Why Is YOUNGOR Firmly Opposed To "Younger"?

According to the world clothing shoes and hats net, recently, the old clothing enterprises

The group launched a high-profile conference to celebrate the birthday of Hart, Hart Schaffner Marx. Ten years ago, YOUNGOR was authorized to become the sole Licensor of the US brand in mainland China, Hongkong and Macao. In 2014, it bought the latter's brand management right in China with a very favorable price.

Compared with the 130 year old Hart Marx, YOUNGOR, founded in 1979, is far from an old brand. However, in the eyes of many young consumers, this local brand has already had a bit of "old age".

At one time, YOUNGOR group's "three carriages" were always relished by people, and began to set foot in the field of real estate development and financial investment in 1990s.

Companies that know the most about finance and real estate are also the best selling companies in the capital circle.

However, the diversity of the "go hand in hand" has finally been hit hard in 2011. Chairman Li Rucheng also told the media that in that year, "two of YOUNGOR's three carriages were caught."

The two carriages caught in Li Rucheng's mouth refer to the real estate business and investment business. Therefore, since 2012, YOUNGOR's slogan of "returning to the main business" has been somewhat more than enough.

However, for many years, YOUNGOR clothing industry has not yet become the absolute main force in the revenue report.

Finally, at the 2016 China clothing festival, Li Rucheng made a high-profile voice: "five years to rebuild a YOUNGOR."

Is YOUNGOR really able to return to its main business this time?

It has been a year since Li Rucheng's last lofty aspirations. In this year, some changes are taking place in the big ship. By the interview after this press conference, tiger sniffing quickly captured several changes of YOUNGOR.

Li Rucheng and his team of 70 and 85

In fact, in the past few years, this local men's wear brand is often evaluated by the media as "not doing the right thing".

If you look at its earnings in recent years, the data will be more intuitive in explaining this.

Taking the 2016 earnings data as an example, during the reporting period, YOUNGOR's clothing business revenue was 4 billion 274 million 366 thousand and 200 yuan, accounting for only 28% of total revenue (14 billion 894 million 990 thousand yuan). Obviously, the driving force of this garment enterprise's stronger performance still came from investing in two real estate sectors, and the original clothing industry was marginalized, even though it repeatedly claimed to "return to the main industry", it was also difficult to see improvement, even accounting for far less than 38% of 2012.

However, it is noteworthy that in the first half of 2017, the group's earnings report showed that the clothing business has become the only three largest piece of revenue and net profit showing a growth of more than 10% over the same period.

For the previous "diversification strategy", Li Rucheng, the chairman of the board, responded very frankly. "The reason why it is divided into real estate and investment is that money is faster than clothing."

But now, the focus of Li Rucheng's work has shifted.

"Since last June, I have put my 50%-60%'s energy on the clothes, taking into account the real estate and investment business.

The fundamental reason is that the big environment is changing. If YOUNGOR really wants to be bigger and stronger, clothing is our core.

The real estate industry is constantly adjusting and controlling. It is not very clear. This road is hard for YOUNGOR to go through, and the opportunity for investment is relatively large. We also do not have a very strong and professional team here. YOUNGOR has been investing in YOUNGOR for more than 30 years.

Although compared to real estate at 500 million or 1 billion, clothes earn money by selling clothes one by one, but money is slow enough, but it is robust enough.

"Health is more important than speed. I hope that YOUNGOR can withstand wind and waves and challenges."

Li Rucheng, 65 years old, still holds the general direction of the company's business.

He will take more than ten hours of aircraft, fly to Europe, visit the top fabric suppliers, will also go down to a factory to check production at any time, and in addition, he also has an important task to train the team.

When it comes to this topic, Li Rucheng said something interesting. He said, "training teams must come by themselves." if they are given to others, they may worry that their jobs will be handed over to others. But I don't need to worry about it. I don't have to give up my job earlier.

In the core team of YOUNGOR today, there was once a deputy mayor of Wenzhou, Hu Gang Gao, who had 85 of the group's deputy general manager Xu Peng, who had worked in Giorgio Armani from Taiwan.

But Li Rucheng's only daughter, Li Hanqiong, 39, who has been a director of YOUNGOR since 2011, is rarely pushed to the stage.

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Subtract with heavy gold

Nowadays, YOUNGOR is more willing to call their own physical stores a "platform", which is not only a selling channel, but also a brand service, experience and cultural function.

According to the 2016 earnings data, YOUNGOR group has 3225 existing stores, of which more than 90% are self operated stores, and YOUNGOR's latest goal is to reduce the 3000 stores to 1000 stores. The company has built 1000 sales platforms with annual sales of over 10 million yuan.

Like almost all the new and old retailers today, YOUNGOR also referred to the current hot words "new retail" in its 2016 earnings report.

According to Li Rucheng's understanding, there are five elements for new retail: quality products, competitive cost, fast logistics response system, comfortable experience environment and high tech marketing methods.

Of course, for this "new card", each has its own way of advocating and playing.

And following YOUNGOR's own "

"Understanding", in the construction of subtracting platform, they plan to invest 8 billion yuan, and most of the money is used to buy land and decoration.

"Why must we buy land?"

The answer to this question is one of the young backbone of Li Rucheng, Xu Peng, the deputy general manager of YOUNGOR mentioned above.

He said that a very important reason for YOUNGOR to do so is that YOUNGOR hopes to grow into a century old shop, and in the long run, the cost of buying land is much more expensive than that of a rental store, that is, the so-called "competitive cost".

The annual rent increase has become a big burden for many brands, especially for many brands in order to build up their image and rent the facade in the core area, looking at the high rent that they can only afford to die, and buy it directly, without such worries.

More than 10 years ago, YOUNGOR invested more than one hundred million yuan and bought a storefront on Nanjing East Road, Shanghai, with an area of 3000 square meters.

It is reported that the annual sales volume of this store is 40 million yuan.

In the same area, if other businesses want to cover similar areas, the rent will be about thirty million a year, and the market price of the land will be as high as about 1000000000.

YOUNGOR also spared no expense in decorating the store.

According to the introduction, last year, near YOUNGOR's most popular Sanyang Plaza, YOUNGOR opened a large store of nearly 3000 square meters. It invited Burberry Handford and other luxury store designer Philip Handford to design, the decoration price reached 10 thousand yuan per square meter, and the store invested nearly three hundred million.

Opening thousands of stores is only the first step.

"Many of the smart stores we now talk about, including unmanned convenience stores and unmanned shelves, are only front-end applications.

What we need to do behind this is to build a strong system to support the operation of these front office applications so as to achieve real efficiency.

Xu Peng introduced to us that, at present, YOUNGOR has all the data, but basically it is one-way.

Some data can be connected, but it is not systematic enough.

And in building the system, YOUNGOR is also actively seeking cooperation with large Internet Co.

Logistics is also an indispensable and even more important part of retailing, and the efficient logistics system mentioned by YOUNGOR is mainly aimed at offline channels.

Xu Peng said, "if 100 stores need 100 SKU for consumers to choose, it is actually a 10000 inventory. Inventory is the killer of clothing brands."

And through efficient logistics, we can achieve the sharing of inventory, so that I do not have much stock in doing the same thing.

I think this is the real "new retailer" to make retail more efficient.

Of course, in the same area, YOUNGOR does not intend to do it by itself, but also to a well-known domestic logistics company.

With the platform of efficient logistics system built up, then consumers are not "running water". What do YOUNGOR rely on to catch them?

To this problem, Li Rucheng passed the sentence, "through our store renovation, comfortable experience environment and big data."

YOUNGOR's big data still don't know where to start, and the answer is obviously too vague.

In addition to big data, pulling the pressure of consumers naturally falls on YOUNGOR's brand.

Why does YOUNGOR not "become younger"?

In recent years, the topic of how to attract consumers has been more focused by the brand (narrowing) on how to curry favor with young consumers. Therefore, the brand's youth has become a slogan that many companies can't wait to throw out, trying to make changes in the product line, design and marketing mode, in order to seize the new consumer power, but in this respect, YOUNGOR is quite cautious.

YOUNGOR is mainly dressed in men's clothing. The main consumers are businessmen aged 35 to 40. At least for now, the brand wants to do well in the market, so they will not try to sell their products to the post-90s.

YOUNGOR refused to simply "younger".

But a problem at the moment is that YOUNGOR's target user pool is undergoing this wave of upgrading. The 60 post 70 fans behind the brand have great differences in their spending habits and ideas with those who are entering the "pool".

Xu Peng endorsed this, and he said he would value YOUNGOR brand online display.

"We cannot ignore this wave of young people who enter our target consumer group."

Xu Peng said, "according to our price and our current channels, we are still mainly under the line, but in the future, this wave of consumers entering our target age group has developed online consumption habits.

More importantly, if they haven't heard of YOUNGOR before, or do not know enough about them, their first reaction is to take out their mobile phones to Baidu Google. In this way, online has become a channel for consumers to brand cognition. He may not form a paction online, but he will know the first time on your brand online.

But at the same time, YOUNGOR will not deliberately push its products and brands to the other extreme, such as "fast fashion", so as to please and cater to young people.

In other words, for young people, what YOUNGOR wants to do is "ambush marketing".

"Our brands cannot grow old with our consumers."

For Gong Naijie, director of design who has just joined YOUNGOR for more than a year, how to grasp such a "degree" is the difficulty: you want the brand design to be more fashionable and younger, but you can't run away from it, which makes people feel that this is another brand completely.

Gong Naijie introduced to us that "when we are developing, we will have special ideas. We want to try new things and do enough research. But at the stage of implementation, these ideas are going to land. In the middle process, we have been running in with all departments."

However, objectively speaking, the current post-90s generation is different from their predecessors. When they grew up in the high-density information environment, they became almost instinct for the pursuit of speed, freshness and fashion. These are far from what YOUNGOR can do now.

YOUNGOR has never been a fast company. The whole industry chain mode that it is proud of from raw materials to clothing sales will not become a big burden in the future if it can not get up in time.

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Training "two stage rocket"

At present, YOUNGOR group has its main brand YOUNGOR (Youngor) and four big brands Mayor, Hart Schaffner Marx, GY, HANP.

What needs to be recognized is that despite the fact that YOUNGOR has made many attempts at "not letting brands grow with consumers", the attraction of the main brand to consumers is slowing down.

Obviously, in order to ensure the overall expansion of the garment business, the group needs to work hard to train the "two stage rocket", and Mayor, which started in 2016, is one of the best ones.

In the half year 2017 financial report, the main brand Youngor achieved a business income of 2 billion 40 million yuan during the reporting period, an increase of 8.85% over the same period last year, while the sub brand Mayor grew by 284.97% over the same period.

Mayor is YOUNGOR's high-end men's clothing brand.

The brand leader told us that the brand was registered as early as 2000, but it did not start operation until 2009, but the investment was not enough until June last year. It has gained more than 200 million of revenue. It is expected that the brand revenue will reach 500 million yuan next year.

As the main high-end market, in addition to stationed in YOUNGOR's large platform store, Mayor's independent stores will mainly focus on the second tier cities, trying to enter some high-end department stores that YOUNGOR main brands can hardly access.

But because the reputation of the brand is limited, it takes more time and energy to negotiate.

For Mayor, the problem of brand awareness may be the immediate solution.

In October last year, Mayor signed a strategic cooperation agreement with top five top European fabric suppliers. The five fabric suppliers (ZEGNA, LORO PIANA, CERRUTI 1881, ALBINI, ALUMO) were specially designed for the first tier international clothing brands such as LV. Apart from the customized cooperation in high-end fabrics, these fabric manufacturers are also promoting some brand publicity and building strategic cooperation for Mayor through their own professional team.

In addition, Mayor's current product announcement also includes some offline activities for members.

Another notable concern is the HANP, the main brand of hemp material. At present, its products include not only clothing, but also some household products.

It is said that Li Rucheng has already spoken inside. After Mayor, the group will push forward HANP next year.

In fact, in recent years, the clothing industry, especially the men's clothing area, has been paid more attention to the Hai Lan family, which has made rapid progress in light asset mode. In 2009, there were only 655 stores, and now there are 5491 stores.

Mid 2017 earnings data show that during the period, Hai Lan home clothing business achieved revenue of 9 billion 98 million yuan, an increase of 6.38% over the same period, much higher than that of YOUNGOR's apparel sector's revenue of 2 billion 450 million yuan.

However, it is worth noting that in terms of gross profit margin, YOUNGOR is 26.5% of the 65% of Haolan's home.

The addition of Hai Lan's home is continuing, and YOUNGOR, which is famous for its heavy assets, is trying to make subtraction to integrate its stores.

More interesting reports, please pay attention to the world clothing shoes and hats net.