The Entrepreneurial Life of Yi Feng, an Internet female entrepreneur

There are many entrepreneurial projects, not just selling small things. The name of the entrepreneur in this entrepreneurial story is Yi Feng.

If entrepreneurs are divided into elites, geeks and geeks? Yi Feng is a typical elite entrepreneur, and she chose the most challenging field-vertical e-commerce brand.

The office outside Yi Feng is the sample room of Youman Home Textiles, which is filled with all kinds of pillows and quilts. "We slept together." Her husband, who is also the co-founder of Youman Home Textiles, can't help but "spit". "Do you know how she" destroyed "me? For more than half a month, there were twenty or thirty pillows and a dozen quilts in the bedroom, and I was woken up every two hours, and the pillowcase was removed for the pillow core and the quilt, saying that it was necessary to have such an intensive experience to tell the pros and cons. Sometimes I am too sleepy to remember what I feel, and I have to sleep again the next night. This is how the two of us and the backbone of the operation department chose products. Now even I have become an expert. Asking three questions can help people choose a very suitable pillow. "

The couple served as bedding consultants for many clients, such as Xu Xiaoping, one of Youman's angel investors. After Zhenge Fund invested in Youman, Yi Feng and her husband once visited Xu Xiaoping's home and found that the bedding he used was just average, so they carefully selected a set of their own products and sent them there. When I saw Xu Xiaoping again a month later, he boasted: "I didn't know how hard my life was in the past twenty years until I used your products."

this company, which was established in August 211, chose Qingsong and Zhenge from seven angel organizations in April last year. Two weeks after all the money was received, Zhenge started the A round of financing-the financing is drawing to a close.

why do internet people make bedding?

before becoming an entrepreneur, she had a thick stack of gold collar resumes: she was in charge of marketing in the Asia-Pacific region in Rockwell Collins, the world's largest avionics company; she helped MSN and Lenovo in the Beijing office of McKinsey; she was in charge of product development in 13 websites around the world on eBay ... In 28, she was invited by Hope Chen, managing director of DFJ, to return to China to join Ku6 as vice president of strategy, products and financing.

After finishing her master's degree in biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Feng Yi switched to TMT because she felt that she was not suitable for research. In 1999, she was admitted to Stanford Business School, and Zhang Fan, who co-founded sequoia capital china with Shen Nanpeng, was a classmate of Stanford MBA. After returning to China in 21, he returned to Silicon Valley from the bottom up because he was not satisfied with the top-down CEO thinking at McKinsey, and shuttled between the big Internet companies in China and the United States for 1 years.

When she was still in Silicon Valley in about 26, she targeted the e-commerce market in China and recommended it to many VC friends. When she started her own business, e-commerce became her best choice. There are about three kinds of people who do e-commerce in China: the first is to do shopping malls, such as a comprehensive or vertical B2C platform filled with smoke in the price war; The second kind of selling goods, such as distribution and shopping guide under various platforms; The third is to be a brand, such as "Amoy brand". The first two kinds of Internet users are mostly good at grabbing users, while the latter one is dominated by traditional industries and Taobao stores. According to common sense, since Yi Feng has accumulated so much Internet experience, it should be a platform or service. However, she thinks in the opposite direction. Since there are few people who understand the Internet and are willing and able to use the Internet as a brand, it is her opportunity.

of course, this is not the whole judgment basis. First of all, she thinks that the time has passed to be a comprehensive platform, but she doesn't want to be a vertical platform that burns money. In addition, she is tired of engaging in the virtual economy for a long time and wants to be grounded, so she chooses the vertical field as a brand. Moreover, she attaches great importance to fashion and quality of life, and is obsessed with and particular about home and daily necessities. After returning to China, I found that my needs could not be met in the domestic market. She is used to using bath towels made in Europe and America, which are especially large and soft, and converted into RMB of four or five hundred, such as Ralph Lauren. The same thing is sold in Xinguang Tiandi for one or two thousand, and there are very few choices. At the other extreme of the domestic market-supermarket goods with tens of dollars are thin and hard, and she can't accommodate them at all.

after investigation, she found that home textiles is a large market of over one trillion yuan, which is highly dispersed. The market share of the top ten brands is limited, and the annual sales of the largest one is only over two billion yuan, so users' awareness of brands is not high. The progress of the Internet in the industry is not as fast as that of clothing. Almost all e-commerce companies are traditional brands, which means that there are opportunities in both markets and e-commerce.

"Home textiles are very skin-friendly and close-fitting. Good fabrics and poor covers feel completely different. As long as you have tried them, you will know that it is difficult to taste them. Moreover, only one knows how good and expensive home textiles are, unlike clothes worn outside, which can show famous brands to people. The quality of home textiles in China is many years behind that in Europe and America, but with the improvement of living standards and consumption power, after the external vanity is satisfied, the pursuit of inner feelings will definitely catch up. " Speaking from her own experience, she said frankly that she is optimistic about the space of home textiles in consumption upgrading, and said that what she wants to do is to erase the channel cost with the help of the Internet and directly face consumers, so that China consumers can enjoy the same quality of life as Europe and the United States at an affordable and reasonable price.

discuss financing by confinement

The background of Youman's core operation team is similar to that of Feng Yi: some have been engaged in the Internet for more than 1 years, and some have been engaged in retail for more than 2 years. Some returnees, some terrapin. Shareholders and investors also have both in two industries and two identities.

As soon as Youman registered, Yi Feng found herself pregnant. The initial stage of the company happened to be her whole pregnancy. Angel round financing was negotiated when she was confined to the moon. But last year, Youman had 3 million sales, with a growth rate of 3%.

At present, Youman's main sales channels are B2C platforms such as JD.COM, Tmall and No.1 Store, and different products are launched according to the differences in age, region, customer unit price and other aspects of the audience of each platform. Youman didn't promote his own official website, and has begun to lay out offline, but the official website and offline functions are more for display, so that users can see or experience it, not as the main sales channel.

For operating brand e-commerce, Yi Feng feels that there is something in common with the Internet platform in the past: they are all 2C businesses, and they all need to do personnel management, scheduling, online bug testing and fault repair. The role of more suppliers' backup is equivalent to redundancy of servers, and what the quality control team does is the past testing. The logic is the same, except that a group of people from traditional industries are replaced. In the face of these new people, she thinks that what she lacks relatively is the ability of brand marketing and supply chain management, which is why she deliberately introduces shareholders with retail background and VC. At this stage, her most important job is equivalent to the product manager of the Internet company: the purchasing manager of the general e-commerce company has the right to place an order, while in Youman, she takes a group of purchasing managers who have been in the home textile industry for many years to place an order, even if the SKU exceeds 1.

"I admit that it's impossible to do everything by myself when the company grows up, but now I'm doing it to formulate norms and processes." She explained that "product quality and supply chain are the cornerstones of the brand. I am very glad that we can now make the price of the same quality products only 1/3 ~ 1/5 of that of offline specialty stores and shopping malls. Xinguang Tiandi sells 5 yuan of bath towels, 69,1 yuan of oversized bath towels, 129,12 yuan of bedding sets, and more than 2, yuan. The quality is the same, the weight is the same, the technology is the same, and even the manufacturers are the same. I can use Youman's 129 yuan bath towel to replace the 5% off 7 yuan bath towel I bought in the United States, and according to my own strict requirements, I can already replace all the home textile products in my home, so I have the confidence to compete with those online predators who have been entrenched for many years. "

The following is an interview with Yi Feng about female entrepreneurship:

Q: What are the advantages and disadvantages of female entrepreneurs compared with men?

A: different industries have different performances. What I do is household goods mainly consumed by women, which means that I am both a practitioner and a consumer, and I can grasp brand tonality, product quality and design more sensitively and accurately. On the other hand, women are relatively cautious and conservative, and sometimes they excessively pursue perfection and lengthen the production cycle, which limits the production capacity to some extent.

Q: what is the leadership of female entrepreneurs?

A: women's natural delicacy, responsibility, hard-working, implicative and resilience make the management style more humane and emotional. For example, pay attention to communication, give employees more respect, tolerance and career development space, make the company atmosphere more harmonious, and everyone is like a family.

Q: what's your biggest progress in the past few years?

A: I have improved my judgment on people's inner qualities and personalities. Getting along with people in America is simple and direct, just follow the procedure. After returning home, I found that people's communication is relatively complicated. Before doing things, I need to judge people's quality before I can cooperate or implement it.

Q: what kind of male partner or employee are you looking for?

A: rational and logical, with clear thinking and execution. However, there are more female employees in our company, because women naturally feel more about household items.

Q: what is the biggest bottleneck at present?

A: e-commerce brand management and marketing talents are relatively insufficient, and more need to be trained from scratch according to the characteristics of enterprises. We need more compound talents who know the Internet, retail, brand and marketing. ;