Douyin started selling clothes, quietly launched online, and quickly removed from shelves

Introduction: With the continued popularity of e-commerce platforms and live streaming, Douyin has also launched a new self-operated clothing business. Compared with other platforms, the emergence of "Feiyun Zhishang" seems to be silent, and the public has been questioning it. The author gives two powerful suggestions to make the initial development of the emerging business no longer confusing.

Following Douyin Supermarket, Douyin’s self-operated business has added a new category: clothing.

Searching for "Feiyun Zhishang" on Douyin, you can see a corporate account that mainly sells women's clothing. The main operating company associated with this account is "Shanghai Xinpai Information Technology Co., Ltd.", which is 100% controlled by Douyin Group (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd.

At the same time, some media reported that Douyin was setting up a self-operated clothing team. Interestingly, on the day the news was exposed, the sales volume of the "Feiyun Zhishang" corporate store, which had more than 900 pieces, was removed from the shelves within one day.

The clothing industry, which is characterized by high-frequency consumption and rapid iteration, has always been the main battlefield for e-commerce platforms. It used to be a fragmented industry, where consumers of different ages, styles, and aesthetics often had their own consumption preferences. It seemed that a specific store or a vertical platform could not fully meet such diversified demands. Taobao Tmall was the first to accomplish this. With a variety of styles of clothing and supply across all age groups, Taobao Tmall has attracted many brands and gradually established the platform mentality.

For a long time, the platform mindset created by this strong category has been one of the core moats of the platform.

The changes come from the supply and marketing end. Live streaming e-commerce, which cuts off multiple distribution links in the midstream, has had an impact on the production and sales chain of this industry - this is not only reflected in the more immersive way of displaying clothing, but the more important change is that consumers are responding to their preferences faster, which means that for the clothing industry driven by new products, the process of capturing "fashion trends" is accelerating.

However, when everyone started live streaming and live streaming e-commerce returned to a media channel, how should the platform take on such a highly stylized category and how should it meet the consumption demands of users? This is a very challenging task. For Douyin e-commerce, clothing has become the third self-operated category after wine and supermarkets. What is the layout logic?

1. "Feiyun Zhishang" was quietly put on the shelves and quickly removed

The clothing sold on Feiyunzhishang is mainly fast-fashion women's clothing, including T-shirts, suspenders, and cotton clothes, with prices ranging from 99 yuan to 399 yuan. On April 11, the account showed that the number of fans was around 200. As of press time, the number of fans has risen to 379. No short videos have been released, and no live broadcasts have been held. The overall operating style of the account is very low-key. On the same day, with small-scale media reports, all the products in the store were removed from the shelves in the afternoon of the 11th, and the number of products on the shelves is currently zero.

It’s not surprising that Douyin has opened a self-operated store to sell clothes.

According to data from Soochow Securities, from April to May 2022, in the structure distribution of Douyin's GMV (platform transaction volume), the apparel and underwear category contributed the highest sales, accounting for 34%, and has long occupied the first place. According to Douyin data statistics, the average daily GMV of Douyin's apparel channel on "Double 11" last year increased by 105 times month-on-month, and the number of stores with a GMV of over one million in the mall has reached 1,044. The continued active third-party merchants provide Douyin with a basic consumer ecology, which also cultivates a good foundation for the incubation of self-operated businesses.

On the one hand, clothing is Douyin's most mature category at present. As a choice of self-operated business, consumers will not feel abrupt in its operation. On the other hand, for Douyin e-commerce, finding a strong category of its own is an important means to cultivate users' shopping habits on Douyin. Douyin once placed its hopes on trendy e-commerce. The first independent e-commerce APP "Douyin Box" launched at the end of 2021 was positioned as a trendy e-commerce platform. However, the "trend" label that Douyin attached to itself did not create a memory point in the minds of consumers. Compared with clothing, "trend" is still a niche circle and a little far away from consumers.

Just as JD.com's strong categories are 3C digital products, Taobao and Tmall's strong categories are apparel and beauty products. In the early stages of the development of e-commerce platforms, using strong categories to drive the maturity of the platform's mindset and then develop other categories is a proven successful path to developing e-commerce.

Douyin needs a strong category, not only for the development of the platform itself, but also because of the changes in the competitive environment of live e-commerce. In the first half of live e-commerce, relying on the novel display method of live streaming, Douyin cut into the e-commerce track where the competition landscape was already very stable. But whether it is the accumulation of goods, services, tools or logistics and other e-commerce infrastructure, Douyin started from scratch.

How long can the competitiveness brought by media upgrades be sustained? Since the beginning of this year, the apparel industry of Taobao and Tmall has begun to test selected live broadcast rooms based on the mentality of planting grass, and Taobao Live has also begun to accelerate the introduction of content anchors. Similarly, platforms such as JD.com, Pinduoduo, and Kuaishou are also filling the gaps in "people, goods, and venues". When competitors quickly make up for the shortcomings, live broadcasting is no longer an exclusive trump card, and mobile resources such as anchors and merchants are unlikely to become the moat of a certain platform.

Can "Feiyun Zhishang" undertake such an important mission for Douyin? Judging from its quiet launch and quick removal, as well as its cautious testing of the waters, perhaps for Douyin's own operations team, this is not a question that can be answered in the short term.

2. Can clothing be self-operated?

Apparel is a special industry, which may be the main reason why Douyin is so cautious and repetitive.

In terms of self-operated business, the first category that Douyin entered was wine. In April 2022, Douyin formed a self-operated wine team and opened the "Douyin E-commerce Wine Flagship Store". The reason for choosing wine to take the lead is not difficult to understand. Standard products with high gross profit margins also have platform genes. According to huge arithmetic data, in 2022, Douyin's average monthly wine-related content releases were nearly 6.75 million, and the average monthly video playback volume exceeded 11.2 billion times. As of press time, the "Douyin E-commerce Wine Flagship Store" has been online for about a year, with a cumulative number of 12,000 fans and sales of 88,000 pieces. Among them, the best-selling Moutai Prince Wine is priced at 338 yuan, and 13,000 pieces have been sold.

The second self-operated business that Douyin has entered is Douyin Supermarket, which was launched in early January this year. It currently includes 9 sections, including snacks and sweets, grains and oils and instant foods, personal care and beauty, mother and baby and pets, electrical appliances and department stores, etc. The wine and beverage category is also included, but clothing is not included.

If alcoholic beverages are the self-operated category that Douyin has entered, the self-operated Douyin supermarket also carries the expectation of developing the local life market and driving long-distance e-commerce with near-field e-commerce. One problem is that clothing cannot replicate the growth path of alcoholic beverages, nor is it suitable for entering scenes such as supermarkets. In a sense, the clothing that consumers want is a customized experience. The logic of this non-standard product is completely different from that of mass-market fast-moving consumer goods, and it is necessary to constantly find a balance between personalization and assembly lines.

As an industry with strong style and heavy branding, it is unlikely that Douyin will open a "Douyin e-commerce clothing flagship store". Compared with starting with a category flagship store, operating a brand is a more industry-specific approach, which is why it is not difficult to understand the emergence of "Feiyun Zhishang". However, the next question is, can the platform succeed in operating a brand itself?

Taobao Tmall is the platform that is best at selling clothing. Alibaba has several self-operated businesses including Tmall Global, Tmall Supermarket, and HEMA. However, in the clothing category, it always maintains an operating strategy based on the platform model: helping third-party merchants run their businesses through insights into consumer trends and digital deconstruction of styles. The reason is that in an industry like clothing with diverse styles and vertical segmentation, it is difficult for a platform to cover all consumer demands through "self-operation", and supporting a prosperous merchant ecosystem is a better choice.

For example, taking "Flying Clouds Weaving Up" as an example, there are two ideas:

1. Be a traditional brand

But what style of brand should be created? Commuter style, college style, neutral style, European and American style or Japanese style? If a platform is limited to a certain style, it will limit the scale of business, but it is difficult to show the recognition of the brand by breaking through the style. Unlike alcoholic beverages, which gain trust through official endorsements, the driving force of clothing consumption is more about style and style.

2. Become a brand with platform/channel awareness

For example, SHEIN is also a self-operated platform, but consumers recognize "SHEIN" rather than a specific clothing brand. This idea works because SHEIN has successfully cultivated consumers' mindsets - "the goods on the SHEIN platform are rich and cheap", and it took 15 years to cultivate this mentality.

The reason why SHEIN can provide abundant supply and low prices is its high integration with China's clothing supply chain. Even if Douyin can replicate SHEIN's path by integrating the supply chain, the self-operated idea is destined to gather more white-label products, which is not a pleasant news for many industrial belt merchants and white-label merchants doing business on Douyin.

In the past two years, the boundary between the self-operated model and the platform model has become increasingly blurred. JD.com, which started as a self-operated company, has begun to increase its investment in platform business, while Alibaba, which is good at the platform model, has begun to deploy self-operated business. Integration is a visible development trend. But for an industry like clothing, is self-operation a wise choice? In the existing Douyin system, "Feiyun Zhishang" may get a share of the pie, but it is destined to be a difficult task to compete with tens of millions of suppliers and brands.

From the fact that "Feiyun Zhishang" was quietly launched and then suddenly taken down, it can be seen that Douyin is still cautiously testing the waters of making its own clothing.

Author: Wang Yaqi

Source: WeChat public account "E-commerce Online"