The iron-clad summer quilt, the nickname of Liu Shui.
Text/Jiang Xuefen
Editor/Fan Tingting
Summer is here. Whether or not to cover yourself with a quilt when sleeping is a question. If you don’t cover yourself with a quilt, you worry about getting cold. If you cover yourself with a quilt, you will be sultry, which affects the quality of your sleep.
Unlike winter quilts, which mainly focus on keeping warm, summer quilts have more complex requirements. They must be breathable and not hot, and help the skin cool down, but they must also have the function of keeping people from catching cold. In the past few years, air conditioners were very popular. Last year, "ice cream quilt" was highly praised. This cool-sounding nickname made it a hot keyword.
This year, the key word for summer quilts has become "little ice quilt". Businessmen say that it can cool down when you put it on, and the quilt seems to be equipped with a radiator.
Liu Kebao is the driving force behind this popular quilt. He is from Shandong. After graduating from university, he stayed in Shanghai to work hard. He stayed at IKEA for 8 years and was responsible for the home furnishing supply chain. During this period, he saw that people's lives were stressful and urban office workers suffered from sleep problems, so he thought about how to use products to help people get a good night's sleep.
Three years ago, he quit his high-paying job and founded a sleep brand. He said that if he wanted to make products with the ultimate experience, he would start with quilts. In less than a year, its flagship product, the summer quilt, became a hit, selling more than 100,000 pieces a year and once ranking first in the category.
Focus on coolness
Before making the popular cool quilt, Liu Kebao took many detours.
In the middle of 2019, all he could think about was “making the ultimate sleep product, with good looks, body feel, and everything else. Winter quilts must be extremely warm, summer quilts must be extremely cool, and the products must be rich and functional.” Pillows, mattresses, etc."
It was summer, so he planned to start with cool quilts. But the team has no unified understanding of how cool it is. Through research, they found that summer quilts on the market are generally filled with ordinary cotton or chemical fiber fabric . User reviews vary. Some say there is no cooling feeling or the cooling feeling is not good, and some say it feels like a foreign body when covering the skin.
They think the problem lies in the material. "Iron conducts heat much faster than wood. In summer, the skin can take away the heat instantly when it touches the iron, so it feels cool." Liu Kebao thinks that quilt fabrics should also be made of heat conductive materials. He tried to use nano-scale modified fibers with faster thermal conductivity to make fabrics. In addition, he adopted a hollow design that feels cool when touched, not stuffy. It also creates a soft and silky feel to the touch, reducing the irritation of human skin. Foreign body sensation.
But the sales volume was not good when the product was first launched. The team reviewed and found that, firstly, because there was too much information to be conveyed to users, the new brand’s marketing power was not enough, and it was unable to reach all large and comprehensive marketing scenarios; secondly, because the channels were not good, the traffic was too scattered, which was not conducive to marketing. Explosive product.
Liu Kebao recalled that those six months were “the darkest period for the brand.” Sometimes he only earned a few hundred yuan a day, but sold a total of hundreds of thousands of yuan in half a year. Every day, he worried about how to support the entire team.
He decided to break the situation by doing subtraction, "focus, put all the energy around one product, and polish it to the extreme."
After that, the team changed its strategy of casting a wider net. Liu Kebao wanted to understand more user needs, so he tried social channels. Collect early user feedback. After a few months, the brand had a batch of its own seeds.
The focus strategy has achieved remarkable results. In less than half a year, they sold more than 5 million yuan of quilts through the community. Problems also came one after another. Many users complained that the quilt was not cool enough. In order to continue to expand the market in the future, Liu Kebao decided to upgrade the product.
Popular troubles
Through analysis, Liu Kebao found that users’ problems mainly focus on three points: “First, in order to pursue the ultimate softness and silkiness, the material selected for the quilt is relatively ‘delicate’. Some people say that it is prone to scratches during use; Second, many users love to keep their quilts clean. They often wash their quilts and stir them in the washing machine. The surface of the quilt is fluffy and pilling, saying it is not durable enough. Many people also suggest whether the quilt can be made cooler, and whether a single-sided cool quilt can be changed to double-sided. Cool, preferably 360 degrees cool." The
team took the right approach and researched and upgraded the product. They first improved the grade of the fiber material, increased the area of the cooling surface, and increased the thickness of the surface fabric. They upgraded it three times.
However, the cost of quilts has increased, and the terminal sales price has also increased, from more than 200 yuan to nearly 400 yuan. Liu Kebao targets the middle-class people. Before placing an order, these users are most concerned about whether the quilt is cool or hot when sleeping, and whether it can improve sleep quality. On the contrary, they are not so sensitive to price.
But how can a quilt get out of the circle and break through the single channel of the community? They started planting grass all over the network.
is different from traditional home brands using "air conditioning quilt" to describe the feeling of coolness. They promote "ice cream quilt" and deeply bind keywords to the brand.
In the next year, as other home brands also joined the "ice cream quilt" planting team, the brand and products gradually gained popularity. Annual sales exceeded 100,000 pieces, and the brand's annual sales increased three times.
Not long after the “ice cream quilt” became a hit, a new problem arose. The next year, an overwhelming number of "ice cream quilts" appeared on the Internet. Cooling-feeling products are becoming more and more familiar to people. “No matter what material is used, or a model is asked to take a photo, they all claim that they are cool-feeling quilts. The products fall into homogeneous competition.”
Sleep is a hard thing
How to stand out from the crowd of "ice cream quilts"? They analyzed that only when there are new selling points can users remember them, and people will take the initiative to search for them, so they decided to do a differentiated approach. Other brands are busy planting "ice cream quilts" all over the Internet, and they started to plant "little ice quilts" all over the Internet.
In order to popularize the "little ice quilt", in addition to planting grass, the team also visually highlighted the cooling experience, adding many elements related to ice cubes in the online store to mark the cooling value.
In addition to creating a cool feeling on the product, they also thought that the service must also have a cool feeling. Traditional quilt packaging uses woven bags, and you can tell it is a home textile product at a glance. They designed a "small refrigerator"-like packaging box that "gives users a sense of coolness before opening the box."
In Liu Kebao's view, there are many home furnishing brands on the market, but there is no well-known sleep brand. “It’s a tough nut to crack,” and everyone’s sleep experience is different, which makes it difficult to meet all needs on the product.
Data shows that my country’s sleep industry market size will reach 400 billion yuan in 2020, and is expected to exceed one trillion yuan in 2030. The industry has broad prospects. Unlike traditional home textile products, sleep products require R&D, design innovation, and service capabilities.
According to "2021 White Paper on Exercise and Sleep ", 300 million people in China have sleep disorders. He introduced that some people have trouble sleeping every day because of basic physical diseases, some people have insomnia due to mental illness, and many people have insomnia due to long-term psychological reasons and poor overall sleep behavior.
Currently, there is a mixed bag of sleep products on the market. According to the "Sleep-Related Home Environment Standards", factors that affect sleep include bedding, electrical appliances, lighting, home textiles, especially the hardness, thickness, breathability and other physical properties of mattresses, sleeping pillows , quilts, sheets, and pajamas. Indicators, , mites, and other biological indicators.
He said that if you want to successfully build a sleep brand, in addition to striving for products, you must also provide good services and help people develop good sleep habits from the three levels of behavior, cognition, and emotion. Naturally, we cannot ignore the need to communicate with users. Every aspect.
In addition to "Xiaobing Quilt", the brand has also expanded its products and services such as toast pillows, sheets, mattresses, and smart medical care. This summer, they set a sprint to double their sales target. In order to convey healthy lifestyle and concepts to more users, the brand also participated in the Tmall Summer Quilt Category Day event, providing people with cool benefits in the hot summer.
