The GMV of a single game exceeded 100 million yuan, and the light luxury minimalist women's clothing exploded in the live broadcast room

We will explore the secrets of COCO ZONE's success, including its unique talent IP style, strong inventory and operational capabilities, and its innovative practices in the field of live e-commerce. At the same time, we will also focus on the development prospects and challenges of mid- to high-end women's clothing merchants in the current market environment. Let's walk into the world of COCO ZONE and explore the secrets of its success.

There are no secrets in the women's clothing industry.

Whether it is a popular element, a popular style, or a popular brand, the flow and dismantling of information is always immediate. For example, in the past year, COCO ZONE, a popular store with a minimalist style, quickly became the research object of the women's clothing circle and the protagonist of various dismantling short videos.

People outside the circle may not have heard of this brand name, but people in the circle are already busy dismantling the growth myth of COCO ZONE. A little-known anchor, who sells clothes for only four or five hundred yuan, can sell hundreds of millions of GMV in a single live broadcast, with annual sales of up to 5 billion yuan, and has been ranked first in the sales of women's clothing on Douyin for consecutive years... It is hard not to attract attention among the well-informed women's clothing e-commerce community.

In the multi-billion-dollar clothing industry, women's clothing has always been the category with the largest space and the most intense competition. A wave of fashion trends can make a group of brands popular; a batch of inventory may punish another wave of merchants who misjudge the trend. And each new wave of platform dividends may also reshape the entire industry landscape.

In this process, what type of women's clothing merchants can achieve stable and long-term operations is a proposition of common concern in the industry. As the biggest dark horse in the industry, can COCO ZONE and the mid-to-high-end women's clothing merchants it represents bring new inspiration to the industry? This is what we are very interested in.

01 Single-game GMV exceeded 100 million

Who is COCO ZONE?

In February 2023, after a city jacket priced at 599 yuan became a hot item, Douyin women's clothing merchants began to ask, who is Liu Yiyi? What is the origin of COCO ZONE?

This jacket named COCO ZONE appeared in the live broadcast room of waist expert Liu Yiyi. The jacket is available for both men and women in three colors: black, white and gray. The design style is suitable for both urban commuting and outdoor sports scenes, combining minimalist aesthetics with strong practicality. Of course, the price is not cheap.

According to the experience of many live-streaming e-commerce practitioners, affordable and high-volume products and user groups in lower-tier regions are the basic base of live-streaming rooms. However, the new brand COCO ZONE has been pursuing a high-quality, mid-to-high-price segment since its launch, and its sales volume has been increasing. Last year, its GMV exceeded 5 billion yuan.

To understand the magnitude of this achievement in the women's clothing industry, we can refer to the performance of several domestic women's clothing listed companies: In fiscal year 2023, JNBY, a brand under Jiangnan Buyi, had revenue of approximately RMB 2.5 billion. Another mid-to-high-end women's clothing brand "Broadcast" had revenue of RMB 998 million in 2023.

The key is that this growth momentum has continued to this day: during this year's 618 period, COCO ZONE's GMV reached 450 million; at its peak, Liu Yiyi's live broadcast room had a transaction volume of 400,000 yuan in one minute and 16 million yuan in one hour.

On June 18, COCO ZONE’s single live broadcast exceeded 100 million views

Judging from the number of fans, COCO ZONE is not among the top brands, as the latter can easily have 5-6 million fans. COCO ZONE is a brand that is strongly tied to the IP of celebrities. As one of the founders, Liu Yiyi, a live streamer, has the largest number of fans among the three accounts with the same name, @刘一一, with only 1.4 million fans, followed by @刘11生活号, with 920,000 fans, and @Bella刘一一, with 300,000 fans. Among the three store accounts, @COCO ZONE clothing flagship store has 140,000 fans.

Roughly speaking, the number of fans of COCO ZONE matrix is ​​about 3 million+, but this does not affect the appeal of Liu Yiyi and the brand. Looking through Liu Yiyi's life records and outfit sharing short videos, the average number of likes for a single post is around 10,000. There are many interactions in the comment area with old fans such as "When will this set be available?" and "Whatever clothes Yiyi wears, I will buy them." There are also fans who share "buyer shows" in the comment area, and the interactive atmosphere is like Xiaohongshu.

From the perspective of clothing style, COCO ZONE follows the minimalist and quiet luxury style. The colors of the fashion are mainly low-saturation black, white, gray and brown, which are both versatile and can highlight the sense of luxury. The styles are mainly basic women's styles, but unlike the bland and cold style that MUJI has brought to the extreme, it is more inclined to the design and tailoring of fashion brands, pursuing simplicity and generosity.

This style can easily benefit from the trend. In the past two years, the minimalist style has become a high ground of the era's aesthetics by relying on the "high-end feeling" maintained by relaxation and low-key. The quiet luxury style and the old money style are both representatives of this trend. At the beginning of the year, a person in the clothing supply chain estimated that on the Douyin e-commerce platform, more than 20 minimalist style top anchors including Liu Yiyi, Romi, Sister Huan, Hala, Luo Ge, etc., achieved sales of more than 10 billion last year, which is a strong momentum.

This is not only due to the support of fashion trends, but also the platform's recommendation mechanism. As a content platform, Douyin can not only lead the trend through content, but also quickly push the trend to potential users through personalized recommendations of interest e-commerce, thereby activating the entire commercial realization chain.

From the fact that COCO ZONE and Liu Yiyi have emerged as the top brands and continue to dominate the women's clothing category, we may also be able to get a glimpse of what types of women's clothing merchants are more popular among platforms and consumers at the moment.

02 A blast without any weaknesses

In the analysis of its peers, COCO ZONE's rise is attributed to the differentiation of its influencer IP styles + its product range + its operational capabilities. From the perspective of brand operation, many industry insiders commented that COCO ZONE "has no obvious shortcomings."

Judging from the live broadcast style, there is no noisy "123 to link" and "Sisters, go" in Liu Yiyi's live broadcast room. Her personal style is closer to the slow live broadcast of Xiaohongshu bloggers. She sits on the sofa or squats on the ground alone, introducing products, materials, and dressing concepts in a gentle chatting way. She also shares her life updates and personal insights with fans.

Compared with other live-streaming rooms that promote products and deliberately create a sense of tension of "if you're slow, you'll miss out", Liu Yiyi's room gives people a more relaxed feeling and is not so urgent to sell products. The interactive content beyond product introductions can also provide a certain emotional resonance for female fans, that is, emotional value.

It is not difficult to see that Liu Yiyi's personality, speech skills, and live broadcast style are highly consistent with the value proposition of relaxed and comfortable life that COCO ZONE wants to convey through minimalist style.

This is also reflected in the results. On the homepage of Liu Yiyi's account, its content experience score is 5 points; having unique and competitive content also brings higher fan stickiness. Whether in the comment area or in the brand's private domain operation, COCO ZONE's fan activity is higher than the industry average.

Of course, having a "good audience appeal" is only the first step. In live e-commerce, what really makes the difference between influencers and brands is the back-end inventory and service capabilities. All e-commerce platforms consume inventory, but live e-commerce platforms are even more so, but inventory places extremely high demands on the back-end supply chain.

"We were already prepared before we started this brand." "Brother Jian," one of the founders of COCO ZONE and responsible for the supply chain, revealed that he has been working in the Guangzhou apparel industry for more than ten years. He has been providing product R&D and design supply chain services for domestic first- and second-tier brands, and has accumulated a large number of designer and factory resources. It can be said that this team has the genes for fashion R&D and design.

After the rise of live streaming e-commerce, Jian Ge's team turned to supplying top anchors, still focusing on mid-to-high-end products. But he has always wanted to create a high-quality women's clothing brand. "Being in the supply chain is to serve others, which is passive. Your design is chosen. Being a brand is different. You can express what you want to present."

At this time, although Liu Yiyi, the famous anchor, was still in the middle in terms of the number of fans, he had already shown his ability to bring goods in the live broadcast room, but after the traffic exploded, the goods could not keep up. Since they both wanted to make "good goods", the two quickly hit it off after being introduced by a friend and co-founded COCO ZONE in early 2023.

When analyzing the COCO ZONE inventory data, many peers were impressed by the brand's speed of new product launches and its ability to create hit products. COCO ZONE currently has 6 live broadcast rooms, and each live broadcast will have about 20 to 30 new models. Jian Ge revealed that in addition to the company's internal design team, the brand also has 4 external R&D and design teams, with about 60 people. These people are responsible for a steady stream of creative output, and can provide an average of 30-50 new product design plans every day for the live broadcast room to choose from.

This also explains why COCO ZONE was able to release dozens of new 2024 spring and summer models at the brand's exclusive event at the Shanghai Fashion Week last October. Predicting trends in advance also requires the support of strong supply chain capabilities.

This kind of R&D design is not done behind closed doors. According to our observation, before the new product is launched, COCO ZONE will have a short video test session, that is, through the seeding situation in the comment area of ​​the short video, it will decide which products need to be stocked in advance, so that they can be shipped directly after the first wave of the live broadcast. This operation has an obvious advantage - accumulating intention orders through preheating in advance and reducing inventory risks; but there are also certain thresholds, such as testing the number of fans and fan stickiness of the influencer IP, otherwise there may be information distortion and deviate from the real market situation.

The product selection and pattern making process is still supervised by Jian Ge himself. He will closely monitor whether the finished product meets the design expectations. According to Jian Ge's philosophy, the founder's understanding of the product is the core, otherwise the product has no soul. "Only the clothes that we ourselves like can be put into production. If we and the people around us don't like it, we will definitely not sell it to consumers."

The user profile of COCO ZONE is high-spending women aged 30-50, such as elite white-collar workers and middle-class mothers. When these people buy clothes, they not only want good-looking styles, but also have higher requirements for quality. Especially for high-priced clothing, quality often determines the repurchase rate. COCO ZONE has been targeting offline big brands since its initial positioning, with the goal of being more "cost-effective" than offline brands under the premise of equal quality.

As for how to ensure quality, with years of experience in the supply chain, Jian Ge quickly developed his own standards: for example, the OEM factories he cooperates with all have experience in OEM for first- and second-tier brands, and the textile fabrics used are at least first-class national standards; accessories such as zippers are all made by Japan's YKK. There was a saying in the clothing industry before, "Those who can afford YKK zippers will not have bad quality clothes, shoes and bags."

In order to ensure consumers' shopping experience, COCO ZONE uses SF Express for all shipments, and each piece of clothing is manually inspected before leaving the warehouse to ensure that the clothes received by consumers are free of thread ends and other defects. Currently, manual random inspections and machine mixed inspections are the common practices in the industry.

According to Jin Wen, the person in charge of COCO ZONE brand operations, the after-sales service department will specially invite LV salesgirls to provide training. In addition to providing one-on-one exclusive customer service and regular gifts for old fans with high repurchase rates, the team is relatively relaxed in reviewing the reasons for returns. For example, the official requirement is 7 days of no-reason returns, but as long as Liu Yiyi has made a promise in the live broadcast room - for example, if the shoes are not comfortable after wearing for a month, they can be returned, the after-sales service will fulfill it. "Since the fans choose to believe in you, you have to do it well. If you just sell and don't care, you will definitely not be able to last long."

According to the store information of COCO ZONE, its service score is also 5 points. Many fans left comments in the product review area saying, "Except for being expensive, there is nothing wrong with it."

03 New trend of content e-commerce: the rise of mid- to high-end products

Data from Feigua and other platforms show that the average customer unit price of COCO ZONE brand autumn and winter clothing is over 400 yuan, and that of spring and summer clothing is over 300 yuan.

Industry insiders have observed that COCO ZONE is the first batch of celebrity stores in the women's clothing category of Douyin e-commerce with high customer unit price. Since the autumn of 2023, many women's clothing merchants of the same type have entered the market, and a group of large wholesalers and supply chain merchants with deep roots in Guangzhou Shisanhang have begun to focus on this track.

Brother Jian told NoNoise that there were two reasons for deciding to set a high customer price. On the one hand, it was based on the product concept: to make high-quality women's clothing, the surface materials, craftsmanship, quality inspection, logistics and after-sales must be of high standards, which will result in higher costs. On the other hand, it was an observation of trends. When supplying goods to the top anchors, he found that the mid-to-high price range was showing an explosive trend in Douyin e-commerce. At the same time, the performance of Taobao's high-quality and high-end women's clothing was also growing.

This trend also appeared offline. Despite the impact of the epidemic, some high-quality women's clothing brands are still rebounding rapidly. In the second half of last year, the designer women's clothing brand Jiangnan Buyi's revenue increased by 26% year-on-year; its net profit was 574 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 54.5%.

In retrospect, the timing of COCO ZONE's creation also coincided with the trend of segmentation of live e-commerce platform demand and the rapid growth of mid-to-high-end women's clothing. Douyin has more than 600 million daily active users. The richness of the user ecosystem determines that the platform must not only provide "affordable" goods for some users, but also meet the needs of another part of the user group with high-quality goods, and thus differentiate between platforms.

For merchants, product quality is also the most sincere way to communicate with fans and a guarantee for long-term brand operation.

In the face of a new structural opportunity, the first mover can often reap more dividends. COCO ZONE has become the "e-commerce textbook" in the industry disassembly video, which can be said to have benefited from this. However, in the face of increasingly fierce industry competition, COCO ZONE has never dared to relax even though it has already ranked first in the women's clothing category.

"Douyin e-commerce itself is a fast-paced platform, and merchants themselves must constantly change in order to stay stable." Jinwen, head of brand operations at COCO ZONE, believes that even merchants who have already reached the top must continue to iterate in order to keep up with the pace of the platform. No one can stay where they are. "Only when we have achieved the ultimate in what we can do ourselves can we have the confidence to compete with others."

For example, in the face of competition, COCO ZONE has started to upgrade its brand. Jian Ge revealed that the models launched this year basically use customized fabrics and imported fabrics to differentiate them from the common goods in the market. Relying on the mature domestic clothing supply chain, most models on the market are easy to copy, and the cost of innovation is quite high, but the quality details such as fabric materials are difficult for followers to copy. It can be said that in the future, competition will evolve more and more upstream of the supply chain.

The Jinwen team is seeking iterations in traffic operations. In addition to live broadcasting, COCO ZONE has been vigorously exploring business models such as store broadcasting, product cards, short videos, and slices this year. "Multi-domain is the general trend of Douyin e-commerce, and brands must make arrangements."

If each round of platform business model expansion has the opportunity to bring new scale dividends, in the field of interest e-commerce, omni-domain operations are bringing new growth space to more brand merchants. Jinwen revealed that the current brand's natural traffic is about 70%, of which about 30% comes from platform recommendations. According to his observation, the Douyin e-commerce shelf field brings more and more incremental sales to merchants. At this time, omni-domain operations can not only "make up for the volume", but also tap into new incremental sales. For example, during this year's 618, the "product card" alone brought an average daily sales of 1.2 million yuan to COCO ZONE, and on the day of 618, it even reached 6 million yuan.

During the 618 period this year, Douyin e-commerce also launched a support activity called "Protecting New Brands", which provided participating brands with multiple rewards such as cash back. COCO ZONE actively participated in the selection and set a record on the 618 day for the first time that the GMV of Douyin women's clothing exceeded 100 million in a single event.

The live streaming e-commerce industry has entered the second half, and the platform traffic, live streaming atmosphere, and consumer shopping psychology are all undergoing subtle changes. What type of merchants can stand out and achieve longer-term operations? After careful examination, we believe that all industries still have the greatest common denominator - such as the strong combination of good content and good products.

Merchants with this underlying advantage may also be able to create the next COCO ZONE.