Plant-themed outfits remain popular. How can businesses take advantage of content trends on Xiaohongshu?

"Plant-style outfits" have quickly become popular on social platforms such as Xiaohongshu and have become a new fashion trend. How can merchants capture this trend and achieve brand growth through content marketing and e-commerce strategies? This article deeply explores the popularity of "plant-style outfits" on the Xiaohongshu platform, and analyzes how merchants can use content seeding, theme activities, and live broadcast linkage to quickly respond to market trends, achieve closed-loop transactions from content to e-commerce, and bring new growth points to brands.

Dressing yourself up as a tree and embracing the wilderness freely is a new plan for young people to "get rid of the class atmosphere".

On Xiaohongshu, the most popular relaxation project recently, is to wear a "plant-style outfit" to embrace nature. The eye-catching moss green is matched with earth tones, beige and light yellow, and daisies, roses and sweet oranges bloom on the hems and skirts, and the "midsummer" is coming.

As of press time, more than 80,000 "plant-style outfit" notes have emerged on Xiaohongshu. Strictly speaking, there is no official definition of "plant-style outfit", but in the process of spontaneous dissemination by users, it has some obvious characteristics: it often uses natural colors, embellished with plant and fruit elements, and the materials are mainly comfortable natural fabrics such as cotton, linen, and gauze.

At the same time, under the background of the rapid development of Xiaohongshu e-commerce, a group of merchants and buyers who understand content and life have seized this opportunity and taken on this wave of popularity. They share "plant-style outfits" by posting notes, and then adjust the goods, plan theme activities, and introduce users to the live broadcast room to achieve "shopping while browsing". So far, one of the most popular topics on Xiaohongshu is to teach you how to get the same style #植物系look买上身#, and the topic exposure has exceeded 700 million.

This path of quickly responding to popular trends and facilitating transaction conversions has been understood by more and more businesses and has quietly swept Xiaohongshu.

1. Share content based on hot trends and integrate e-commerce with “number broadcasting in one”

One of the businesses that noticed this trend the fastest was Mardi Mercredi, a clothing brand that already featured plant elements. As a popular independent designer brand in South Korea, its style incorporates French style and has always been well-known on Xiaohongshu.

In early summer, Mardi Mercredi frequently posted notes on its Xiaohongshu brand account, actively sharing "plant-themed outfits". By following up on hot content, Mardi Mercredi continued to magnify classic brand elements such as daisies, roses, and mushrooms.

"Wear daisies and go out for photosynthesis", "Become a summer limited botanist"... In late July, combined with scenario-based construction, Mardi Mercredi created the "Plant Illustrated Book" theme event, incorporating the popular MBTI personality test. In the process of launching the topic #What is your plant MBTI#, it used notes to link to the matrix account live broadcast, which widely gathered users.

At that time, "plant-style outfits" were very popular on Xiaohongshu. Taking advantage of this trend, Mardi Mercredi discovered that this trend on Xiaohongshu, which had been fermented from the user side, gradually entered the merchant and buyer side and gained more attention. In this process, merchants responded to the trend and kept up with the pace, which effectively took on the dividends brought by the trend.

By using the method of "posting notes + live broadcast linkage" to keep up with the latest fashion trends - the merchants who have discovered this opportunity are not limited to Mardi Mercredi, but also CAREMIND, a fashionable women's clothing brand that advocates simple and comfortable life.

From the perspective of brand concept, CAREMIND has always attached great importance to the texture of clothing and prefers natural fabrics such as ramie and linen in its designs. As the trend of "plant-based dressing" continues to ferment, CAREMIND realized that this trend is in line with its brand concept.

On May 28, CAREMIND introduced "plant-style outfits" items in the content of the notes, using stylized descriptions to visualize "plant-style girls". "Green ramie sunscreen shirt" is light and breathable, "jacquard texture skirt" is light and natural... CAREMIND uses exquisite outfit display pictures, combined with "plant-style" feature copywriting, to publish a collection of plant-style outfits related to the products, and brings up topics in the notes. After continuously pushing up the popularity, it immediately prepared 8 "plant-style outfits" special live broadcasts to achieve transaction conversion.

It can be said that after capturing the rising trend of "plant-themed outfits", merchants took advantage of this trend the fastest through theme planning and integrated account broadcasting. Subsequently, more and more merchants began to copy this path - on Xiaohongshu, from content seeding to e-commerce transactions is a short-chain closed loop, which is also the fastest way to keep up with popular trends.

2. Linking "buyers" resources, merchants can amplify the potential of the epidemic

After entering midsummer, the popularity of "plant-style outfits" on Xiaohongshu has continued to rise, and has even gradually "broken the circle". More and more merchants have begun to spontaneously bring up the Xiaohongshu topics of #植物系穿搭# and #植物系look穿身#. This new trend shared spontaneously by users has further amplified the influence of the trend through the interaction of merchants, users, and buyers, and has cross-fed back to e-commerce transactions.

As a fashion collection space, Chá Gallery’s biggest advantage is its strong supply chain integration capabilities.

After noticing the new trend of "plant-based dressing", Chá Gallery responded quickly and quickly locked on a number of domestic and foreign niche fashion brands with natural styles: io adesso futura, Sissel, Cortana... These pioneering brands can perfectly interpret the "plant-based look" in terms of materials and concepts, and showcase the aesthetics of life.

After completing the initial product assembly, Chá Gallery further linked up with buyers to collaborate and amplify the potential of the trend. In June this year, fashion buyer Kuai Zai walked into the Chá Gallery brand live broadcast room. With the theme of "plant-based wardrobe", Chá Gallery sold out more than 40 items through solid product selection and natural promotion, and the new product sell-out rate exceeded 90%.

[Chá Gallery brand live broadcast room "plant style wear"]

During the same period, Roheme, Elliatt, BIRKENSTOCK, Youqie and other merchants from clothing, accessories, bags, women's shoes and other subcategories all entered Wu Xin's live broadcast room with their "plant-themed" items. With this live broadcast room as a link point, the "plant-themed" items from different merchants covered more precise users.

Before the broadcast, Wu Xin mentioned the topic of plants in the notes for the live broadcast. During the live broadcast, she combined her personal experience to share the upward growth power and spirit contained in "plant-based outfits". The live broadcast room ranked first on the buyer list within one hour of the broadcast. The total transaction volume of the live broadcast exceeded 33 million yuan that month.

This wave of intensive sharing has spread to a wider circle - on Xiaohongshu, many benchmark buyers such as @董洁@沈梦辰 have joined in, providing merchants with more channels to link to "plant-based outfits". At the same time, under the head effect, more merchants have also begun to join spontaneously and join the craze through store broadcasts.

Merchants, users, and buyers interact with each other, and together they have created a smoother e-commerce business path - in this link, the supply chain advantages of merchants and the buyers' advantages in product selection and precise user coverage work together to take on the trends growing on the platform while meeting user needs.

3. Taking on the user needs behind the trend is a new growth point for business

In July this year, Xiaohongshu gave its first definition of Xiaohongshu e-commerce: Xiaohongshu e-commerce is a lifestyle e-commerce. What users buy on Xiaohongshu is not only good products, but also a desirable life. On Xiaohongshu, merchants, buyers and users are all lifestyle sharers. They equally exchange their own life philosophies and share interesting things and good things in life.

"Xiaohongshu is not building a highway to quickly send users to the live broadcast room to complete their orders, but paving a path at every critical moment that may stimulate users' purchasing needs." Leon, head of Xiaohongshu's e-commerce products, described it this way, pointing out the essence of lifestyle e-commerce through live broadcasts.

It can be said that lifestyle e-commerce meets the most real needs of users. The amplification of trends leads to more demands, and behind the trend is the explosion of user demand.

[Users’ hot topics on Xiaohongshu #植物系look买上身#get同款]

Tracing back to the origin of the rise of "plant-themed outfits", it is closely linked to the continued popularity of outdoor sports and young people's yearning for nature, and more from life. From city walks to "20 minutes in the park", young people who were once keen on going crazy are seeking a more peaceful attitude to "integrate themselves into nature". Through plant-themed outfits, they not only buy outfits that reflect their lifestyle, but also meet their spiritual needs for relaxation.

Nowadays, capturing the user needs behind these trends has become the secret for more and more businesses to seize "growth". It is worth noting that Xiaohongshu's e-commerce trends are different from other platforms.

In the traditional narrative system, most platforms promote the growth of trends through "agenda setting". They are accustomed to creating momentum based on categories, nodes, big promotions, etc., to attract merchants to leverage the momentum for marketing.

Compared to this top-down linear communication, on Xiaohongshu, trends occur more like a network structure, with diverse and rich content, showing real life scenes to a large number of users. This multi-point birth path makes trends more real and more lasting, bringing merchants a higher certainty of transaction conversion.

The popularity of "plant-style outfits" is a vivid example of Xiaohongshu's many consumer trends. It verifies that on Xiaohongshu, merchants can effectively achieve step-by-step growth in business through the three steps of "tracking UGC content trends - bloggers' large-scale promotion to amplify influence - merchants and buyers' transactions". Users' spontaneous sharing of "plant-style outfits" gave birth to this novel style, which was then captured and taken up by keen merchants. In the future, this path is bound to become more and more smooth, and more business opportunities will be born under the trend of continuous growth.

Text｜Wang Yaqi This article is written by the author of Operation Party [E-commerce Online], WeChat public account: [E-commerce Online], original/authorized to be published on Operation Party, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

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