As a start-up brand, Chumei does not have a great reputation, but it was able to achieve sales of 100,000+ on the first day of its launch and maintain a 40% repurchase rate.

It is no exaggeration to say that Mei is a "dog food" brand!

Because of his wife’s illness, the “straight man” Abang buried the seeds of creating a safe and effective skin care product in his heart. After more than two years of repeated polishing, this seed began to take root and sprout, and eventually grew into "Chubei", a non-irritating skin care brand that symbolizes "after the rain, the sky clears up, saying goodbye to irritability and lack of confidence, and returning the skin to its best condition".

As a start-up brand, Chumei is not well-known, but it was able to achieve sales of 100,000+ on the first day of its launch and maintain a 40% repurchase rate. What extraordinary efforts and efforts are hidden behind this dazzling report card? Yimeishang had an in-depth exchange with Abang, the founder and No. 1 product manager of the Chumei brand.

When building a brand, the first step is to determine "who it is"

Resigning from a decent and well-paid job as a senior foreign exchange trader, and then joining the hot skin care field to start a business, does seem a bit crazy, but Abang is not a person who fights unprepared battles.

According to Abang, in the early stages of his formal entrepreneurship, he conducted a survey of 400 people and obtained three key pieces of information from this relatively small sample.

First, the current cost structure of cosmetics is very unreasonable. Often, for a product costing RMB 1,000, advertising may account for RMB 600-700, and the cost of raw materials and formulas that can truly cure skin problems may only cost about RMB 100;

Secondly, the concept of efficacy is becoming more and more popular, but many skin care products with functional ingredients However, it is irritating to a certain extent, and it is difficult to meet users' needs for safe and efficient products;

Thirdly, in addition to basic functions such as cleansing and moisturizing, anti-aging has become the most demanded product effect by consumers, and the age of users is also constantly being advanced, from 35 years old to about 25 years old. This means that the user group and scale of the entire anti-aging market are expanding, and there is still room for development of related products.

Under the guidance of these three results, Abang's thinking gradually became clear. What he wanted to do was to build a non-irritating functional brand with functional raw materials and R&D investment far higher than the industry level.

In order to more systematically demonstrate the idea of ​​differentiated brand positioning, Abang proposed a formula: R&D/manufacturing investment + marketing/channel expenses + company operating expenses + company net profit = price * sales volume.

In this formula, if you want to keep the price acceptable to more ordinary consumers without compromising on efficacy, then you must reduce all non-essential expenditures as much as possible and spare no effort to invest all the costs in the product itself. The direction of

has been established, and the next step is how to implement it into the product. In this regard, Abang specially visited two professionals - Duan Xingxing, a professor at the School of Life Sciences of Tsinghua University and a leading scientific researcher in the field of polypeptides, and YIXING, an Tsinghua alumnus with more than ten years of experience in the field of skin care product research and development. With Abang's unremitting efforts, the two eventually became the brand's chief scientific research consultant and co-founder and chief formulator respectively.

In order to deeply ingrain the brand concept in the hearts of consumers, Abang pays special attention to the creation of the first new product "Honest Cream". According to him, this product competes with international brands that sell for 3,000 yuan or more, but the actual price is only 1/7 of that price. During the research and development process, in addition to using 31% high-concentration Boseine, the team also specifically added non-irritating ingredients such as ectoine, ergothioneine , nine active peptides and eleven plant extracts to truly achieve mild onset, safety and efficiency.

However, Abang also said that this does not mean that Chumei is an anti-aging brand. “We will also attack some basic products, but no matter what product, adding sufficient non-irritating functional substances will be our most basic principle and the most significant difference.”

“Poor” brands also have “poor” ways of playing

In-depth co-creation with users in every link

has always believed that the criterion for judging the quality of a product is the product itself, and the method of burning money to drive sales will eventually be tested due to the loss of capital. Therefore, from the beginning of establishing the brand, he has set the goal of continuing to make ht even without financing. ml3

Although in terms of marketing, Chumei has almost zero investment, in Abang’s view, “poor” brands actually have a “poor” approach, and “playing” with users in depth seems to be a good way.

According to Abang, they will co-create in depth with users in every aspect of product development. For example, in the early stage, users will be recruited from the private domain group, and products will be finalized through phone calls and questionnaires; in the middle and later stages, samples will be sent, and then optimization will be carried out based on user feedback. “Although adding user opinions in every step has lengthened the development cycle of one of our products to 6-8 months, it will also make us more confident in the products we put on the market. "

In addition, Abang will also mobilize users' sense of participation and favorability towards the brand through some public welfare activities.

In the early days of the brand's establishment, Chumei launched a "for every product sold, a sanitary ware will be donated to a girl in Liangshan, Sichuan." This activity quickly received positive feedback from users and enhanced the stickiness between consumers and the brand, so to this day, the project is still ongoing.

And just recently, Abang and the team came up with a new inspiration called "Can I transfer the original price to you for a slightly defective product?" "A Bang pointed out that during the quality inspection process, it is inevitable that there will be products that cannot be sold normally due to defects such as damaged outer boxes and collapsed inner supports. However, in terms of product quality, there is actually no problem with these products. It would be a pity if they were just handled hastily.

The picture is taken from Xiaohongshu

So the team planned that as long as any user reports to the charity organization If the amount of charity donation reaches the selling price of Chumei products, you can get a bottle of Weixia products of corresponding specifications for free. As expected, this charity initiative caused a stir on Xiaohongshu and became a win-win situation for the brand, consumers and recipients.

However, Abang is also doing a review on marketing recently. He admitted frankly that reducing advertising investment can indeed save "guns and ammunition" for production and research and development, but it is also true that it restricts the rapid development of the brand to a certain extent.

In this regard, Abang plans to try some precision marketing (compared with the general consumers attracted by advertising on buildings, etc., Abang hopes to first accurately match the crowd, and then accurately reach) methods in 2023, and at the same time expand offline channels to jointly promote the Chumei brand to a new stage.

online in one year 4 A single product

"You can’t be in a hurry when building a brand, you have to ensure that you can survive."

has been out for a year, and Chumei has only launched a total of 4 single products, namely a jar of facial cream, a mask, a cleanser and a bottle of water. Although consumers have always been looking forward to the launch of new products, Abang always believes that "it doesn't matter if you go slow, it is the most important thing to be able to withstand the test of the market." "

In Abang's view, building a brand is actually quite consistent with the short board effect. You can't lose too many points in any one place. So in addition to focusing on the investment in internal materials, Abang is also trying his best to ensure excellence in every link.

For example, take the user experience process. Abang pointed out that in order to allow the mask product to fully cover the corners of the user's eyes and mouth, the team specially made the film holes very small. However, after learning that consumers wanted to apply the mask while playing with their mobile phones, they specially returned to the factory for mold opening and optimization;

Another example is packaging design.It is reported that the original facial cream used a pink liner, but some users pointed out that this color is really reminiscent of anti-aging, so today's packaging was created;

Not only that, but also went through several rounds of adjustments to warehousing logistics, spray box coding, and the selection of suppliers and raw materials. It's almost harsh...

"But because of this, we can survive well in the current market environment." Abang pointed out that many users write notes for Chumei on Xiaohongshu from the bottom of their hearts. Although the number is only dozens or hundreds, the actual value they bring is far beyond that.

At present, Abang said that he cannot predict the future market environment 100%, but he firmly believes that being able to sincerely serve this group of users who agree with his brand concept is enough to ensure survival. As word of mouth gradually accumulates and reaches a new turning point, what he expects will eventually be realized.

As the traffic bonus gradually reaches its peak, the competition among beauty brands in the first half will also come to an end. If you want to continue to win the second half of the competition, the potential of your products and supply chain cannot be ignored. As an intermediate bridge between the market and R&D, product managers determine the future of the product to a certain extent, and product managers with product thinking, user thinking, content thinking, and marketing thinking have become the company's passcode.

In response to this, Yimeishang has not only launched the industry-university-research mentor group and product manager academy projects, will also hold a product manager salon event simultaneously during the 11th Meishan Expo from February 15 to 17, 2023, to conduct in-depth discussions on hot topics such as raw material innovation and R&D trends, helping companies accurately understand industry trends and win at the starting line.

Note: The product pictures in the article are all from the brand pictures

Text: Qianmo

Editor in charge: Nanfeng