Health & Beauty

Yihe golden osmanthus, Xixi peach blossom, Kunlun boiled snow, academy lotus pond, floating light bamboo shadow...

Seeing these names, do you immediately feel a breath of classical oriental coming oncoming, poetic, picturesque, and imaginative?

These names all come from a local fragrance brand-Guanxia. On Xiaohongshu, this brand has more than 10,000 notes on fragrance reviews, which has attracted a large number of loyal fans.

Guanxia is updated on the WeChat applet every Thursday at 8pm. "A fragrance is hard to find." It is sold out within half an hour. Many netizens left a message: "Help, how do you buy Guanxia?"

In the past two years, as a sub-category of beauty makeup, local fragrances represented by Guanxia have quietly emerged as domestic beauty products are in full swing, and have gradually developed into an increasingly complex category, including perfumes, balm, and smokers. Fragrance, scented candles, scented personal care, etc.

New fragrance brands continue to emerge. They put more emphasis on their "domestic products" label, and arouse the emotional resonance of consumers through elements that are closely related to the local Chinese culture. At the same time, they use social media to create topics online and build brand minds. So, can these local fragrances deduce a trend different from international brands?

Market growth, capital entry

For Chinese consumers, perfume is an exotic product. Perfume-based fragrance products have been very popular in Europe and America, but they have always been a relatively niche market in China.

Quantuo data shows that the global perfume consumption market has reached 406.3 billion yuan in 2020, and China's share of it is only 2.5%.

However, with the changes in the structure of consumer groups in recent years, new opportunities have also emerged in my country's fragrance industry.

At present, the main consumer in my country is the post-90s, post-95s and even post-00s. Compared with the previous generation, these young consumers pay more attention to their quality of life, their aesthetic consciousness has begun to awaken, and they are willing to buy the best products within their ability and pursue The aesthetic design of daily life and the spiritual appeals contained therein have completed the transformation from pragmatism to self-pleasure mentality in consumption.

Except for perfumes, most fragrance products are exactly the ones that are most in line with the characteristics of "pleasing oneself for consumption".

Therefore, although the Chinese fragrance market is not large, its market penetration is accelerating. Kantar Worldpanel pointed out in a recent report that from 2018 to 2020, the annual sales growth rate of the domestic perfume industry is about 15%-20%, and the market size is expected to exceed 40 billion yuan by 2022.

In addition, "scented" daily chemical products are becoming more and more popular. In beauty and personal care products, the business of olfactory experience continues to grow.

Take the international beauty giants Estee Lauder Group and L'Oréal Group as examples. Due to the slowdown in the growth of various fragrance products abroad, the two have not only introduced high-end new fragrances in China in the past two years, but also continue to introduce products such as lavender essential oils. , A personal care product of verbena essential oil.

As an entry-level luxury product, my country's fragrance market was once dominated by major international brands. Under the concept of “all consumer products are worth redoing”, a number of emerging domestic brands have begun to emerge in the perfume industry, such as the scent library that has launched a number of Internet celebrity popular perfumes, and the RE that has challenged the mid-to-high-end market Incense room, Barrio BARRIO with annual sales of over one million, etc.

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At present, the venture capital circle, which "investments must not talk about consumption", has also set its sights on China's local fragrance market.

Beginning in August last year, many domestic original fragrance brands such as Scentooze Santu, Yufan, RE Fragrance Room, Plustwo Rabbit, etc. have completed ten million yuan angel rounds or Pre-A rounds of financing. Most of these brands are positioned as "high-quality perfumes that are easier for young people to pick up and taste new", and their prices are more affordable than those of big-name perfumes.

Among them, Yufan is positioned as a "professional fragrance OEM·ODM one-stop service provider". In addition to its own fragrance brand Barrio BARRIO, it also provides one-stop perfume OEM services. Its investor Ouyou Group is the "behind the scenes" of several new consumer brands such as Jiang Xiaobai, Three Squirrels, and Zihai Pot.

Su Cheng, founder of Ouyou Group, believes that the penetration rate in the fragrance industry is a major pain point. In China's environment, the category is not yet mature, and there are almost no big names in China. Perfume is a seriously underestimated track, which is seriously underestimated abroad and at home. Disproportionately, new opportunities will emerge within 3 years.

Since the fragrance is invisible and intangible, it is a unique category that relies heavily on experience. The layout of offline stores is particularly important for the brand. After all, there are still a minority of consumers who are willing to buy perfume blindly before they taste the fragrance.

Some brands choose to interact with consumers through offline stores and complete the omni-channel layout in the follow-up.

The smell library is highly tied to shopping malls and department stores, and currently has more than 60 offline flagship stores. The RE fragrance room has also opened more than 100 offline experience stores in more than 50 cities across the country. Guanxia opened its first offline flagship store in Sanlitun, Beijing, and turned it into an art experience space.

How domestic fragrances tell stories

"Able to tell stories" is a key factor in the rapid rise of new consumer brands, and the same is true in the domestic fragrance market.

On the one hand, it is aimed at the consumption habits of contemporary young groups, that is, in addition to the functional attributes of the product, it also pays attention to content attributes and social attributes. The channels for obtaining information are mostly online, focusing on topics that can be shared with peers on social networks. Fragrance has put a lot of effort into the brand story and product copywriting.

The "2020 China Perfume Industry Research White Paper" released by iResearch shows that female users aged 18 to 45 who have used perfume/fragrance products for 2 years and above are the current mainstream perfume consumer groups. When they obtain perfume information, they are most exposed to Product introductions from counters, Xiaohongshu, friends around you and e-commerce websites, as well as fragrance comments on Weibo.

Compared with mature international commercial perfumes, consumers often refer to more KOC or KOL experience when choosing local fragrances, and dabble in these perfume products with the mentality of trying them out.

On social media where young consumers gather, such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu, there is a steady stream of domestic fragrance evaluations, and the content is high-quality and creative, so as to attract users' attention.

Taking Guanxia as an example, if you learn about its products online, it is not the fragrance ingredients, the origin of the materials, and the production process that impress consumers, but the aesthetic and creative expression of the product through the copywriting of its fragrance products. It can be seen.

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The copywriting of "Drinking Snow and Exploring Plum Blossoms": It has the clear fragrance of Xueluo plum blossoms, and it also allows you to live in a pavilion, and you can also borrow the elegance and leisure of a courtyard. Friends who love "Mei" have been waiting for a long time.

Copywriting of "Kunlun Cooking Snow": Southern friends have many romantic fantasies about snow. If you put a bottle of it at home, the equator can also retain snowflakes.

For consumers, aroma brings not only an olfactory experience, but also stimulates people’s imagination about scent, thereby satisfying emotional and spiritual needs. The comments of professional fragrance critics and bloggers will also stimulate the user's expression of fragrance, thereby driving a new round of spontaneous communication.

Zhu Ran, the founder of Plustwo, also said: "Current consumer products must have content attributes. Product content and communication content can make brand content easier to output and spread, and truly make products pave the way for marketing." His team is doing it. Before product development, the selling point of the product and the method and form of promotion have been considered.

With the help of Xiaohongshu and KOLs on the Douyin platform, Plustwo achieves the integration of product quality and sales through the combination of "precise delivery + global content planting + private domain". It is understood that its first video on Douyin has a playback volume of 50 million +, and a single video has exceeded 2 million in sales, with an ROI as high as 30%.

On the other hand, the new generation of young people no longer blindly worship European and American big names, and have a higher acceptance of domestic brands. With the rise of the national tide and the new national style, these domestic fragrance brands have also combined my country's unique cultural characteristics to make products with oriental characteristics.

Good at viewing summer in oriental aesthetics, using pine, lotus, bamboo, and osmanthus, these plants that represent the oriental charm, blend the natural aroma of China.

Uttori Wuduo has the feeling of "restore the taste in the memory of the Chinese". There are multiple perfume series such as Gui, Mei, Smile and Orchid, and dig deep into the elements to develop different scent scenes of the same category.

In terms of product stories, they invariably focused on the pictures and images in the oriental context, and named the products: "Dingzhou Gongku Yinxiang", "Elizhang Zhongxiang", and "Du Ruo Xiuzhongxiang" "", "Sheng Dan Jing Mo ugly" in RE perfume room, "Yihe Jin Gui", "Xixi Peach Blossom", "Floating Bamboo Shadow" in Guan Xia...

From the name to the copywriting, these products all reveal a strong Chinese style. Through the elements that are closely connected with Chinese local customs and culture, they resonate with consumers and cater to the current young people's enthusiasm for consumption of the country.

The smell economy, how far is it from the outbreak

Under the question of "Why are some perfumes so expensive?", the author RitaW replied: A bottle of real perfume from the initial inspiration to the final product requires hundreds of repeated revisions and attempts before it can be finalized. . The selection and proportion of each raw material must be extremely precise.

Similar to beauty products, despite the need to invest heavily in packaging and marketing, the core of fragrance is still the product.

Like domestic beauty products that take the cheap and young route, the originality of some new fragrance brands has also been questioned. For example, within half a year of the Plustwo Magic Mirror series, some netizens have copied the Korean brand pibu pibu on Douban. Another popular product, Moon Balm, was also spit out in its design that resembled a Kjaer Weis eye shadow. .

Due to the limited purchase method and purchase time of Guanxia, although the brand explained that the production process is difficult and the product inventory is limited, it is considered by many to be a very typical hunger marketing.

Odor Library claims to be the "spokesperson of Chinese taste" for its "Cool White Open" series of fragrance care products, and it has repeatedly screened the screen with Dabaitu, Vanke Real Estate, etc., and has been criticized for excessive marketing. Some users commented that: marketing is OK, but it doesn't smell good.

Blindly marketing is still not enough. Sometimes you need to slow down and have a relatively eternal product that forms a memory point with the brand.

On the consumer side, young people tend to change their preferences and prefer to discover unique fragrances rather than big-name commercial perfumes that are easy to "smelt" on the street. This is also the reason why imported niche perfumes have shown significant growth in recent years. Euromonitor International, a global market consulting company, predicts that this figure is close to 20%. Therefore, in terms of product development, creativity, aesthetics and cultural depth need to be compared.

In addition, brands such as the smell library have also opened a multi-category front after the successful breakthrough of large single products, in order to expand the market. Personal care products such as shower gel and body lotion have stronger functionality and can be made according to the idea of scented products, and are closer to the actual needs of consumers.

On the other hand, the continuous maturity of the supply chain is also laying the foundation for the outbreak of the domestic fragrance market.

According to incomplete statistics from Pinguan App, in 2020, 6 local spice companies will rush to IPO one after another, and the overall performance is showing a rapid growth trend.

These upstream companies in the fragrance industry not only have innovative technology and cost-effective advantages, but also have a more accurate grasp of the fragrance preferences and market trends of domestic consumers, and use genuine local flavor raw materials to support downstream fragrance companies.

Compared with the 100 billion-level market scale behind the "face value economy", although the tens of billions of the "olfactory economy" is not a big one, there are still many possibilities.

After all, for generation Z consumers, the luxury attributes of perfumes are gradually weakening. Perfumes used as status symbols have become an embellishment in their daily lives.