article | Retail Krypton Planet, author | Nicole, editor | Mo Xiaolu
A novel and fashionable place that not only captures young people, but also middle-aged people.
Sisi, who works at Ningbo , was recently taken by a post-95s friend to a well-decorated cafe with fragrant coffee and high sales. She completely understood why young people are keen to explore new offline stores.
As a middle-aged person who "hopes not to make mistakes", Sisi will habitually choose chain cafes. However, she admitted that the two-way rush between "new stores" and young people "is exactly the living space for new brands and new business formats to sprout."
Actually, it’s more than just visiting trendy new cafes.
As the Internet and e-commerce continue to penetrate and provide unprecedented convenience for shopping, people are full of unprecedented enthusiasm for exploring all new offline commercial spaces that can provide completely different experiences.
HARMAY Huamei’s industrial cave-style Chongqing store
After all, as natives of the Internet, the new generation of consumers have an innate curiosity and desire to explore. When a new brand or new business format emerges, it often uses social media to quickly spread its voice among young people, so as to maximize the spotlight in this era of scarce attention.
"Retail Krypton Planet" combed through some of the offline "new stores" that have stood out in recent years and found that whether they are catering formats such as bars and cafes, or brands such as beauty and offline physical stores, they are all making breakthroughs by not following common sense. Traditional and stereotyped methods generate new content, reconstruct experiences, and become a new retail species.
These latest "new stores" actually have something in common in terms of functionality, experience, and aesthetics.
01 What does the "new store" look like?
There is a view that the Internet era is a stage of all-round fragmentation and reorganization of the industrial era. There are not only great changes in lifestyle and business models brought about by new technologies, but also corresponding changes in aesthetic tastes.
's "new stores" are not only the fragmentation and reconstruction of the traditional business model that divides the market according to age, gender, and price, but also the change of aesthetic taste based on the characteristics of the new generation of consumer groups.
- Business format "mix and match"
A new brand that has grown up in the new consumption wave, has a special liking for the exploration of "mix and match" business formats.
COMMUNE was established in 2016. After several years of development in obscurity, it is now a "social landmark" that young people in first- and second-tier cities rush to check in. COMMUNE's key change to the traditional bar is to combine the three functional sections of the beverage supermarket, super bar and classic dining area, transforming it into a complex restaurant and bar for Generation Z and the new middle class consumer groups.
COMMUNE Commune is a "social landmark" that first- and second-tier young people are keen to check in.
This way of recombining business formats, spaces, and products around "social" scenes makes COMMUNE Commune suitable for lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, night and other time periods. Consumption needs in multiple scenarios. In addition to capturing young people, the
COMMUNE commune has also gained the favor of capital. New consumption faced a downturn in the second half of last year, but COMMUNE still announced the completion of hundreds of millions of yuan in Series A+ financing before the 2022 Spring Festival.
Beauty collection store HARMAY is also a "new store" with mixed business formats.
A typical example is the HARMAY Shanghai Anfu Road store, which is internally regarded as a 2.0 version store. It combines different contents such as beauty retail + coffee + lemon tea + public square + art display window inside and outside a single building. In addition to buying products and enjoying afternoon tea, consumers can even hang out in the public square on the first floor and watch art exhibitions.
It is said that HARMAY Huamei will leave a display window in every store to make it an art gallery. The evaluation of this "pan-art museum" by the person in charge of UCCA is: consumers may not go to art museums on weekends, but they are likely to go to HARMAY, which not only consumes money, but also popularizes and appreciates beauty.
The biggest benefit of "hybrid" formats such as COMMUNE and HARMAY is that it helps improve store space efficiency and consumer experience.After all, compared with a single business format, a composite business format can better meet the consumption needs of multiple time periods and multiple scenarios.
This is why Damien, the founder of HARMAY, opened a store in a way that had nothing to do with traditional store opening logic from the beginning. In his view, the birth of many consumption scenarios is the implantation of new concepts into existing spaces.
Therefore, HARMAY Hua Mei, "What has been challenging is that the store does not have to be a retail scene, it can be a different scene."
Damien emphasized, "Make the consumption scene and timeline longer, like a hook, repeatedly Integrating consumers in time and space."
- Stepping out of the "standardized" template
The Shanghai coffee brand M Stand, established in 2017, is a chain of cafes, but it has taken a path that does not follow the standardization of traditional chains.
"One store, one design" is M Stand's new way of solving problems.
is different from the standardized and commercialized traditional coffee " third space ". When M Stand was established, it created an industrial and minimalist space style, calling itself "the Starbucks of China's new generation of young people". Starbucks is challenging the standardized route.
This means that the design of M Stand stores is always in dynamic evolution. Even though it currently plans different store types, even the smallest capsule store has "one store, one design."
HARMAY Huamei also tried to challenge the same difficulty as M Stand in designing of the store space.
So far, HARMAY stores in each city have different aesthetic styles. Through the integration of unique design themes and local culture, they have become new landmarks of urban symbols and aesthetics.
M Stand and HARMAY have abandoned the standard and rapid copying style of traditional retail stores. Although, on the road to self-replication and expansion, a Hard mode is activated.
However, it is this kind of breakthrough that will allow consumers to always have expectations and surprises like opening a blind box, and get an Easy model in terms of winning the brand's mind.
- Tongtong Dimension to the "Third Space"
After American sociologist Ray Oldenburg proposed the concept of "Third Space", it was interpreted by Starbucks into the most successful commercial space concept in history.
"Third space" is a public space that is different from the "first space" of family living and the "second space" of the workplace. In addition to the well-known cafes, there are also public places such as city bars, museums, libraries, and parks.
In fact, the "new stores" that are striving to rise in the new consumption wave are also trying to create a "third space" at the brand level after breaking through the single buying and selling function, attracting target consumers to stay more and belong more. Become their gathering point.
In January 2022, Anta opened a digital smart sports complex called "982 Creative Space" at the headquarters in Jinjiang, trying to explore with a series of product-related diverse experiences, interactions and lifestyle expressions. A deeper emotional connection between customers and brands gives consumers a sense of belonging.
ZUCZUG AN KO RAU, Suran’s fashionable sports and leisure women’s clothing brand, has explored earlier than Anta. In 2018, AN KO RAU opened its first concept store on Anfu Road, Shanghai, trying to make the store not only an offline sales channel, but also a stronghold for the brand to organize outdoor and sports activities.
Traditional brands strive to upgrade their stores to and move closer to the "third space", as AN KO RAU advertises: "In the Internet age, the most important purpose of offline stores is not to display products, but to provide A real, high-quality platform allows people who like sports and outdoors to gather together, share each other's stories, and plan new fun things together."
Yao Weixiong, CEO of Anta Group's fashion sports brand group, defined "982 Creative Space. ” is: “A new business destination driven by user scenario experience”
In an era when e-commerce is developed and contract fulfillment has entered an hour and a minute, offline stores have already been push to a new stage of replacement of old and new business logic.
When selling goods is no longer the core function of a store, super experience is becoming the self-cultivation of "new stores".
Whether it is business mix and match, breaking the standard face, or increasing the dimension of space, these new practices that are very different from the past offline operation and expansion principles are being tested and explored in large quantities, trying to make consumers stay more, interact more, and immerse them as the core logic. The "new store" is being unveiled.
Angela Ahrendts, the former senior vice president of retail of Apple , which is more avant-garde on the road to "new stores", has long said, "We don't need to open more stores, but we need to open great venues to It is built to look like a city square, like a gathering place."
03 The old dilemma of new species: finding the balance
Zygmunt Bauman wrote in "Work, Consumerism and the New Poor": "Think. To improve consumers' spending power, we cannot let them rest. They need to constantly accept new temptations and continue to be in a state of never-ending excitement. "
On the one hand, it is a "new store" that is eager to bring people back offline. provides a direction; on the other hand, it also points out the difficulties on this road. Consumers who accept new temptations can be excited about exploring "new stores", but they may not necessarily become consumers of the brand. Let "new Store" makes money.
lacks consumer insights and a rigid mix and match reconstruction of the underlying business logic. Behind the "fake excitement" caused by Internet celebrity check-in, how many follow-up imitations are all gone in an instant? Even LINE FRIENDS, which owns the leading IP, closed its last offline cross-border collection store in the Chinese market this year after a huge hit. The concentrated explosion of
"new stores" has injected vitality into offline businesses with new experiences. However, as long as it is a business activity, it is necessary to find the operational balance between mixing rich experiences and business transformation.
First of all, when any brand actively embraces "new stores", it needs to avoid and weigh common practices and avoid the old thinking of traditional retail.
Wu Bin, founding managing partner of Qingrui Venture Capital, was deeply touched by the fact that "cannot find the new continent with an old map" .
met with the founder of HARMAY in March 2019, but Wu Bin still missed the project. He recently posted a reflection on zhihu: Traditional retail logic should not have been used to evaluate HARMAY Huamei before. For example, "new stores" do not necessarily follow the traditional retail practice of replicating standardized stores on a large scale.
HARMAY Hua Mei has also proved the advantages of the new approach: the single store revenue and profits of offline stores have surpassed traditional cosmetics retailers. Not only that, the Beijing Sanlitun store has also been reported by the media. At its peak, it could achieve sales of about 15 million a month, ranking among the top in offline channels nationwide.
With the development of e-commerce and social media, the offline commercial space does need new approaches.
This is also what business observer and Paidong Media CEO Shen Shuaibo found in some "new stores" that goes against traditional retail common sense: "Experience and efficiency are not a matter of choosing one or the other, and there is no strong correspondence between space size and square footage. Relationship.”
Of course, this does not mean that experience-focused is the only label for the “new store”.
Secondly, the essence of any retail is around cost, efficiency and experience. Once the basic skills of cost and efficiency are laid, the experience brought by labels such as beauty, personality, and characteristics will be the icing on the cake.
Don’t be fooled by the superficial bells and whistles. The core is solid basic retail skills, organically combining consumer experience with business transformation.
Some failed offline stores can see the imbalance between consumer experience and business transformation: the root cause of LINE FRIENDS's rapid popularity and disappearance is the lack of innovation in IP operation products and fan interaction, a single experience, and a lack of "hook" to continuously attract traffic. ".
Super Wenheyou who came out from Changsha, the combination of catering + retro culture has not "worked" in other cities. On the contrary, after the craze of check-in has passed, it has fallen into isolation. The reason is that the people who check-in for novel experiences are not attracted by its main catering business. Impress people who will sit down and consume.
HARMAY Damien from Huamei has always emphasized two very core competitiveness.One is to build the latest venue in the center of the city for consumer communication and entertainment; the other is to constantly look for new international brands and update them to ensure that this venue will not become outdated.
The management team of COMMUNE Commune has been immersed in the industry for many years and is well aware of consumer needs. Its solid supply chain capabilities can allow COMMUNE Commune to be labeled as a "liquor museum" at affordable prices.
Finally, in the Internet era, the super core of "technical brain" will be the standard feature of all "new stores" that go far.
Consumers will never be satisfied, and new needs will continue to arise. "New stores" need to always be able to grasp and keep up with user needs and changes. While building a differentiated user experience, they must also use technology to build advantages and calculate the long-term economic accounts of cost reduction and efficiency improvement.
Sun Yanhua, a partner at Zhongding Capital, commented on HARMAY Huamei, "On the one hand, it presents beauty to users, and on the other hand, it maximizes efficiency through digitization."
It is said that HARMAY Huamei has an IT team of nearly a hundred people. It will observe the length of stay of users entering the store in different areas of the store, determine "hot areas" and "cold areas" and perform data calculations, constantly adjust shelf placement and product display, and update and iterate products.
Taken together, whether it is HARMAY, COMMUNE or ANTA that have been discussed, as well as new tea drinks that have not appeared in the article but have gone from being visibly popular to becoming calmer and more everyday in recent years, brands and retailers are very interested in "new tea drinks". The exploration of "store" is still in its early stages and needs to be continuously improved.
However, no matter what, "Retail Krypton Planet" believes that the successful "new store" of in the future may not be a closed fortress, but an open platform architecture that can proliferate and be combined with other new media. Get more space for your business.
Nowadays, more players have plunged into this sea area, and they are just waiting for time.
