How does Jiaoxia expand its product categories? You can learn from Xiaohongshu’s successful experience

The Jiaoxia brand is a rising star that focuses on outdoor products. How did it gain a foothold in the outdoor market? How will it drive user growth and promote product category expansion in the future? This article may give you some inspiration~

While shopping, I saw a windbreaker endorsed by Jay Chou. The style was nice and not very expensive, so I bought it.

After becoming a user, I started to research this brand called "Jiaoxia".

The founders are two science and engineering men. After completing their postgraduate studies in Hong Kong, they started a business selling sun umbrellas.

Surprisingly, they dared to sell this umbrella for more than 200 yuan. During the 618 shopping festival in 2018, it directly ranked first in Tmall's home brand sales, squeezing out the giant Tiantang Umbrella in this category.

Of course, the sun umbrella is just a hot-selling item. Jiaoxia entered the outdoor market from here and differentiated a new category: lightweight outdoor.

It took several years to expand from single products to categories and then to define new categories.

The greatest scarcity is to define outdoor use as "lightweight" and seize new product categories that have not been defined by the industry. This is the core moat of the brand.

The lesson we learned from this is that when a niche market reaches a bottleneck, there are two ways to achieve further growth:

(1) Like Anta, it continues to acquire mature brands to supplement its product diversity.

(2) Like Jiaoxia and Xiaohongshu, they expand product categories through self-enhancement from within.

It’s not to say that there are no problems under the banana tree.

After defining lightweight outdoor activities, the next issue we face is the issue of expanding our customer base.

If you have been to Jiaoxia's offline stores and Taotian stores, you will find that the majority of users are female, which can be clearly perceived from the display of goods.

How to expand from the female group to the entire outdoor audience is the problem that Jiaoxia wants to solve.

When it comes to successful cases in expanding the audience and product categories, it has to be Xiaohongshu.

In the early days of Xiaohongshu, the core UGC users were models and photographers. They have strong aesthetic sense and are good at matching clothes, editing photos, and producing films.

From this group, it gradually spread to more users with aesthetic tastes, mainly young women from first- and second-tier cities, and then continued to expand until it became the community app it is today with 100 million daily active users.

In terms of population and category expansion, although Jiaoxia and Xiaohongshu have different product types, they are essentially similar.

Let me talk about Xiaohongshu’s success story and see if it can be of some inspiration to you.

1. Expand supply first, then promote the spread of consumer groups

Xiaohongshu set up a special project to target male users. The first step in thinking about the problem was to expand the content supply suitable for male users.

For example, technology, finance, sports, military, etc. are fields with a very high concentration of male users.

After the content is supplied, we need to understand and label the content, and finally distribute it on the algorithm side . This is the general idea. There are various problems, and we need to solve them one by one.

Doesn’t it look simple?

There are many difficulties that need to be overcome from a professional perspective. For example, among these male content categories, which ones are suitable for Xiaohongshu? What types of creators are more likely to make money on Xiaohongshu?

Technology information belongs to technology; but technology product reviews also belong to technology, and obviously the latter is better.

Professional sports events are considered sports; but sports like fitness and frisbee are also considered sports, and the latter is better.

Making decisions on these issues requires professional skills and the continuous use of AB testing.

2. The key to choosing the supply category is “relevance”

In other words, when choosing which categories to expand and which to expand first, we need to find the connections between the categories.

I can say responsibly that when most of the leading content platforms expand their product categories, they first assign this task to a certain team or group, for example, Group 1 is responsible for Category A, Group 2 is responsible for Category B, and so on.

Then, groups 1, 2, and 3 of these people will go out to find content suppliers, that is, to attract accounts to settle in.

However, no one can manage whether these accounts can survive, whether they can form synergy, and whether there are strategies to promote them. As a result, each group and each business is independent and fragmented, which makes it easy for them to die.

Xiaohongshu’s approach is to find direct relevance between categories.

Let’s take an example to make it easier to understand. For example, if you want to expand the outdoor category, don’t just think about which accounts to pull in, but look at where these groups gather and which categories they are related to.

Outdoor enthusiasts all have their own groups or offline gathering points, and usually fishing, mountaineering, hiking, skiing and other categories are also similar, and the group overlap is very high.

When Xiaohongshu expands its outdoor business, it will bring these related categories together.

And we will not only focus on account level, but also on the user mindset in this category.

The question is how to make outdoor users know about the Xiaohongshu platform and come here to communicate. If we use indicators to measure it, it is the first mention rate.

Let me repeat the successful experience of Xiaohongshu’s category expansion:

• Starting from the content supply side, the consumption side takes over.
• Don't focus on one category, find a group.
• The user mindset within the industry is also important.

Like a puzzle, one piece at a time, they fit together to form a whole.

Back to the Jiaoxia case, we can refer to Xiaohongshu’s successful experience to expand our audience and product categories.

• Starting from the supply side, we will launch more products suitable for more people. This is obvious. The key is what products are suitable for Jiaoxia, which is the first step to determine success or failure.
• Don’t focus on “categories”, focus on “people groups”. Jiaoxia has corresponding target groups, and we plan products based on their common needs.
• Cultivate the minds of new user groups. Establish awareness among new user groups through brand marketing, community penetration, KOL promotion, etc.

The above three points are suggestions for Jiaoxia to expand its customer base and product categories. I have not elaborated on them, so friends are welcome to join in the discussion.

Author: Han Xu

Source: WeChat public account "HanXu (ID: kenengyouxihanxu)"