Some observations and thoughts on Douyin's live broadcast of women's clothing

This article starts from Douyin women's clothing and analyzes several routes for live streaming women's clothing. It is recommended for students who are engaged in women's clothing to read.

When it comes to women's clothing, the questions I'm often asked are:

Hey, why don’t you do Douyin live streaming? XXX’s Douyin live streaming is selling very well.

Or my friend XXX, who made a fortune by selling women’s clothing on Douyin!

Basically, someone asks me this every now and then.

I didn’t do it in the past few years, mainly because of the epidemic, and I didn’t dare to do anything reckless.

I don’t do it now, mainly because of awe.

Because the boss around me lost a lot of money by selling women's clothing on Douyin.

After a lot of communication, research and observation in the past few months, I have a clearer view of Douyin's women's clothing live broadcast.

First of all, I think short videos + live broadcasts are definitely the best form of clothing retail performance, and the output efficiency is much higher than pictures.

But in the current competitive live streaming e-commerce market, I believe that only live streaming women's clothing that follows the following routes will have a chance of succeeding.

1. The first route: the industry belt kills the low-price flow

Many live broadcast rooms with good sales are basically backed by factories, or are factories themselves, and the industrial belts themselves broadcast live. For example, Qingdao Jimo, Dongguan Dalang, Zhejiang Jiaxing, Pinghu, Changzhou, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou. Basically, they compete on low prices.

A T-shirt is 30 yuan, a down jacket is 120 yuan, a windbreaker is 90 yuan...

There is definitely nothing wrong with this. No one dislikes low prices, and low prices carry their own potential. However, this low price can only make money if the source of the supply chain sells it itself.

Take a T-shirt for example. It costs more than 30 yuan. After deducting the product cost, personnel cost, postage, returns, and quality inspection, if it is not produced by the factory, there is no profit at all.

Even if the factory cuts prices to the lowest, it doesn't matter if it doesn't make any money on the retail side. It is enough for it to make money just from the production side.

Some teams saw that they could sell the rolls at a low price, so they thought about getting the goods from the factory themselves, adding a little money, and selling them at a low price.

Financially, this is not a profitable business! Your price is not as low as the source supplier, and you can make a small profit on each piece, but the costs you have to pay, such as rent, personnel, traffic, equipment, etc., are very high. Even if you sell tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pieces a month, you may not make money!

I think only factories can do this. If there are more steps, it will be impossible to make money.

2. The second route: blogger-buyer flow

This may be the lowest threshold for ordinary people to do Douyin live broadcasts of women's clothing, which is to become a fashion blogger.

If you can't become a fashion blogger, you can become a beauty blogger, or a lifestyle blogger, or just a beauty blogger.

In short, you are a small internet celebrity, a small KOL, have a certain ability to promote products, and have a certain number of basic fans and loyal fans.

If you start a live broadcast to sell, as long as the clothes look good, they will eventually sell.

In this way, your roles are to be a buyer and a promoter. You don’t need to create anything original, design, or research and develop anything.

All you need to do is purchase goods from the market and resell them at a higher price.

How much you can raise the price depends on how good-looking you are, the variety of grass you have, and how much your fans trust you.

Of course, some fans know the products you sell, and they can buy the same products by searching, or even buy them at a lower price.

But fans trust you, so they will buy it even if it is expensive.

3. The third route: self-developed and designed high-end flow

This route has to satisfy two points.

One is that the product is designed by ourselves and is exclusive on the entire network. The other is to sell in the mid-to-high-end price range, with a customer unit price of 300, 500, 800, or even more than 1,000.

If you develop it yourself, you will have potential in the scenarios of short videos, algorithms, and live broadcasts. First of all, customers will want to find the same model they like, but sorry, they can’t find it. This model is designed by ourselves and only we have it.

Secondly, the general design style and niche target audience will be more accurate and have a higher conversion rate with the help of algorithm recommendation.

The significance of operating in the mid-to-high-end price range is that this approach is very expensive. If you don’t have several million or tens of millions of funds rolling in, you simply cannot make it work.

R&D also costs money. If you don’t have a high average order value, you will earn less money, and less money will not be able to support subsequent R&D.

One point I particularly want to point out is that businesses that pursue original design are more suitable for live streaming.

After all, if you are working on Taobao or Tmall, after you design the product, you have to take photos and edit them, which is very expensive and inefficient, and one photo can determine your success or failure.

On the contrary, after live streaming, as soon as a model is designed, it is immediately put on the market for pre-sale, which saves costs and improves efficiency a lot.

However, the prerequisite is that the design ability must be really good enough to really capture the market segmentation population.

4. The fourth route: big-name replacement

This part of the strategy is a bit similar to the [Self-developed and designed high-end flow]. It is also self-designed, but the designed models are mainly imitations of big brands, taking the route of substitutes.

For example, high-end fashion clothes are sold for more than 4,000 yuan in shopping mall counters, after all, the rent of shopping malls is very expensive.

Then I will make a replacement version, which can be purchased directly for 800 yuan, and the quality and workmanship are basically the same.

Then in the live broadcast room, I will implicitly promote that it is a similar model from a big brand, and that buying it from me is very cost-effective.

The potential energy has arisen.

But this path is not something most people can do, because it requires a lot of professionalism.

If you want to make a substitute for a big brand, you must be very accurate in the style and workmanship, and you must also choose the right style, and you must have abundant resources in terms of fabrics. Because high-end styles compete on fabrics, and many high-quality fabrics cannot be purchased without resources.

It's also very expensive. Without a few million dollars rolling around, you can't do this.

5. The fifth route: the boss lady coolie route

There is nothing much to say about this. The boss lady personally took the lead and started broadcasting. There is no skill or style. It is all about hard work and time.

As long as time goes by, you can sell a few pieces. And the boss lady broadcasts it herself, it’s her own business, and there is no additional cost.

Whether you sell more or less, you still make the money, but the boss lady is a bit useless.

To sum up, I think that if these resources are supported, Douyin women's clothing live streaming can still be done, and there is hope that it will become a hit, or even if it doesn't, it won't lose too much money.

Because some of these models can solve potential energy, such as low prices. Under the impact of live broadcast order retention, rhetoric, and atmosphere, the potential energy of low prices will explode;

Some are about trust. I am a KOL. You, as my fans, recognize me. You have seen my live broadcasts and talked to me in person. You will definitely buy whatever I promote.

Some solve the problem of product homogeneity. My products are exclusive and unique. With the support of the live broadcast room, I create this sense of uniqueness and scarcity. If you want to buy them somewhere else, I'm sorry, you can't buy them. I will add more fabrics and workmanship, and show them to you in person during the live broadcast, and the products will be very tempting.

Some solve the problem of substitution. If you want to buy a big brand at a low price, I have it! The quality and workmanship are similar, but my price is only 20% of his. You are a fool if you don't buy it.

In short, these modes have potential energy during the live broadcast process, and the potential energy will be amplified by adding to the atmosphere of the live broadcast.

After observing a large number of failure cases, I found that there is a pattern that is most likely to fail.

I just saw that the live broadcast of women's clothing on Douyin was very popular, so I entered the market with money. I didn't know much about this industry and I didn't have the advantages mentioned above.

Then I started to build a team, recruiting buyers, anchors, pitchers, field controllers, assistants, photographers, editors, and shipping personnel. I built a team of more than a dozen people.

I spent a lot of money to rent a venue, decorate the live broadcast room (or several live broadcast rooms), buy equipment, shoot videos, send short videos, test models, and it was a big and vigorous work every day.

Then choose a lot of styles from the market, match them, and put them on.

Then we started to invest in various traffic and optimize the advertisements every day.

I think it is very difficult to make money with this model, and losing money is a huge loss.

Of course, you asked whether there are teams that make money. I think there are, but the probability is too small.

I think there are many reasons for losing money.

For example, in this model, it is very important to find a great anchor, but this is very rare, very expensive, and very unstable, making it difficult to truly bind. Often, the departure of an anchor will basically cause the collapse of the entire sales;

Secondly, you don’t have any advantage in terms of supply. You say you get goods from the market, but the price can’t be lowered, and the originality is also very poor. All you can do is to choose a large number of styles and change a large number of styles. Once you become popular, you will be easily targeted because others can also get your supply.

This model also tests the ability of the traffic investment team, because the short videos made by such a team are mediocre and not as good as those of KOLs.

Those KOLs can gain some traffic and basic fans at low cost by posting content and making it popular.

You can only get traffic by directly investing in traffic, but the cost is actually very high. And everyone is rushing to do it, so your cost of buying traffic will only get higher and higher. Even if you make money, it will all be spent on advertising fees.

If your product has no potential, your anchor is not good, and you can't get traffic through low-cost content, then your entire team will have to fight hard.

We need to compete for live broadcast time, various manpower consumption, and spend more time to make up for the disadvantages in product operation and supply chain. But this is even more difficult.

Just imagine a group of people who don't really care about it and just work for a living, selling clothes through live streaming every day. How lucky do they have to be to sell out the products?

Author: Liu Weidong, WeChat public account: Liu Weidong’s Entrepreneurship Notes.