another reason is that in my impression, the style of the early live broadcast rooms was very exaggerated, which is completely inconsistent with my true personality."

*Chen Chen in life

Although he did not join the live streaming e-commerce industry immediately, in the past few years when short videos have become increasingly popular, Chen Chen still records his daily life as usual, shares practical dressing tips, and introduces various daily necessities he has discovered to fans like a friend.

Once, a short video sharing fitness experience suddenly became popular. In the comment area, fans not only exchanged fitness experiences, but also left messages asking for outfit links. With the mentality of giving it a try, Chen Chen opened a live broadcast room. This "accident" made Chen Chen see the charm of content e-commerce: it turns out that fans not only notice the anchor through short videos and like the content, but also communicate directly with the anchor in the live broadcast room. It is not only the exaggerated live broadcast style that can gain fans, the real self can also be seen on Douyin e-commerce.

*Chen Chen in the live broadcast

More importantly, with the help of the bridge built by content, from asking for daily dressing suggestions to specific good product recommendations, and even life insights gained from books... these topics related to life and consumption have also allowed Chen Chen and her fans to gradually build trust and become "electronic besties."

A fan who said she suffered from severe depression sent a "small essay" to Chen Chen, saying that she was very grateful to Chen Chen because she felt the positive power and learned a positive attitude towards life in her live broadcast room. It was also because of Chen Chen's encouragement that she chose to walk out of the haze and live the way she wanted to be.

The real feedback from fans made Chen Chen feel the special relationship between people established through the live broadcast room, and also saw the unique business logic of content e-commerce: it is not a simple business, but a supply and demand relationship based on trust built from the content.

2. High-priced products can also become “hot sellers”

There are both advantages and disadvantages to doing live streaming e-commerce in Hangzhou, the capital of e-commerce.

The good thing is that Hangzhou's women's clothing industry is famous for its "quick response" ability, and its mature supply chain can meet the production needs of various brands. In addition, due to its geographical advantage of being close to the sales end, Hangzhou's women's clothing e-commerce can always discover hot items in a timely manner.

However, because the supply chain's "quick response" capability is too prominent, once a piece of clothing becomes a hit in a live broadcast room, a replica of the same style may appear in other live broadcast rooms within a few days. In addition, in order to reap the traffic dividend brought by the "hot item", some merchants will take the initiative to start a price war, and finally fall into a death cycle of low-price competition.

Faced with this competitive atmosphere of chasing "explosive products", Chen Chen and his team decided to adopt a strategy of upgrading competition from the beginning. Instead of chasing existing "explosive products", they thought about which user group they wanted to target and what the users really needed.

* Chen Chen communicates with the designer about new product design

In the autumn and winter of 2023, when the clothing market was about to change seasons and launch new products, Chen Chen and his team finally decided to make fur after much planning.

Compared with ordinary clothing, the average customer price of fur is generally higher, which is in stark contrast to the market trend of the entire live e-commerce industry, which focuses on cost-effectiveness. However, Chen Chen and his team believe that although the purchase threshold of fur is high, it also avoids pure price competition from the source.

In addition, when the entire market is competing on low prices, the demand for high-quality products by some high-net-worth individuals is being ignored. The reality is that few businesses realize that at a time when short videos and live broadcasts have become the main communication platforms, platforms like Douyin have accumulated users of different consumption levels, and they can all be accurately reached through content. In other words, when everyone is chasing the "explosive item" of cost-effectiveness, fur products that focus on niche groups and precise needs have a greater opportunity.

Facts have proved that Chen Chen's team's judgment was correct. According to Deloitte data, the GMV of the luxury goods industry on Douyin e-commerce increased by 254% year-on-year in 2023, and the proportion of Chinese luxury consumers using Douyin reached 73%. Fur, as a synonym for luxury and nobility, has also seen an explosion in demand on Douyin e-commerce along with other luxury goods.

Driven by his truth-seeking and pragmatic character, and in order to provide fans with high-quality products, after deciding to develop fur products, Chen Chen led the team to start "cramming" professional knowledge and supply chain capabilities.

In order to obtain high-quality raw materials, Chen Chen personally went to the Copenhagen Auction House in Denmark to bid for world-class fur raw materials. In order to ensure the quality of the finished garments, Chen Chen and his team traveled all over the country to garment factories. From cutting raw materials to matching accessories, Chen Chen participated in and personally checked every detail.

* Chen Chen at the auction in Copenhagen

With his unique vision and live broadcast room explanation and sales methods, in January this year, the GMV of coffee mink products alone in Chen Chen's live broadcast room reached 90 million. According to Chen Chen, after the coffee mink became a hot seller, the entire fur e-commerce field noticed this new hit, and many brands also began to prepare related new products. "When I went to the auction house before, I found that everyone had almost driven the price of coffee mink fur raw materials to a record high."

Chen Chen and his team have proved that live streaming e-commerce is not just about low-priced and high-volume "hot sellers". High-priced products can also become double "hot sellers" in terms of GMV and word of mouth through live streaming.

3. Quality, the “confidence” of live e-commerce

After experiencing the "explosion" and creating a "hot item", Chen Chen and his team have seen a bright future, but they also have new concerns: How to ensure the continued stability of traffic after the explosion? After the coffee mink becomes a "hot item", how to launch new products? And fur products are seasonal. In addition to autumn and winter, what other products can be provided to fans?

Chen Chen is not too worried about the traffic problem, because in her opinion, there is no absolute relationship between traffic and transaction volume. As Chen Chen said, using huge traffic to convert into sales is still a "hot-selling mentality", and because of the high value of fur products, what really needs to be solved is not the problem of basic volume, but the problem of user accuracy. And because Douyin e-commerce has enough users, merchants can use content to continuously screen out sufficiently accurate user groups, and then establish a unique market segment based on user needs.

"So after entering the fur industry, I found that user accumulation is far more important than pursuing the growth of the number of fans. Because it is a small but beautiful, few but fine track, what I really need is people who are interested in fur and willing to consume it."

As for new product issues, Chen Chen's team discovered in the process of operating fur products that the target users of high-order products care about quality and experience, and this demand exists all year round. Therefore, there is only one problem facing Chen Chen and his team, that is, how to continuously expand product categories and attract users to buy while stabilizing traffic.

In terms of stabilizing traffic, Chen Chen chose to start from the live broadcast content. When explaining the product, he not only introduced the characteristics of the product to the fans in the live broadcast room, but also talked about the source and history of the fur raw materials, so that fans can first understand the product and then understand the value behind it.

*Chen Chen explains the product in the live broadcast room

In addition, in order to meet the fans' demand for new products, Chen Chen spends one day every week to select new products from 300 products to be broadcast in the live broadcast room that week. "In fact, the 300 products I see have been selected by the team from thousands of products, and I will select 20 to 30 products based on my own vision and understanding of fans' needs. This process may be cumbersome, but it is also a way for us to insist on product quality."

Faced with the challenges brought by new products, quality has become Chen Chen's confidence.

In March this year, Douyin E-commerce released the "2024 Douyin E-commerce Women's Consumption Trend Data Report", which showed that in the past year, the number of orders for new Chinese-style clothing placed by female users on Douyin E-commerce increased by 195% year-on-year. Among them, Xiangyunsha clothing, as a high-end product in the silk category, had an order growth rate of 112%.

With the visible market growth, Chen Chen's live broadcast room also launched the silk category this summer. Before that, Chen Chen and his team spent a month and a half preparing, visiting the source of silk raw materials to explore the supply chain and learn about fabrics and processes from experts in the field. In order to ensure product quality, Chen Chen forced the factory to improve fabric cutting and sewing processes by bearing the cost increase.

* Chen Chen is checking the design details

Not only that, in order to understand user needs, Chen Chen and his team also conducted market research specifically for fans. They randomly selected 800 fans from nearly 5,000 fans to participate in the questionnaire survey, and gave trial styles to fans for actual experience.

These visible and invisible efforts have ultimately brought great value to Chen Chen and his team. According to Chen Chen, the Xiangyunsha series of products launched in his live broadcast room had a maximum GMV of more than 5 million per broadcast, becoming a "hot-selling" category this summer.

The success from fur to silk has made Chen Chen increasingly clear that accurately grasping user needs and providing users with high-quality service experience are the "confidence" and motivation of live streaming e-commerce. Chen Chen also feels that his responsibility is becoming heavier, because high quality needs to be reflected in daily services and even content.

So at this year's Fur Festival, when Chen Chen led his team to the Danish auction house to select leather materials, he specially produced a large number of traceability short videos, allowing fans to see through the lens where the products they bought came from and where their value lies.

* Chen Chen is checking the fur raw materials

At the same time, on the day of the big promotion, the brand live broadcast room not only broadcast the live event of the Olympic Sports Show, but also connected the production workshop, quality inspection workshop, warehouse and other links to let fans understand the whole process of the product from raw materials to their hands, and see the source and guarantee of quality with their own eyes. It is these visible investments and the "invisible" accumulation in the past that have jointly contributed to the CHENSMCHEN brand's record of breaking the 100 million GMV in a single game.

It is worth mentioning that with the popularity of fur brands on Douyin e-commerce, the entire category has also ushered in a big explosion. In 2024, the overall GMV of Haining fur on Douyin e-commerce increased by 99% year-on-year, and the order volume increased by 54% year-on-year; the GMV of commodity cards increased by 118% year-on-year, and the order volume of commodity cards increased by 83% year-on-year; the GMV of short videos increased by 260% year-on-year, and the order volume of short videos increased by 240% year-on-year.

4. Women's clothing e-commerce has entered an era of comprehensive development

In fact, from the success of the CHENSMCHEN brand, we can see that in recent years, the rapid development of live streaming e-commerce has not only provided merchants with more business opportunities, but also promoted the rapid growth of merchants and even industry iteration.

While merchants choose high-priced tracks, they also need to prove their value to users, and high-value goods naturally attract professional people. Therefore, in the live broadcast room with refined operations, consumers are becoming more and more professional, which forces merchants and anchors to not only understand the content, but also understand the products and users. This also leads to the era of live broadcast e-commerce entering a comprehensive and in-depth development.

* Chen Chen explains the raw material knowledge to fans

If you want users to pay for your product, not only the quality of the product must be guaranteed, but also high-quality service. From the moment the user receives the product, the assessment of the service experience begins.

"We have received feedback from fans before, saying that they bought clothes from us for thousands of yuan, but when they received the goods, the packaging boxes were rotten. Later we found that it was because the packaging boxes were deformed due to storage and stacking in the logistics process. To solve this problem, we upgraded to thicker packaging boxes, and then spent about 140,000 yuan to buy a plastic sealing machine to fix the packaging boxes during the packaging process to avoid packaging damage during the logistics process."

Although the quality upgrade of the packaging process has directly led to CHENSMCHEN's logistics and delivery costs as high as 50 yuan, for users who value experience, this is precisely the "quality" that is most easily seen. According to Chen Chen, the packaging upgrade quickly received positive responses from fans, "There are even fans who reported that after they opened the express delivery, the aunties at the property rushed to get the packaging box."

*CHENSMCHEN brand delivery station

In addition, the after-sales link is also an important part of improving the service experience, and Douyin e-commerce is also actively guiding merchants to discover the unique value of the service link.

Chen Chen believes that the service standards promoted by the platform, on the one hand, explore the real needs of users from their perspective and feed them back to merchants. On the other hand, it also helps merchants continuously improve their competitiveness and achieve the goal of retaining users and making business last longer.

Because for fur products that cost tens of thousands of yuan, the act of placing an order has already proved that users have demand and recognize the value of the product. Even if returns have occurred, it is often easier to retain users with high-quality after-sales service experience than to attract new users to place orders.

Frankly speaking, the success of CHENSMCHEN just reflects that under the competitive atmosphere created by Douyin e-commerce, the live streaming e-commerce industry has ushered in a positive improvement: merchants need to comprehensively delve into various links from design, production to sales services, and meet user needs more proactively and quickly, and users will also be willing to pay for a higher quality consumer experience.

This also means that the development direction of the e-commerce industry is moving away from the vortex of price competition and shifting towards creating a high-quality shopping experience with good quality and good service.

In the past, the e-commerce industry has created many digital myths with sales volume as its goal, but the result of quantitative change will inevitably usher in a qualitative change. In the future, the development method centered on quality may allow the e-commerce industry to get back on track and open up a new era.

Author | Bai Lu This article is written by the operator author [Jingzhe Research Institute], WeChat public account: [Jingzhe Research Institute], original/authorized to be published in the operator, and reproduction is prohibited without permission.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.