Meilishuo Xu Yirong’s entrepreneurial story: from 10 billion to 100 billion

Meilishuo is about to evolve into a huge fashion discovery platform, and its innovation ability has made Ma Huateng’s eyes shine. I have compiled the beautiful story of Xu Yirong’s entrepreneurship. Welcome to appreciate and learn from it.

In 2015, create a huge fashion discovery platform

In August 2014, when "Entrepreneurship News" had an exclusive interview with Xu Yirong, the founder of Meilishuo, he It tells about the transformation that took place in November 2013 (for details, see "Beautiful Story of Xu Yirong: The Nirvana of a Vertical E-commerce"). At that time, Taobao blocked online links from shopping guide websites like Meilishuo on a large scale, causing Meilishuo's traffic to plummet, and it had to make the decision to quickly transform into a vertical e-commerce platform for women's fast fashion. Only half a year has passed since the last interview, and the transformation and traditional e-commerce image are already a thing of the past. It is really too out of place to look at Meilishuo this way again.

One morning in mid-March, Xu Yirong once again accepted an exclusive interview with "Entrepreneurship State" to introduce the layout of Meilishuo starting from the second half of 2014. "I don't want Meili to be a traditional e-commerce website that relies on expanding traffic and increasing UVs to survive." Xu Yirong said, "That's not the case. We are going to do something subversive." Meili said that the annual merchandise sales in 2014 The total amount is about 5.6 billion yuan, and it is expected to reach 15 billion yuan in 2015. In the next three years, it is hoped to reach 100 billion yuan. Meilishuo's core strategy in 2015 is to plan around the future scale of RMB 100 billion.

Although he often immerses himself in the circle of fashionable women on Beauty Talk in order to discover innovative points in the combination of fashion and technology, Xu Yirong still has the image of a slovenly technical man, wearing a dark blue cotton suit with hanging clothes on his neck. The pink belt of the work badge often makes him laugh heartily. The book he recently read is Horowitz's "The Hard Way to Start a Business," which says that there are two types of CEOs in the world, one is the CEO in adversity and the other is the CEO in good times. "I may have experienced too much adversity. I am an adversity-type CEO. I have to keep shouting and pioneering."

China's economic development has had two major trends in the past few years. One is rapid growth. With the consumption upgrade, users’ consumption power is upgrading and they are also seeking more professional and personalized services. The other is that technology is subverting traditional industries. The rapid evolution of Internet and mobile Internet technologies will reshape the entire industry, changing everything from production methods to profit models.

Xu Yirong predicts that these two major trends will continue for ten years or even longer. Meilishuo is in line with this trend. In the next three years, the transaction volume will increase from 15 billion to 100 billion yuan, or even larger.

The core of Meilishuo’s strategy in 2015 is to embrace all fashion lovers as never before, centering on fashion lovers and drawing circles outside. "Last year, we drew a circle to provide these merchants with more accurate traffic. From the end of last year until now, our main focus has been to draw two more circles outside. One circle allows merchants to directly contact users, and the other circle is to provide merchants with supplies. Chain services. ”

In addition to supporting merchants from three dimensions: providing accurate traffic, building circles, and supply chain services for fast production, Meilishuo will also provide financial support to merchants and help fashion enthusiasts solve their financial problems. Turnover issue.

“As long as you are the ultimate lover, you have professionalism in fashion, and you have very good services in fashion, that’s enough. The rest can be left to the Meilishuo platform. ”

According to Xu Yirong’s definition, Meilishuo is a huge fashion discovery platform where users can discover and purchase fashion. This platform can also support all fashion lovers. Ultimately, it will be a A fashion ecosystem and fashion industry chain.

Micro-circles make Ma Huateng’s eyes shine.

The so-called fashion lovers are those personal micro-stores or fashion merchants who really love fashion and understand fashion. As consumption continues to upgrade, users will increasingly favor professional and personalized merchants. Merchants must understand fashion. For example, merchants selling clothes must first be fashionistas themselves. And those uncles who only know how to sell goods while shirtless but know nothing about fashion will be eliminated by the future business world.

But on Taobao, where hot-selling products are rampant, merchants who truly love fashion are often submerged, and it is difficult for merchants and users in need to find each other. Meilishuo puts these types of fashion enthusiast merchants on its own platform, and at the same time attracts young girls who are highly sensitive to fashion, allowing merchants and users to accurately benchmark and provide merchants with more accurate traffic. Xu Yirong said that Meilishuo's ROI (return on investment) is about 1:15, while Taobao's is only 1:3 or 1:4.

In addition to providing merchants with more accurate traffic, Meilishuo also has an original function: micro-circles. Some time ago, Ma Huateng visited Meilishuo. Xu Yirong demonstrated to him the function of micro circles. Ma Huateng's eyes lit up and he thought it was a very social shopping innovation.

On current e-commerce platforms, merchants open stores on the platform and work hard to attract traffic amid the raging popularity of popular products. However, it is difficult for merchants to retain their fans and users. On Meili.com, in addition to opening a store, merchants can also create a group (micro-circle). The store owner is also the group owner, and the group is full of users. This is equivalent to pulling a group of people with the same hobbies into a circle. Users can jump seamlessly between groups and stores, interact and communicate in groups, browse and place orders in stores.

There is a jewelry store opened by a pair of sisters on the Meilishuo platform. Soon after it opened, it accumulated five to six thousand fans. The group owner comes to share with users every day what good jewelry is, how to identify real pearls, and why the jewelry worn by a certain star is so beautiful... Users study and discuss in the group every day, and feel that the merchants are very friendly, and the two parties start doing business. It was also very pleasant and comfortable.

This kind of group or circle is actually a very simple and lightweight CRM system for merchants. Merchants can directly and effectively interact with users, hear their voices, and get their feedback. Users say that the green color of this dress looks better, and whether the jewelry can be slightly modified, merchants can decide the categories and frequency of stocking based on the user's opinions. On the other hand, users find many peers with similar interests in the group and no longer worry about being cheated, because the credibility of the merchant will be endorsed by other users.

“Use the group as a store and the store as a group. The group is a store where people come and go.” Xu Yirong said that micro-circles can allow merchants to obtain very loyal fans in addition to accurate traffic. users, improve fan retention rate and purchase conversion rate. For users, it can improve their sense of security, provide more fashion discovery, and be more fun.

The birth of microcircle was not so smooth. In Xu Yirong's opinion, there are two most powerful user behaviors on mobile phones, one is group form, and the other is taking pictures. "Why the 2014 World Cup was the most violent in history? Because in 2014, there were WeChat groups, and you could join groups at any time. People became more social on their mobile phones." The other is taking pictures. Mobile phones are used by people all over the world. Eyes, the billions of mobile phones in the world are billions of eyes, and you can see and take photos anywhere.

However, the mobile Taobao store has nothing to do with these two major activities. Xu Yirong’s intuition is that the mobile Taobao store is a product of the PC era, and Meili said that it uses technology to create more awesome products for fashion lovers. form.

The micro circle is the result of constant quarrels and PKs within Meilishuo every day. On Double Eleven in 2014, the Meilishuo team worked hard for 28 hours and achieved great success, with sales far exceeding the target. The sales department on the 11th floor started to get excited. Some people ran around naked and some opened champagne to celebrate. The office on the 9th floor was a different scene. Xu Yirong and several colleagues were racking their brains to figure out the shape of the circle and filming each other. From four o'clock in the afternoon to 11:30 midnight, they "moved to tears". Later, they also went to the 11th floor to celebrate with everyone.

Unexpectedly, when these people communicated again the next morning, they suddenly discovered that the idea of ????the circle shape had already come out, and the product shape was conceived within a few minutes.

Xu Yirong said that in the next version of Meilishuo, the camera function in the circle will become cool and powerful, allowing users to better share their discoveries.

This year’s Spring Festival, Meilishuo will be connected to the WeChat wallet portal. Tencent is the largest investor in Meilishuo, with a total investment of nearly US$100 million. “The traffic brought by WeChat reached more than 2 million a day at its peak.

"Xu Yirong plans to further upgrade this entrance in the future, "We hope to further explore the form of social shopping at the WeChat wallet entrance, and may also ask WeChat to open some APIs to cooperate with WeChat in the most cutting-edge exploration in this area. " Ma Huateng's visit to Meilishuo may mean that in the near future, a new form of micro-store will be born on WeChat.

Use flexible supply chain to create beauty

Meilishuo creates new fashion The third dimension of the ecosystem is beautiful manufacturing, that is, flexible supply chain services. Fashion enthusiasts are mostly small and medium-sized businesses, micro-businesses, and even post-90s own-brand designers. They are all disadvantaged in the production process. We have to face supply chain problems.

The clothing industry is highly specialized in production. For example, one factory produces sweaters, another factory produces chiffon, and another factory produces trousers. It is often necessary to negotiate with different factories, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The clothing industry also faces a lingering nightmare, which is inventory risk. Every merchant hopes that he can produce small orders and then follow up on small orders. Small orders do not have bargaining power in front of factories. When merchants do not have supply chain capabilities, the delivery time will become extremely long, or the quality of the goods will be uncontrollable.

China is the world’s clothing factory. , from cotton planting, spinning and weaving to printing and dyeing, to clothing pattern making and processing, all links are very complete. But the strange thing is that on the one hand, merchants do not receive support from supply chain services; There is a general lack of orders in factories.

Xu Yirong made up his mind to build a supply chain service platform in July last year. The platform will take the lead in integrating factories and provide supply chain services for merchants on the platform. Production can be carried out according to the quantity, and subsequent orders can be quickly followed, and the production price and product quality can be controlled for merchants.

In addition to accepting orders from merchants, Beautiful Manufacturing can also allow users to reverse customize, which is consumption. An investor-driven C2B model. Any girl can upload pictures on Meilishuo and collect likes. Once a certain number of likes are collected, Meilishuo will arrange production.

There was a piece of clothing. After users collected likes and pre-sold it for two days, Meilishuo used big data to calculate a user model. The calculation result was that this piece of clothing could eventually sell 550 pieces. Many days later, In the end, 600 pieces were actually sold. Xu Yirong said that the great thing about this is that there is almost no inventory.

Beautiful manufacturing can help merchants solve inventory problems, rapid production problems and stable quality problems. The price is reasonable. “We can use this supply chain to support all fashion-loving merchants, micro-businessmen and designers. ”

To achieve small and fast production in a flexible supply chain, there are several links that need to be opened up. The first is to be able to gather users, let users like them, encourage users to participate more, and discover through this link User preferences. The second step is to use big data to make accurate sales forecasts. Xu Yirong said that the traditional forecasting method has a deviation of 50%, and Meilishuo's forecast deviation is about 10%. The third step is that the supply chain service can be fast. Response, this requires the use of computer systems to integrate all aspects of the factory production process, thereby improving efficiency.

If there is no user participation in the front and no big data prediction, the small and fast production itself will be more difficult. Forecasts are inaccurate, orders are inaccurate, and factories are not willing to play with you. "We have strong capabilities in these three links," Xu Yirong said.

Currently, Meili is manufacturing flexibility. In the supply chain, clothing processing and production are outsourced to cooperative factories, and the important pattern making, design, and quality inspection links are all controlled by Meilishuo. There are currently dozens of pattern makers in the city, and there are more than 100 cooperative factories. Home. "If your orders can account for more than 1/3 of the factory's production capacity, you will have strong control over the factory. "Xu Yirong hopes that 25% of Meili's 15 billion yuan transaction volume this year will be produced through Meili manufacturing supply chain services.

He expects more than that. He also plans to supply Designers and pattern makers at one end of the chain, as well as users with similar needs, are all brought into a micro circle. Everyone discusses how to make a piece of clothing in the circle, and the scene will be very high.

Xu Yirong likes to study the fast fashion clothing brand ZRAR, and often uses ZARA as an analogy. In ZARA's Spanish headquarters, the entire city is full of small and medium-sized enterprises that produce and process clothing around ZRAR. What ZRAR does is to build infrastructure and allow satellite factories throughout the city to quickly produce for themselves.

Xu Yirong also imagines the beautiful future of beauty theory in this way. "For example, we apply for a piece of land in Guangzhou with the government, build all the supporting infrastructure, let factories move in, turn this area into a clothing base, and promote industrial upgrading." On the online side, Meilishuo can aggregate large and small businesses across the country. For small individuals, micro-businessmen, and merchants who are interested in fashion, we use beautiful manufacturing to help them produce. "At that time, Meili was said to be ZARA, an open Internet brand."

The prospects are bright, but leveraging the entire industry chain is not easy. Flexible supply chain production is not a very new method. Alibaba has been talking about it for many years, but in the end it did not invest much money in it. Many peers in the industry have indeed studied it, but they have not dared to do it.

Xu Yirong described his mood when facing this problem as "very excited". As the book "Entrepreneurship Is Hard" says, CEOs in adversity are usually very fierce in their work, dare to invest, and pursue the ultimate. "I am a boss who is not easy to serve." Xu Yirong said that only when everyone has a persistent spirit and reaches the ultimate state can the ultimate product be produced.

The product "Micro Circle" requires strong creativity to create new forms. "Our team really competed all night, and my colleagues didn't want to talk to me the next day," Xu Yirong laughed. say. Beautiful manufacturing requires the integration of a large number of garment factories. It not only needs to use technology to streamline processes, but also undertakes the task of re-education of traditional factories.

The current situation of China's garment industry is that not only small and medium-sized processing factories, but also large garment enterprises are very backward in technology. A large number of factories are still using Excel spreadsheets and other information products from the Microsoft era twenty years ago.

Meilishuo has two self-owned "version rooms", which are like a small factory with a higher level of Internet technology penetration. Xu Yirong used these two version rooms as samples for testing and polished them to the ideal state. , and output this form to other factories. Use technology to promote the integration of traditional factories and the Internet, while providing them with stable orders and lasting benefits.

Xu Yirong told the reporter of "Entrepreneurship State" that if we can do this, we can provide unprecedented value to users and merchants. Now every business is exhausted by inventory and drowned in a lot of hot products. This is the only way to break this situation, otherwise China will never be able to produce great fashion companies.

Higo allows girlfriends to spread all over the world

Meilishuo’s main APP is a fast fashion model for relatively young girls. But when a user reaches the age of 30 or 40, her economic spending power will be relatively better, and she will be particularly interested in global brand products. At the end of last year, Meilishuo also launched a global overseas shopping product line, hoping to connect besties around the world and discover fashion together.

Xu Yirong told the reporter of "Entrepreneurship State" that Higo has deployed professional buyer girls who are particularly passionate about fashion and understand fashion in various cities around the world. These girls are micro-businessmen who help users discover and purchase fashion products in Paris, New York, Good stuff from Tokyo and many other places. Going a step further, they can even provide users with local escort services, and they can take them with them wherever they go. "This is how it feels to have your best friends all over the world." If Aribnb is a discovery platform for global travel enthusiasts, then Higo is a discovery platform for global fashion enthusiasts.

Higo’s goal is to recruit tens of thousands of micro-businessmen this summer. During the global recruitment process, there was one thing that surprised Xu Yirong: some of the group leaders recruited turned out to be early users of Meilishuo five years ago. Five years ago, when Meilishuo was two or three months old, Xu Yirong was particularly impressed by a few early users. There was one named "Xiaotu" who was still a college student studying design at the time. He shared in many magazines on Meilishuo. A super user, she later went to the United States to study and stayed there, and now she is back to work as a fashion buyer on Higo.

Xu Yirong said that this was a surprise. From the beginning, Meilishuo was a fashion entrance to realize the dream of ordinary girls pursuing beauty, and these users who grew up became many fashion enthusiasts on Meilishuo. A leader among consumers, Meilishuo, like its users, has always adhered to its own path of being a fashion lover.

Compared with other overseas shopping platforms, Higo is more like C2C, arming individual buyers with fashion professional backgrounds around the world as purchasing agents. Xu Yirong believes that this matter is very scalable. "I can easily seize every place in the world." For example, a town in Japan produces very beautiful ski suits, and the price is only half of those in China. A handsome guy or girl there can do the shopping for them.

Higo has also made great innovations in product form, and every purchasing agent has a circle. At the same time, the buyer's passport will be reviewed and the buyer's geographical location will be determined on the APP. These will greatly reduce the risk of fake goods and avoid the situation where the buyer claims to be in Paris but is actually in a county in Shandong.

The general overseas shopping model is B2C. The problem with this model is that the purchased items are not necessarily colorful and interactive. Higo's model is that fashion enthusiasts around the world gather together to generate a large amount of information. Users can have a richer experience and can better meet the more personalized and niche needs of the post-90s and post-00s generations. In turn, users put forward The new needs will also inspire and guide buyers to new products and new discoveries.

Meilishuo’s strategy in the past five years has been fashion discovery, to discover those merchants who truly love fashion and understand fashion. This strategy will be the same in the future, embracing fashion lovers and trying every means to integrate technology with fashion. , liberating people’s creativity.

Meilishuo’s current strategy is to invest, first release the water to raise fish, then transfer profits to various terminals on the platform, and open up all links on the platform. "Income is not a problem to consider. The investment this year will be 1.2 billion yuan, and the value will be given to users and merchants first."

"If we can put together several circles around fashion enthusiasts this year, Including the upward extension of global fashion discovery, we should be able to see a transaction volume of 100 billion yuan." Xu Yirong said. ;