The first Chinese luxury brand to succeed overseas may be a confinement center

Through precise insights and high-quality content, Saint Bella works with Pamela and others to improve the health and well-being of pregnant women, successfully create a full life cycle service experience, and expand overseas markets.

After acquiring the new identity of a mother, I almost became a maternal and child expert as a brand researcher.

My experience of pregnancy, childbirth, confinement and childcare has given me a personal sense of the maternal and child care industry. Becoming a mother means a change in lifestyle and even a reshaping of one’s personality.

Therefore, this track is particularly suitable for crowd branding - the user group has obvious characteristics and high stickiness, so it will also bring a correspondingly high life cycle value. Once trust is gained, product categories can also be extended.

Postpartum care is an even bigger market opportunity. We have a long history of postpartum care and a high level of awareness of postpartum care. However, there has not been a brand that can really capture the minds of the new generation of women in this field. When they or their relatives and friends need to take a postpartum care, they will immediately think of it. Until the emergence of Saint Bella in recent years.

This year, on Mother's Day, Saint Bella came into my sight again. Among many brand campaigns that emphasize motherhood or use Mother's Day as a promotional node, Saint Bella is unique in that it truly starts from brand positioning and user needs and takes actions to improve the health and well-being of pregnant women.

On May 11, Saint Bella cooperated with Pamela, a world-renowned fitness blogger, and joined hands with authoritative expert consultant, Ma Liangkun, chief physician of obstetrics and gynecology department of a tertiary hospital, to customize the "Pamela, You're Tired of Being Born" 8-minute pregnancy exercise for pregnant women and issued invitations to follow the exercise.

In response to the special needs of postpartum women, Pamela, Ma Liangkun and maternal and child care doctor Liu Meifang jointly developed the Saint Bella customized postpartum exercises, upgraded the services and products of stores around the world, and unlocked them only for Saint Bella customers.

In addition to customized content, Saint Bella has also developed a bubble series of advanced customized maternity pants designed to fit the pregnant belly and enhance the mothers' exercise experience.

I can clearly feel that Saint Bella has a very deep insight into the new generation of pregnant women, and has the ambition to build an international brand and successfully establish a flywheel of population growth.

Its starting point is the precise group of pregnant women. Through sophisticated user operations and leading brand content, the emotional connection between the brand and users has been greatly strengthened. On this basis, the brand launches more new products and services around this group of people, and consumers are also happy to buy them. Ultimately, a virtuous cycle of self-growth is formed.

Taking this cooperation with Pamela as an opportunity, I found Lin Wanyi, co-founder of Becon International and brand manager of SAINT BELLA, and talked to her about why SAINT BELLA chose to cooperate with Pamela and how it created a full life cycle service experience for the new generation of mothers. I hope to provide some ideas for relevant practitioners.

1. Use brand content to open up the global market

Over the past year, I have talked with many brands about growth, and the common dilemma is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to acquire users, especially those who have deep connections with the brand.

There are two main reasons. One is that the business environment has changed from supply-driven to demand-driven. Consumers have more choices and their loyalty has declined. The other is that the media environment has changed from traffic-driven to content-driven. Even if you are willing to spend money, if the content is not good, you still cannot attract consumers.

Content is traffic, and traffic is value. Saint Bella is a brand that is very good at using valuable content to leverage traffic.

Why did you choose to cooperate with Pamela? Mainly due to the strategic consideration of brand expansion overseas.

Lin Wanyi told me that Saint Bella values ​​Pamela's influence at home and abroad as a top global content IP. She is not only a representative of a healthy and high-energy lifestyle, but also the embodiment of beauty and positive energy, with both kinetic energy and potential energy.

Last October, Bella Vista entered the overseas market for the first time, bringing its BELLA VILLA series of single-family homes to the Capella Hotel in Singapore. This year, the brand entered the United States, settling in the Pelican Hill Resort in Newport Beach on the Gold Coast of Southern California, and has entered the pre-sale stage. The new store in New York will also be officially announced soon.

At this point, Santa Bella hopes to leverage Pamela's image to increase brand awareness and favorability overseas and open up overseas markets.

Why customize pregnancy exercises?

Lin Wanyi told me that the new generation of women have developed the awareness and habit of exercising during pregnancy, and have a strong desire to "grow a belly without gaining weight" because they hope to have a smooth delivery and maintain their figure and health. However, the pain point is that exercise during pregnancy requires a high level of professionalism, and the quality of existing content online is uneven.

As a leader in the industry, Lin Wanyi believes that Saint Bella has the responsibility and should provide more professional services and value to the new generation of women, meet their strong demand for professional services during the pregnancy stage, and drive the industry to higher standards.

For Saint Bella, pregnancy exercises allow more users to know Saint Bella in advance, and through high-quality content, mothers can experience Saint Bella's services covering the entire pregnancy and childbirth cycle. At the same time, it also allows more pregnant women to realize how to have a better and healthier lifestyle after becoming mothers.

Therefore, for this Mother's Day campaign, Saint Bella also invited Ma Liangkun, chief physician of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of a tertiary hospital, to jointly develop content. In the development of postpartum exercises, Dr. Liu Meifang, a maternal and child care doctor who understands the needs of postpartum women better, also joined in.

The picture is from the screenshot of Xiaohongshu

Saint Bella’s target population can be roughly divided into three layers. The outermost layer is the general population. Just like luxury goods, even if a person never plans to buy luxury goods, he will have a perception of the brand.

In the middle are pregnant women. Even if they cannot become customers of Saint Bella, Lin Wanyi hopes that they can understand what kind of professional and high-quality services high-configuration confinement care can provide, and form user education based on the confinement center. Pregnancy exercises are designed for this layer of users.

The innermost layer, or the core group, is the customers who have already purchased Saint Bella's services. One of the most important goals of this cooperation is to fully upgrade the original postpartum exercise products in stores around the world, and provide one-on-one services from nurses, which are exclusive to Saint Bella customers.

The picture is reproduced from the official platform of San Bella

In terms of communication, Saint Bella launched a network-wide follow-up exercise campaign #Follow Pamela's pregnancy exercise# and invited a group of interesting pregnancy bloggers with healthy lifestyles to participate in the follow-up exercise activities. At the same time, they cooperated with the explanations of professionals and the practical knowledge of pregnancy exercise. They approached from different scenarios and dimensions to drive the whole network to follow the exercise.

For brand users, Saint Bella invited two celebrity customers, Gina and Sui Yumeng, to practice with them, and organized users to practice pregnancy and postpartum exercises in offline stores. While improving the public's awareness of the brand, it provides users with exclusive content and services to maintain the brand's high-end attributes.

2. Emotional Value vs. Functional Value

Today, all industries are in a state of internal competition. The result of this competition is a competition of traffic, efficiency, and price. This kind of ecosystem is not friendly to most brands, and in the end, the user experience will also be harmed. It can be said that it is a situation where everyone loses.

How can a brand grow healthily in the current environment?

I have shared an idea before: only by breaking away from the existing value judgments of the product or even the industry, and thinking clearly about the brand’s true mission, can we find a way out in the current involutionary environment and truly establish a differentiation barrier.

Saint Bella started from user needs, found its brand mission, and established a differentiated path of providing emotional value horizontally and functional value vertically.

I asked Lin Wanyi, in her opinion, what are the unmet needs of the new generation of pregnant women?

Lin Wanyi said that in the early days of the business, the team found that mainstream confinement centers generally focused on maternal physical recovery and newborn care, and the service content was only for physiological purposes, but not psychological ones. But in fact, today's high-end users not only need the functional value of the product, but also have a high demand for the emotional value of the service.

For Saint Bella, high-end service quality and user experience are equally important. Saint Bella represents luxury beyond "months of confinement". High luxury is by no means a single pricing orientation. Quality is the first principle, and price is only the result of adhering to quality. Products and services that satisfy users' happiness can be called true luxury brands.

Lin Wanyi's experience of studying art abroad made her realize the healing power of art on women. In terms of both form and content, it allows pregnant women to let go of their complex emotions and achieve deep relaxation.

Inspired by this, Saint Bella pioneered art therapy. As early as 2016, it started the research and development of related content. Now, art therapy is provided to mothers and babies in four sessions every day, starting from the five senses, including music therapy in the morning, film talk in the afternoon, art history appreciation in the evening, and poetry reading at night.

Based on the theory of art therapy, Saint Bella provides content products and services covering pregnancy, confinement and leave period, including Sotheby's appreciation, Saint Bella IP pregnancy museum, and the first newborn armpit swimming ring in China jointly created with UCCA, and continuously improves the system and content of art therapy in practice.

Before Saint Bella and UCCA collaborated, the only products available on the domestic market were cervical collars. However, the baby’s cervical spine is not fully developed yet, and cervical collars may cause pressure on the neck, causing breathing problems. In order to give the baby a safer and more memorable experience, Saint Bella followed science and worked with maternal and child care doctor Liu Meifang for six months to design a special underarm swimming ring for newborns, which not only improves the safety factor, but also combines artistry and beauty.

In the vertical direction, Saint Bella hopes to maximize the functional value.

When she first entered the industry, Lin Wanyi discovered that the confinement center industry has long had three major drawbacks: 1. There is a lack of national confinement care brands. In the past, confinement centers all adopted the traditional stand-alone model for operation and management, resulting in obvious regional characteristics in brand distribution and an inability to form a national brand; 2. Most confinement centers use the confinement nanny system, but the professional abilities of the nannies vary, and there is a general lack of scientific and systematic service standards and digital system management; 3. The services provided by confinement centers only focus on the physiological part, and the psychological part is missing.

Saint Bella’s iteration of the confinement center can be divided into three stages.

The first stage is the differentiation of nursing care. Saint Bella innovatively replaced confinement nannies with professional nurses, creating a 24-hour 1V1 nursing model. In addition, Saint Bella has its own Beikang Nursing School, which has formed a training mechanism system of recruitment-training-examination-practical exercises. Only after passing the training mechanism can the nurses provide room service.

The second stage is to differentiate the environment. We only cooperate with high-end brands of global luxury hotel groups to provide pregnant women with a comfortable and private environment like traveling.

The third stage is product differentiation. Through scenario-based services and the combination with new retail products, we can improve user experience. We will continue to gain insights into industry pain points and develop innovative products to penetrate service scenarios.

We say that the crowd strategy model is an inverted funnel model with a small opening at the top and a large opening at the bottom. In the customer acquisition phase, we need to capture the brand's core group and reach them repeatedly. After finding this group of people, we can extend the LTV (Long-term Value) and use brand content to build a consensus on the brand, so that users can have a strong sense of belonging, pride, and resonance.

Looking back at the implementation of Saint Bella's strategies and tactics on this basis, we can find that it has a very clear idea on how to build a brand around a group of people. The most important thing is that its actions are very effective. In just six years since its establishment, it has grown into an industry leader.

According to the latest report on China's home care industry released by Frost & Sullivan, Saint Bella and its subsidiary Little Bella will rank first in the industry in terms of annual revenue, number of directly-operated stores and growth rate above scale in 2023. Among the top market players in the industry, Saint Bella Group has the widest business scope and is the only home care group that covers postpartum care, reproductive health management, infant home care and women's health food.

Among all categories, ultra-high-end and high-end confinement centers showed strong growth, reaching a total scale of approximately RMB 5.2 billion in 2022, with an annual compound growth rate of more than 30%, far higher than the growth level of China's overall confinement center industry.

Having taken the lead in the fast lane, Santa Bella has already set its sights on a larger market.

03Chinese brands go global, people-oriented

I have expressed the same view on many occasions in the past: as our cultural curve catches up with the consumption curve, more Chinese brands will go overseas. In addition to consumer brands, service industry brands also have opportunities.

How to win the favor of overseas consumers? San Bella’s answer is still “people-oriented”.

Lin Wanyi told me that the biggest challenge of going overseas is to integrate into the local culture, constantly adjust the products, and complete the training of the team. Most of Saint Bella's overseas customers are Chinese, and 5%-10% are local customers. Their attitude towards confinement and the length of stay are closer to the concept of staycation, but the demand is objective.

Especially for high-net-worth families, although there is no concept of "confinement", they will ask nutritionists to customize post-delivery menus and find yoga teachers to help with muscle recovery. It's just that they haven't integrated these together to form a confinement lifestyle. The postpartum holiday may only be about a week, and there will not be a complete cycle of 28 days or even 42 days of rest.

Lin Wanyi said that overseas, there are entrepreneurs from Japan and South Korea who run the same business. Their meticulous service is also worth learning. The team needs to constantly think about how to give customers a better experience.

When faced with a completely new culture and market, Saint Bella chose to return to the key issues and look for solutions based on people's needs.

Lin Wanyi told me that returning to the starting point of the postpartum culture, it itself started from the needs of high-net-worth individuals and gradually radiated and influenced the general public. Creating unique value for them is the key to the success of the brand.

After conducting research, Lin Wanyi discovered that Santa Bella's "round-the-clock mother-baby rooming-in, one-on-one professional care model" still has advantages overseas.

Taking the maternity centers in the United States as an example, although a small number of them use nurses' care services instead of confinement nannies, they also follow the Taiwanese model and will only push the baby into the mother's room when necessary.

In fact, mothers’ needs are not well met. Due to the separation of mother-baby rooms, mothers cannot establish a deep emotional connection with their babies through close contact in the early stages. Some mothers even feel guilty and remorseful for not taking good care of their babies.

Saint Bella is based on the intimate parenting concept proposed by Dr. William Sears, the "Father of Modern Parenting", which advocates that parents establish an intimate relationship as early as possible to have a positive and long-lasting impact on the baby's growth.

Based on this, Saint Bella insists on keeping mother and baby in the same room all day, and still adheres to the luxurious care model of "one-to-one care model" overseas. In Singapore, one room is equipped with four nurses working in shifts for 12 hours to create the highest configuration of confinement experience for customers.

Last year, in a conversation with Ye Minggui, we talked about how to judge whether a product has been sublimated into a brand. Guiye said that his way of testing is to see whether it has a premium. The premium means that consumers have developed a preference for this product, which is a very strong barrier.

Guiye believes that humans will only have a preference for one other human being. Humans may fall in love with dogs and cats because they are both anthropomorphized.

During the chat with Lin Wanyi, I asked her why Saint Bella is so brave and keeps subverting common sense and breaking rules. She told me that Saint Bella calls on customers to be themselves. In fact, Saint Bella has always been itself. We hope that this brand will maintain its independent personality, just like we hope that every mother will maintain her independent personality.

I think Saint Bella has already proven its ability to win the preference of users. The next step is to win the hearts of overseas users by leveraging China's confinement culture.

Author: Daojie Doris

WeChat public account: Daojie doris