This is the second issue of the "Back Window" column of China Investment Network. "Rear Window" is a column about the workplace + people. Here, we see another side of workers. Through individualized stories, we can observe the human situation and the changes in the industrial frontier.
There is a famous saying in the pet industry, no one can tame the cat, but it has ruled the world. In rental houses in first-tier cities, struggling young people are frugal and frugal, but they are willing to "go bankrupt" just to raise pets. The "2020 Pet Industry White Paper" shows that in 2020, there will be 62.94 million pet (dog and cat) owners in China's urban areas, the consumer market size will reach 206.5 billion yuan, and the per capita pet spending will be 2,982 yuan, and this amount is still rising.
The protagonist of today’s story is a big pet owner with three dogs and one cat. In order to let her dogs drink milk tea with her, she spent more than a year building a business with an annual income of 3 million.
My name is Huang Lanxi, I am a Pisces girl born after 1995. I have the characteristics that most people born after 95 have - I love drinking milk tea too much. In order to allow my dog to share this happiness with me, I even developed a milk tea specifically for it, named "Wang Tea".
1. After studying abroad, I feel that the pet-raising environment in China is too bad.
Making milk tea for pets is not a whim, but a major decision to fill the shortcomings in my life.
When I was 18 years old, after experiencing some “struggle” with my family, I boarded a flight to the Southern Hemisphere alone and started my study abroad career. Studying abroad was my own decision, but at the age of 18, I didn’t realize that it would be a lonely journey. This flight to loneliness is something that almost all international students will experience. Keeping pets has become an important way for many international students to relieve this emotion.
In 2017, "Toffee" broke into my life. Toffee is the first dog I adopted, a mix of Maltese and Pomeranian. She is extremely smart. We eat together, sleep together, laugh together, and grieve together. Can you imagine, our biological clocks are surprisingly consistent. During the years of wandering overseas, Toffee was almost my closest friend.
The experience of raising pets abroad is completely different from raising pets in China. Summer in Australia is very long, and ice cream specially made for pets can be seen everywhere to relieve dogs from the heat; convenience stores in Japan offer hundreds of snacks for pets; in London, dogs can take rail transit, and many business districts are pet-friendly. But in China, the life of pets is much monotonous. There are only a handful of dog food categories, and pet snacks are not as abundant as overseas. Every time I go back to China and see the fixed food on the pet shelves, I will secretly wonder, are there huge business opportunities hidden among them?
On a subjective level, I have always had a big regret deep in my heart. Every time I drink milk tea, the toffee looks at me eagerly. "It must really like the taste of regular milk tea," I thought. But you know, many things that people eat cannot be eaten directly by pets. So I came up with the idea of making milk tea for pets.
(Huang Lanxi and her pet "Toffee")
The decision to return to China was still against the wishes of my parents. They preferred that I immigrate to Australia directly. In 2018, I returned to my motherland after six years of living abroad and started to discuss making milk tea for pets. I found several friends who were also studying abroad to form a team and looked for nutritionists and reliable suppliers. After receiving my request, many pet nutritionists were confused: What exactly does milk tea for pets look like? Does it have to be the color of milk tea? How to reconcile the ratio of fresh meat and milk? Many large manufacturers directly refused to take orders, and some players in the industry tried hard to persuade them: Don’t challenge this industry, and it would be safer to make traditional cat and dog food.
I know clearly in my heart that if the pet has no appeal, there is no point in doing this.I deduced from the physiological structure of pets and found a new breakthrough point. When raising pets in cities, drinking water channels are single, the diet is mostly dry food, exercise is more, and drinking water frequency is low. A large part of the probability of pets getting sick is that there is a problem with the drinking water system. Some sick pets or elderly pets often have difficulty eating, and traditional cat food and dog food cannot satisfy their necessary nutrition and appetite. Taking pets out, eating and drinking is inconvenient, causing inconvenience to both pet owners and pets. If a product could meet both the physical needs of pets and the emotional appeal of owners, would it be more marketable?
Finally, we asked professional nutritionists to prepare happy tea that can not only supplement nutrition, but also allow pets to drink freely. After half a year of research and development, “Wang Tea” was born in May 2019.
Although it is called "milk tea", the ingredients of pet milk tea are different from those of human milk tea. The main ingredients of the initially launched Wangcha were goat milk powder and chicken breast, while the Meow Tea for cats was made from fresh cod and salmon. It is essentially a nutritional solution rich in meat and dairy products. The pearls in milk tea are fish roe. Through the enzymatic process, the animal protease in the original material is hydrolyzed into small molecule protein peptides and amino acids. While restoring the taste of the original material, the nutritional value will be higher. At the same time, the enzymatic process can also volatilize the flavor of the food itself, and without the need for attractants, it can have an aroma that attracts dogs and cats, thereby replenishing water, supplementing nutrition, and increasing the appetite of pets.
In 2020, I took my "Wang Cha" and "Meow Cha" to the Asian Pet Exhibition. Unexpectedly, these two milk teas quickly became a hit. One user even placed an order for more than 30 copies of Meow Tea directly from our Taobao store.
2. Who doesn’t want to get drunk with his pet?
I love my dog so much that I signed my brand with its name - TAFFEE. After Wang Cha and Meow Tea became popular, we continued to expand new categories. Now, in addition to Wang Cha and Meow Tea, our brand matrix also includes pet seasonings and pet beer.
Some people may question whether what I do is just a gimmick. My answer is, if you really want to do something, it’s not just for money, right?
The founding members of our team are almost all born in 1995, and the oldest is only born in 1994. Almost all of them have overseas study backgrounds. We know very well what young people want, and we are also well aware of the gap between the domestic pet market and the higher-end pet market. In the traditional concept of pet raising, it is just to let the pet have enough food and a place to live. However, in the minds of the post-90s and even post-00s generations, the role of pets has changed greatly. You will find that the younger generation is becoming more and more anthropomorphic about their pets. Almost every pet has a name, they will buy them nice clothes, and they will even call them "son, daughter, husband, wife."
I divide people who keep pets into three categories: one is to raise pets as animals, like fish in a fish tank, to relieve boredom; the other is to raise pets as family members, like young lovers before marriage, and use them as spiritual sustenance like raising children; the last category is to keep pets as spiritual sustenance Single young people who are raised as companions, and this group of people is also the main customer group of our products - young people who marry late and have children later in life in big cities. They have strong emotional needs and hope to find comfort and relieve loneliness in pet companions. Their demand for pet anthropomorphism is also more obvious.
Once pet-raising can be anthropomorphized, the types of pet products will be richer and the empathy will be stronger. This is a huge market that needs to be developed.
Because of this, our pet seasoning and pet beer are now online. We are used to eating white rice, steamed buns and noodles, and we always want to eat hot pot, Japanese food, and beer to "improve" our taste. The same goes for pets. When pet owners buy dog and cat food, they often buy a big bag of it and their pets often stop eating it before they finish the food. In fact, the pets also want a change of taste. We freeze-dry and grind pets with various flavors and more nutritional value into fine particles with better adhesion, and add the nutrients that pets need more. Pet owners only need to mix them with the original cat and dog food to solve the problem of wasting cat and dog food and "improve life" for their pets.
More importantly, this is also an excellent opportunity for owners and pets to enhance their relationship and interaction. In essence, these products are designed to amplify the social attributes of pets and allow pets to experience the emotions in life like their owners. When you go to drink Heytea with your sisters, the first thing you do is to take a photo together to share your feelings and post it on Moments. The first thing many of our users do after buying the product is often to clink glasses with their pets and take photos. There is essentially no difference between the two things. What's more, by raising pets, you can get more like-minded pet-loving friends.
(TAFFEE and Budweiser beer joint brand)
Recently, our pet beer and Budweiser have launched a joint product. Buy a bottle of human drink and you will get a bottle of pet beer. Imagine how cool it would be to have your pet "get drunk" with you.
3. Being young means struggling
I am from Xi'an. In the concept of us Shaanxi people, a girl is successful if she gets a stable job, but I don't think so. My parents had already gone through a round of career choices in their time. When I make career choices now, I face much less pressure than when he was young.
But starting a business is definitely not something you can do with just your passion. There will be many pitfalls to step on. The domestic pet food industry chain is quite complete, and it is not easy to create innovative products. As for pet milk tea, we want it to be close to the milk tea consumed by humans in terms of smell, shape, color and even packaging, but it is completely pet food. When we received our request, the samples produced by some suppliers were significantly lower than our expectations. Some suppliers even directly advised us to add phagostimulants to improve palatability. You know, whenever you want to make an innovative product, except for the founding team and the upstream supply chain who only have a supply and demand relationship with you, everyone wants to save as much trouble as possible.
Bottom-level innovation is by no means easy, and the running-in process is extremely difficult. Domestic pet snacks are mostly packaged in cans, but this obviously does not apply to the "milk tea" liquid we know. Milk tea and condiments require a variety of flavors. We want the most fashionable and refreshing domestic pet food design that can "lock in freshness" to the greatest extent. After replacing six or seven batches of designers, the last designer we accepted ate steak for a week in a row in order to find inspiration for the design of beef-flavored seasoning (laughs). My puppy Toffee has been the first "taster" of our products in this process. If Toffee doesn't like to eat a product, then we will definitely not put this product on the shelves.
Before making pet milk tea, the founding partners of our founding team had done an information technology startup for electronic dog certificates. We are not a "stud" team. When everyone comes together to start making the TAFFEE brand, we can only try and make small steps and continue to deduce, which may reduce our cost of trial and error. If you ask me, what is the most uncomfortable moment when starting a business? It must be when the results of your efforts do not develop as expected and you feel that you can’t continue!
The first person to eat crabs always has to undertake the process of educating the market. I want to promote a new concept of pet raising, which must continue to penetrate from the places where young pet owners are most likely to appear. Cooperation with Xiaohongshu and KOL has provided us with help to some extent. The topicality and content attributes of the product itself will also provide blessings for us to build channels, thereby triggering the social attributes of our products. Now, we are promoting cooperation with offline milk tea brands, and will soon launch a "drink with pets" co-branded model, and will work with more brands to create a "pet-friendly" (that is, a public space that accepts and does not exclude pets from entering people) consumption space. Our Tmall flagship store already has over 10,000 fans, and all emerging consumer products are inseparable from the dual online + offline channels. In the first year of
’s business, we made 3 million yuan in revenue. I analyzed our customer base and found that the main customer base for pet milk tea is concentrated in 18-30 years old, 70% are women, and they are concentrated in first-tier cities. Interestingly, from a single product perspective, our pet beer is sold best in the Northeast region. This may be related to the drinking habits of Northeastern people.
(Meow Tea launched by TAFFEE)
You asked me what is the difference between entrepreneurship after 1995 and entrepreneurship among other age groups? I think most young people of our age will start their businesses based on their own lives and interests, gain insight into the cracks in life, and use better proposals to solve the problems they encounter in life. This is where our generation of entrepreneurs can widen the gap with the older generation of entrepreneurs.
When I was in Australia, I ran my own B&B, drove around the island, skydived, worked as a purchasing agent and opened a company to do foreign trade... I did almost all the things you can imagine and experience. My friends who lived with me at the time lamented that they had never seen me stay at home for 24 hours. I loved this feeling of tossing.
I want my toffee to have the best dog birth experience, and I also want it to be more convenient for people to travel with their pets. I am definitely not the only young pet owner who thinks so. While I am not yet old enough to get married and have children, if I don’t do some things now, I may not have the chance in the future.
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