The First E-Commerce Is Clothing, And Finally It Is Clothing That Has Not Yet Realized Data

The complexity of the whole operation flow of the clothing brand in the clothing industry is ten times and twenty times that of the catering industry.

"Didi and meituan are representatives of the Internet based travel and catering industry, but there has been no such company in the field of clothing." Longjing told zinc finance pan Yuefei.

Three years ago, Longjing founded store plus, hoping to enter the market through SAAS and become a 10 billion listed company. Three years later, "store plus" still has only a few hundred paying customers. Even this summer, the company almost couldn't open.

On the first floor of Xicheng square, Hangzhou City, Ms. Huang, the manager of the "three color" women's clothing retail store, opened the "store +" app on her mobile phone and began to edit the store promotion information to be sent to 472 members. While pressing the send button, she calculated in her mind how many customers and sales this information might bring to her.

International fast fashion brands have taken over the territory, and clothing retail has come back to life under the fierce "artillery fire" of e-commerce.

However, the development of SaaS industry seems to be far from the expectation.

　 01 product is not good, or there is no market or do not understand?

"Three years, you haven't finished your product yet?" Pan Yuefei asked Longjing, CEO of "store +".

Long Jing said he had invested 30 million in research and development in three years, but it was just the beginning“ When we talk about SaaS, investors say it's worthless; When it comes to the industry, investors say they don't understand. " He added.

For stores and brands, the key is sales, but for SaaS enterprises, it is not so simple.

"Shop +" has just spent a troubled summer. Because of the shortage of funds, they have encountered the biggest crisis since they started their business: they can't pay their salaries for three and a half months. Fortunately, except for an intern, none of the more than 70 employees left. Fortunately, with the new round of financing of 30 million pre-A, Longjing wants to open up the data from consumers to stores, headquarters and supply chain through "store +" and can continue to adhere to this ideal.

  But after 15 years of prosperity and 16 years of stagnation, SaaS industry has been in the "longest winter". It has become a common knowledge among people in the industry that they can't live well but can't die.

"We spent three years making this whole set of products, and we didn't believe it. Once the product was demonstrated, we all liked it. When we looked at the revenue valuation, we felt that it was high, and we didn't want to play with us." Long Jing repeatedly stressed that this is the dilemma he is constantly facing when he comes to investors with a valuation of 300 million yuan in recent months.

In order to let investors see the real dilemma of the clothing industry, Longjing organized a "Longyou school" to take investors and customers to Guangzhou for a "study tour" and to investigate the largest clothing wholesale gathering place in China and even the world. In three or four days, Longjing took them to see thirty or forty garment factories, designers and brands in the upstream.

"Online and offline data connection and inventory management are so complicated." After the close contact of bombing style, the management side enlightened, and the customer directly pulled Longjing to sign the contract.

Before finding the "store +", Wang Chenglong, Yuanhe origin capital, also inspected many similar SaaS enterprises. "Their biggest problem is that there are still barriers between CRM and ERP, that is, the three elements of people, goods and market are not connected."

For the clothing industry, the purchase, sale and storage system can not be solved by simple SaaS software. In the past few years, the crisis faced by almost all domestic clothing brands stems from their high inventory“ After the inventory is cleared, the imagination space is the key. " Wang said.

But before getting through the inventory, SaaS enterprises should first be able to survive.

"Low communication costs, high customer viscosity." Longjing said that although "store +" has not been launched, it has accumulated nearly 100 customers through word-of-mouth communication so far.

Software free, service charge mode, may be a good try.

Some investors advised Longjing to raise the price of products and increase the company's revenue. However, Longjing refused to provide the software free of charge because of his failure to do so.

More people think that investing in SaaS enterprises is still not a good business, because if it's just a SaaS, "it's hard to make money by selling tools and software." Wang said.

But salesforce's valuation of more than $70 billion is eye watering.

　　 After the traditional clothing brands have completed the wealth accumulation, it seems that it is "the matter of tmall to open a shop" to add e-commerce modules. But the supply chain of e-commerce and production is not so smoothly connected.

Many agents and young people with supply chain background have seen this business opportunity and have begun to walk from behind the scenes to the front of the stage.

As a fashion brand incubator, magmode connects designers and manufacturers at one end, and also carries online marketing and offline buyer's shop operation“ In the future, it is very difficult to have more than 10 billion circulation brands, more of which are about 1 billion in scale and have clear service for the crowd. " Cai Chongda, the founder, said.

It is still unclear how these brands can effectively connect and cooperate with OEM factories.

Longjing said that small and medium-sized brands have a demand for intelligent retail, but they do not have enough funds and ability to build their own intelligent retail technology system. This is their opportunity.

"The SaaS industry is not going to work on its own products." The founder of a SaaS company said that the brand exported an excel through SaaS, and then sent it to the other party by email. The other party imported excel into their own system, and even needed to confirm by phone.

Therefore, when young people in Japanese and Korean fashion brands, with colorful hair and fashionable suitcases, come to the store + Financing Conference, they are out of place with the programmers who are wrapped in Taobao hot cotton padded clothes and carrying black computer bags.

But do stores really like these? Not necessarily.

In the view of Zhang Qiang of the "three color" women's clothing business department, one of the biggest advantages of "store plus" is to empower shopping guide“ UNIQLO's biggest asset comes from shopping guide, which can increase the sales of stores by 20-50%. "

As the most important part of clothing terminal retail, it has not been fully activated. In the CRM system used before, the background was in the headquarters of the company, so the shopping guide could not get access to these member information, so they could only establish a deeper contact by the most traditional way of adding wechat.

In addition to hardware and software products, "store plus" also recruited a large number of business management talents from clothing retail enterprises such as Ling Zhi, Zara, ur, etc., to form a "business growth Department" to provide guidance services for the operation and management of brand merchants.

After all, the on-site service and guidance of practitioners are much better than engineers and technicians.

But the sense of crisis has not disappeared.

"I think my future competitors must be Ali and Tencent." Longjing takes meituan in the catering industry and didi in the travel field as an example. Bat's accession has spawned Internet enterprises with a market value of 10 billion yuan. These oligarchs also promote the whole industry to complete the transformation of offline business online.

But in the clothing industry, 85% of transactions and big data are still firmly stored in every store“ Who will do this transformation? Baidu won't, Ali will, Tencent will. " Longjing said.

03 supply chain and new retail are not the only ones

In fact, Longjing is soberly aware that if only as a company providing sass system, relying on the current profit model of charging 50000 yuan per year for service fee from the cooperative brand side, going public can only be an illusion.

With the "store plus" system, which has been rooted in more than 10000 stores in China, the new retail and supply chain empowerment behind it may be the real battlefield for "store +" to compete.

For example, in stores like HOTWIND, shop assistants can directly search the inventory of nearby stores or stores through the system. It is no longer like before, you need to go to the warehouse to confirm or let customers go to other stores to search.

"When we serve thousands of customers in the industry, I hope to build our supply chain behind our back. Open the warehouse, logistics and operation, including the control and establishment of factory system. "

The complexity of the whole operation flow of the clothing brand in the clothing industry is ten times and twenty times that of the catering industry. SaaS industry may emerge feasible mode under the stimulation of four industries' demand.

First, the integration of warehouse and distribution. At present, all the clothing brands need to be responsible for their own, high cost and low efficiency.

"Toray group, the supplier of UNIQLO's supply chain, is the largest supply chain company in Asia. In China, it is the Hong Kong Lifeng group. The market value of these supply chain giants can reach 10 billion or even 100 billion." Longjing said.

The second is the supply chain. Taking the clothing industry as an example, foreign fast fashion brands Zara, UNIQLO and HM have a supply chain team of 100 or 200 people in China, linked to hundreds of factories, and have a design, production and supply capacity that can support billions of dollars a year.

Third, the sharing of sales channels. The biggest fear of clothing brands is overstocking. In the future, there may be a group of suppliers who are dedicated to clearing inventory for clothing brands. They can open online Jingdong and vipshop sales channels and offline retail stores to save channel costs by relying on stores.

"Fourth, supply chain finance." Longjing calculated in his mind that when the SaaS system of "shop +" is officially launched, it can help clothing brands improve efficiency, reduce inventory and operating costs, and finally provide services that all clothing brands need, master the best talents and technology, and achieve all goals one by one“ Software can be used for five years. I can use it for two years to do warehouse matching. I can do finance. I can implant it from the back. Ten years is enough. "

But supply chain finance is not omnipotent. The entrepreneur, who was not named, said, "efficiency improvement is the key, not only financial means have prospects." He is not optimistic that once the software can not be sold, he will start to transform to supply chain finance, "or the product is not good enough, the scene is not accurate enough." He added. 　　

Why is it difficult to make a breakthrough in SaaS industry in the domestic market when salesforce, workday and slack have such high sales and profits?

In the clothing retail industry, companies such as store + which focus on SaaS and supply chain may have an explosion in the future.

Zinc finance will continue to pay attention to SaaS.

　　 Q&A

Q: why would you choose Offline retail when the impact of online e-commerce is so fierce?

A: I think it's a controversial topic. In fact, there are nearly 3 trillion retail sales in the clothing industry. Today, the largest online retail sales are not more than 1 trillion yuan. That is to say, 20% of the total retail sales are on the antenna and 80% are offline. It has been said that online impact offline, but there are still a number of offline enterprises live very well. I think today's offline enterprises, as long as you are not dead, you have not lost. It was hard in the first few years, but I learned to embrace later“ The product positioning of "shop +" is just starting from offline retail and completing online.

Q: as an industry level SaaS system, how to find the balance between standardization and personalization?

A: I think personalized demand is a fake demand misled by traditional software companies. I have visited the top 15 ERP companies in the industry. Their operation logic is to make money by software. But after you install the software, you can only ask for any requirements. Good, personalized, and we will develop and personalize the requirements for you. In fact, many needs have been repeatedly mentioned by others. He gives you individual updates and personalization, which is his money making mode. In fact, the product can be solved from the technical architecture. If you want to develop many plug-ins, you can check them if you want to use them. If you don't need to put them there, they will not affect your original business flow.

　 proposal

1. The clothing industry was the first to be moved to the Internet by Taobao, but the supply chain is long and complex, which makes the informatization and data of this industry stay on the surface.

2. Data island is not only a problem of big data industry, but also exists in the field of clothing retail. If companies still rely on telephone to confirm, there is no difference between the system and the system.

3. Big customers contribute profits, and small customers expand the market. The same trial will be carried out according to the two eight principles.