＂Oriental aesthetics＂ is a flower, but it can’t circle young people.

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Wherever Hua Xizi goes, it is all oriental aesthetics.

Since its establishment, Hua Xizi has fully integrated the elements of the national tide into the brand, and at the same time, taking advantage of the live broadcast room in Li Jiaqi, it has once become a model of the rise of the national tide brand.

But on the other hand, it frequently overturned on loose powder, cleansing oil and eye shadow. Hua Xizi’s oriental makeup gift box is still "crying" for many girls in the little red book. The ancient high-end Huaxizi, which is understood, seems to be lacking in modern high-end.

Interestingly, however, the sales of Hua Xizi are still very high.

Hua Xizi’s Success Password: Guofeng Marketing Meets Li Jiaqi.

Hua Xizi was founded in 2017. "Flower" means to raise makeup with flowers, and "Xizi" is named after Su Dongpo’s "Want to compare the West Lake with the West Lake, it is always appropriate to make light makeup and heavy makeup", and "Oriental makeup, raise makeup with flowers" is also the brand concept of Hua Xizi. It can be said that Hua Xizi is full of national style from name to concept, and the element of "Oriental women" is engraved in products and marketing.

For example, concentric lock lipstick, Shouwu eyebrow pencil and Songyan butterfly feather mascara … seem to add these beautiful national style prefixes, no matter what color number or model, as long as they are used, they are "the beauty of the East". In addition to the originality of the name, Hua Xizi integrated the national style elements and techniques such as "micro-carving" into the packaging design, and introduced carved lipstick, even combined with ceramics. It can be said that Hua Xizi’s positive innovation around the national style and clear brand positioning under a certain cultural label are really lacking in old domestic products such as Perfect Diary, Appropriate Herbal Medicine and Nature Hall.

At the same time, in the choice of spokespersons, from kiku, a "four thousand-year-old beauty", to Du Fu, a supermodel with an antique appearance, to Liu Shishi, who is gentle and classical in temperament, and Charlie, who is moderately superior to the national songs, everyone has just combined with "Oriental Aesthetics".

Not only are the products and spokespersons very "national style", Hua Xizi actively promotes more and more users to participate in the discussion of national style culture through marketing efforts, such as the discussion of national style topics such as "Charlie meets Hua Xizi", "Hua Xizi’s birds fly at the phoenix" and "Oriental Romance" initiated on the network platform, supplemented by online and offline national style advertisements, and the scenery is the same for a time.

As long as there is a "national style", is it "charming" enough? The answer may be yes.

According to a survey of more than 1,000 post-80s consumers in the first-tier to third-tier cities in China by Park Rui &Credamo, the minority circle that women are most concerned about has "national style". It can be seen that from the main consumer group of the younger generation to the women who are romantic about "national style until death", as a make-up brand, Hua Xizi chooses the right path, which will get twice the result with half the effort.

In addition, on the way of Hua Xizi’s rise, one person who has to be mentioned is Li Jiaqi. At the end of September 2019, Li Jiaqi was invited to become the chief recommender of Huaxizi, and deeply participated in its product research and development. Insiders of Huaxizi Company said, "Li Jiaqi said no, this product will not pass."

In Li Jiaqi’s public live broadcast, I also "bound" myself with Hua Xizi in numerous high-profile ways, such as: "I supervised them to polish the concentric lock lipstick last year", "Hua Xizi is getting better and better under the supervision of my Li Jiaqi" and so on.

According to institutional statistics, in 2020 alone, Hua Xizi appeared 77 times in the live broadcast room in Li Jiaqi. From the sales data, it took only 16 months for Huaxizi to go from a new beauty product that was difficult to enter the top 20 in Tmall sales in 2019 to a sales volume of more than 190 million yuan in 618 in 2020, ranking first in Tmall GMV.

Next, Huaxizi is still going smoothly. According to the data, in 2021, the highest monthly sales growth rate of Huaxizi reached 89.83%, and the single brand GMV exceeded 5.4 billion yuan, an increase of 80% over the previous year, making it the first local makeup brand. In overseas markets, Huaxizi has been sold to more than 200 countries and regions around the world, with a turnover of 14 million yuan, an increase of 286% over the previous year, pushing domestic products to the world.

The dilemma of Hua Xizi: neither high-end nor cheap.

As a new domestic brand, Huaxizi takes the people-friendly route in price, and the price is mainly 100-300 yuan, which also means that it does not belong to the category of high-end beauty cosmetics. It seems that Hua Xizi is also aware of this and doesn’t want to fight the price war any more, as can be seen from his "bad" behavior in this year’s double eleventh promotion.

Compared with other make-up brands, Hua Xizi only launched preferential activities such as "full dress plus gift", "buy 1 and enjoy 3" and "buy 1 and enjoy 7", and the preferential strength is not "double eleven" at all. In this regard, the relevant person in charge of Hua Xizi revealed: "Hua Xizi’s preferential strength in the traditional e-commerce promotion node has always been small, and the brand is still long-term and will not be excessively pursued.

Not only is he unwilling to lower the price, but Hua Xizi also wants to make a breakthrough in the unit price of customers. "Why can China brands only sell cheap prices? We want to break the price ceiling. " Fei Man, co-founder of Hua Xizi, said in an exclusive interview with the media that Hua Xizi must escape low-price competition if he wants to produce products with high creativity, high technology and high investment.

Hua Xizi’s practice of breaking the price ceiling first chose the Japanese market to practice. The price of Hua Xizi’s powder cake products in Japan is around 300 yuan, and the price directly catches up with Chanel’s cake products. In China, it is also trying to increase the unit price of customers on the basis of the price system that customers are used to. For example, 520 nodes launch concentric Qi Mei suits, and 618 and New Year Festival both launch Oriental Beauty dresses, with prices ranging from 520 to 1314. The unit price of customers is increased by combining products, but domestic customers do not pay the bill.

Relying on these gift boxes, Hua Xizi was "black and red" in the little red book. Many girls who received the gift boxes called "crying in the toilet". The point that everyone vomited was mainly in the exaggeration of formal design and no cost performance. The same amount would rather receive a high-end big-name single item.

Strangely, aside from the cost performance ratio, the gift box of oriental makeup is also a beautiful story about the national style, and the design inside and outside of the gift box is also close to the "national style". Why can this national style only poke the hearts of straight men, but it doesn’t work for girls?

Perhaps it is the user’s aesthetic fatigue, or it may be more rational. But for Hua Xizi, the premise of raising the price, as Fei Man, co-founder of Hua Xizi, said, is actually a product change. It is not enough to call it "high-end" simply because the price has increased or the packaging has become more exquisite.

There are two problems left over from history on the road of product innovation of Huaxizi. One is the lack of R&D investment. In order to achieve overtaking in corners, most domestic beauty brands choose the way of strong marketing investment to earn traffic, and quickly get out of the circle by creating online celebrity single products. Faced with numerous competitive pressures, Huaxizi naturally does not want to give up marketing traffic, which leads to the word-of-mouth waterloo for Huaxizi, who pays more attention to marketing than R&D; On the other hand, Huaxizi doesn’t have its own factory, so it is highly dependent on the foundry, and the foundry of Huaxizi also frequently appears "rollover" behavior. According to the information of Tianyanchi, the enterprises that Huaxizi has cooperated with for many times have been asked by the Market Supervision Administration twice to "take measures for rectification".

Although it is far from the "high-end" at present, it is actually a better way to enter the high-end market, because after several rounds of price increases, Huaxizi has already stepped out of the circle of parity, and the customer unit price of Huaxizi has risen to 150 yuan. In contrast, the customer unit price of Perfect Diary is distributed in the range of 50~70 yuan, which is really in the echelon of parity.

In China’s beauty market, there is still much room for the development of high-end products. For a long time, China’s beauty market has been occupied by foreign products, and high-end products are almost monopolized by international makeup brands such as Europe, America, Japan and South Korea, making it difficult for domestic beauty products to survive. Moreover, compared with international brands such as Dior, Saint Laurent and Lancome, which have been established for at least ten years, the domestic cosmetics brands with a short history, such as Hua Xizi, have lower strength in word of mouth, trust and cultural accumulation. However, the rise of the national tide has made users see that domestic products are not only a "substitute" for big brands, but even more cost-effective solutions are exported through product innovation, and product innovations are also emerging one after another. According to public data, Hua Xi Bio and Nature Hall.

Hua Xizi is actually changing. In early January, 2022, Hua Xizi announced that Villi Liang, the former chief technology officer of Huaxi Bio, would join his R&D team, and declared that he would invest 1 billion yuan in product innovation and basic research in the next five years. Prior to this, Hua Xizi built a number of research centers, including the Oriental Aesthetics and Space Innovation Center, with a total area of 6,000 square meters. This is an important measure for Hua Xizi to speed up the development of his own products.

Is Hua Xizi’s "Oriental Aesthetics" Reliable? The answer may still be related to whether its products can withstand the market test. Now, it seems that the direction of the national wind is actually correct, and it is also a "good agent" that is more suitable for Hua Xizi to form a unique recognition among many domestic brands of cosmetics. The reason for the gift box incident is actually that the behavior mode of emphasizing marketing and neglecting research and development makes Hua Xizi go more and more on the marketing road, resulting in the "beauty of the East" leaving only "the East" and the lack of aesthetic feeling.

But in the future, with the blessing of product innovation and the original user base, marketing ability and marketing resources of Huaxizi, I believe that it will eventually be able to embark on a road of its own high-end brand. At that time, the beauty of the East will really shine.END

References:

Zhao Wanli’s Research on Beauty Brand Innovation from the Perspective of National Tide Culture

Yang Xiaoman and Song Shaoyi, A Study on the Marketing Strategy of Guochao Beauty Brand under the Consumption Characteristics of Z Era —— Taking Hua Xizi as an Example.

Research on Communication Power "Research on Word-of-mouth Marketing Strategy of Huaxizi Based on 5T Theory"

Research on the Transformation and Development of Domestic Beauty Products —— Taking Hua Xizi as an Example by Business School of Chengdu University.

Box lunch finance "Hua Xizi’s Li Jiaqi Dependence"

Blue Media Exchange "How many more" Flower Xizi "can Li Jiaqi recreate"

Economic Observer Hua Xizi: "Abandoning" Li Jiaqi

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See the column "Can the upstart makeup flower Xizi tear off the" online celebrity "label? 》

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