Bawang Tea Princess has no "seven-year itch"

In today's increasingly fierce competition in the new tea market, Bawang Cha Ji has successfully avoided the "seven-year itch" curse with its unique brand philosophy and business strategy. From adhering to the healthy concept of "original leaf tea + fresh milk" to constantly innovating marketing activities, Bawang Cha Ji has demonstrated its perfect combination of a deep understanding of traditional culture and modern aesthetics. This article reveals to readers how to find a blue ocean in a red ocean market and how to enhance brand value through cultural imprints.

When the industry was at its peak, "avoiding complexity and keeping things simple" became Bawang Tea Princess's business philosophy.

Before Ba Wang Cha Ji, no one could have imagined that the new tea beverage track could tell new stories.

After experiencing the wild growth and ups and downs of the boom period, the brands that survived the countless iterations are now unable to escape the red ocean of price wars. Data from Zheshang Securities reveals a significant trend in the industry: mainstream new tea brands have lowered their average customer price, with the consumption share of products below 10 yuan surging, while the high-end price of more than 20 yuan has shrunk significantly.

Compared with the crazy investment in tea drinks by various investors in the past few years, the growth of milk tea has entered a bottleneck period. Brands including Gu Ming and Mixue Bingcheng have encountered many obstacles on their IPO road. Among the companies that have gone public, Nayuki's Tea has turned from profit to loss, and Cha Baidao's performance has declined sharply. The secondary market has given a clear signal: the industry's growth rate has slowed down, and the trend from incremental to stock market is unstoppable.

Against this backdrop, Bawang Cha Ji, which has been on a roll in the past two years, seems to remain unaffected. The sales of its major product, Boya Juexian, have exceeded 600 million cups. From the just-concluded Olympic Games series of brand marketing activities to the recently launched Pet Month theme event and the opening of pet-friendly stores, the brand's popularity remains unabated.

Lenovo's Bawang Tea Princess achieved a GMV of over 10 billion last year, and it is expected that the GMV for the whole year of this year will exceed 20 billion. Even when new tea drinks were at their peak, few brands could match such performance.

Why can it maintain a high level of product appeal while continuously opening stores and expanding in a short period of time? This is the special feature of Bawang Cha Ji. Even though there are many successful cases at different stages, it is actually difficult to measure this company using the logic of the traditional new tea beverage track.

1. Why is Bawang Cha Ji not in a hurry in the second half of the new tea beverage track?

From the perspective of industry development, what is the essence of involution?

When the market changes from incremental to stock, everyone can only compete for market share in a limited market. People tend to think that a lot of funds pouring into mature fields will make these fields too crowded. But in fact, if you measure a track from the perspective of development, involution just shows that the industry is not truly "mature".

The same is true for the new tea beverage industry.

The history of this track can be traced back to bubble tea and pearl milk tea in the last century. Street-side freshly brewed tea drinks are made with non-dairy cream, tea powder, synthetic agents and artificial colors. After 2016, the new tea beverage industry accelerated its development, represented by Heytea and Nayuki, which further pushed up product prices to more than 20 yuan per cup by launching popular products such as fruit and cheese milk tea.

The general perception of the milk tea industry is that it has high gross profit, high demand and low barriers to entry. The gross profit of a cup of milk tea can be controlled between 50% and 90%. A milk tea shop in a downtown area can sell hundreds of cups a day. Due to the low technical threshold, once a hit product appears in the market, other brands can even launch similar products within two weeks.

In this case, the market that is prematurely matured will enter the vortex of internal circulation earlier.

In the past, people always took the two high-end brands, Heytea and Nayuki, as research cases: the former focuses on fruit tea and has a rich variety of SKUs, while the latter is loyal to Starbucks' "third space" concept. In addition to tea drinks, it also offers a rich variety of snacks, European bread, and coffee, hoping that fine production and high-end positioning will give the industry a different answer.

But the reality is that even brands that once focused on high-end, differentiated products have had to adjust their strategies and respond to market challenges in a more pragmatic way amid fierce market competition and changing consumer demand.

In essence, whether it is a high-end or low-end brand, the pursuit of economies of scale, innovative methods to add value to products, and high-profile marketing methods are all business trends driven to a large extent by market competition.

And this is what makes Overlord Tea Princess different.

From learning from everyone to being learned by everyone, Bawang Cha Ji now has a clear logic on how to build a tea brand. In terms of brand building, it combines traditional cultural elements with modern aesthetics. The product positioning is different from traditional milk tea. The combination of "original leaf tea + fresh milk" plays a health-oriented market strategy, aiming to make more people fall in love with Chinese tea.

More importantly, this logic has not changed due to the intensification of market competition.

For example, founder Zhang Junjie judged that fruit tea would limit Bawang Chaji from becoming a global enterprise, so he chose to avoid fruit tea and always focused on original leaf fresh milk tea to avoid homogeneous competition. Although Bawang Chaji has no upper limit on product research and development, it pays more attention to optimizing and iterating existing teas, such as the big single product Boya Juexian, rather than focusing more on adding new product SKUs.

The outside world can sense that the marketing popularity of Bawang Tea Princess has always been online. The logic behind it is that a series of marketing activities and IPs with rich cultural connotations have been created around "making friends with tea". While creating major events, it improves the social attributes of products, forms its own culture and products for sustainable development of the brand, and ultimately realizes sales conversion through the Internet model.

When it was at its peak, Ba Wang Cha Ji did not compete on price or the freshness of its products. It had its own rhythm and "keeping things simple" became its business philosophy.

2. Both are whole leaf tea, why is Ba Wang Cha Ji so popular?

Yunnan is one of the birthplaces of tea culture. According to the latest data, Yunnan has the largest tea plantation area in the country and its tea production also leads the country. This is where the Overlord Tea Queen first grew up.

In Zhang Junjie's opinion, Oriental tea can be compared with coffee and become a global drink. But at the same time, he also noticed that no tea brand has built a product system using the "Chinese original leaf tea + fresh milk" method, and there is still a lack of a world-class Oriental tea brand. Therefore, Bawang Tea Princess's brand mission has always been "to meet friends around the world with Oriental tea."

When it comes to building a good oriental tea brand, Bawang Tea Princess has a more persistent idealism than other players; but in order to make a good cup of tea, it shows absolute restraint and rigor.

Take Boya Juexian as an example. In order to polish this cup of jasmine snow bud milk tea, additives such as creamer, flavoring, and tea powder that will cover up the original tea flavor are not allowed to be used. It is reported that the formula of Boya Juexian has been iterated dozens of times.

An ideal new tea beverage business has the characteristics of high standardization, product universality, high repurchase rate and scale effect. Based on these points, and based on minimalist products and formulas, automated production processes and precise control of healthy raw materials, Boya Juexian is a direct product of Bawang Cha Ji's strategic focus, and ultimately achieved the miracle of single product sales exceeding 600 million cups.

More and more people realize that Ba Wang Cha Ji is real original leaf tea, not milk tea in the traditional sense; its brand culture is a cultural innovation between traditional tea drinks and new tea drinks. Oriental tea culture has the attribute of scarcity, so it is even more precious.

What’s interesting is that even in the new tea beverage market, there are so many brands that are trying to compete with Bawang Cha Ji, and some even try to replicate the flavor of Bawang Cha Ji and push it into the market at a lower price. But in the end, neither the product nor the brand has achieved better results. The reason behind this is not only the deviation of the tea-making formula and process, but more importantly, the lack of sufficient knowledge about tea.

"The packaging of Ba Wang Cha Ji is so unique. Every time I drink it, it feels like I'm savoring traditional culture." When you open content social platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, you will indeed find that health, culture, social interaction and high-quality taste coexist, which has become a clear impression of Ba Wang Cha Ji from the user's perspective.

When consumers choose Bawang Cha Ji, they not only value its healthy product positioning (the combination of original leaf tea + fresh milk), but also resonate with the traditional cultural elements it contains (such as Chinese style packaging and poetic names). Bawang Cha Ji also meets the needs of modern people for social sharing (such as taking photos and checking in, recommending products), as well as the pursuit of high quality product taste.

A typical example is the recent "Pet Month" themed event centered around the hit product Boya Juexian. Bawang Cha Ji's pet-friendly stores in four cities, Changsha, Kunming, Hangzhou, and Shijiazhuang, have been opened one after another. A new "cute pet interactive space" has been added to the store, providing some pet services and building a platform for communication between people and pets for pet-loving tea lovers.

People and pets, tea lovers and tea, all tell the same story of "companionship".

In fact, the emotional resonance between Boya and Ziqi, pets and humans, and their long-term companionship is self-evident. On platforms like Xiaohongshu, countless tea lovers have even spontaneously shared Bawang Cha Ji's pet-themed peripherals, triggering a new round of "stamp collecting fever."

Many consumers said that they chose Boya Juexian in social situations not only because of its taste and quality, but also because of the cultural identity and emotional value behind it. Previously, Bawang Cha Ji also associated Boya Juexian with cultural activities that young people love, such as music, sports, and Citywalk, from online to offline, to penetrate the concept of "accompany" and achieve the ultimate social interaction.

From this perspective, "Pet Month" not only enriches the brand connotation of Bawang Tea Princess, but also becomes an in-depth sharing and transmission of tea culture.

3. Why do consumer products need to have a cultural impression?

Starbucks founder Schultz once mentioned a view in his autobiography that focusing on the product itself, the value space of all mass consumer goods is limited. In order to achieve a higher brand premium and bring additional value experience to consumers, it is a question that every company that wants to develop sustainably needs to think about.

The key to solving the problem is to have a "cultural imprint", which can be the culture, history, and emotion carried by the brand or product. This is an important sign for successful brands to be recognized.

A typical example is that Starbucks, in addition to providing coffee, also establishes emotional connections with consumers through unique brand stories and humanistic care. Using the concept of "third space", coffee shops are transformed from simple consumption places to social office places, not just selling coffee, but also selling a lifestyle and cultural experience.

Although there are many consumer brands at home and abroad that are trying to imitate Starbucks, few of them can really achieve outstanding results. Many companies only see the surface form when imitating, such as store decoration, but ignore the third space, which contains the respect and inheritance of coffee culture, as well as the deep understanding of consumers' emotional needs. This deep cultural imprint is difficult to replicate.

China has always been an important birthplace of oriental tea culture, and "oriental tea" has become a typical symbol of world cultural exchange, but the popularity of a category does not equal the brand. The "newness" of new tea drinks to a certain extent bears the responsibility of how to use the brand to tell the story of oriental tea culture well.

So when we get back to Bawang Tea Princess, as the cultural core of the brand, the concept of "making friends with tea" runs through every aspect.

There are different theme activities to link consumers' social scenes, as well as tea culture forums and the release of the global brand promotional film "CHA". Bawang Tea Princess gives more content to a cup of tea and builds its own cultural system. The vision is to spread Chinese tea culture further, serve consumers in 100 countries and regions around the world, and serve 15 billion cups of modern oriental tea every year. This is the confidence of Bawang Tea Princess.

Looking at all walks of life, if you want to pick the most competitive one, new tea drinks are on the list. But for the market, it is not the emergence of hundreds of different brands that is called internal competition. The real competition is that hundreds of different stores sell similar products at lower prices. In the past, domestic new tea drinks were gradually heading towards such a misunderstanding. However, supported by tea making technology and cultural heritage, Bawang Tea Princess' unique brand philosophy is bringing a different solution to the industry.