The Change Of Consumer'S Aesthetic, How About Those Famous Women'S Shoes Brands Now

Women's shoes in the world, surging wind and clouds. Looking back on the once powerful women's shoes brands, many have disappeared.

At the beginning of 2022, women's shoes brands announced on Saturday their plans to package and sell shoes sales business, and said they were ready to transform to live delivery. Other traditional women's shoes brands are also declining, and Belle group has been delisted after its acquisition in 2017; The rich bird went bankrupt in 2019; Daphne announced to withdraw from China's medium and high-end brand retail business in the middle of 2020 after six consecutive years of losses.

These famous women's shoes brands, such as Bailey, fuguio, Daphne and St & SAT, have lost their former glory.

It is not difficult to see that with the development of the times, women's consumption concept has changed, more and more female consumers no longer prefer high-heeled shoes, which also makes the traditional women's shoes enterprises dominated by high-heeled shoes have undergone earth shaking changes.

As of the first three quarters of 2021, the company's net profit attributable to its parent company was - 146 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 28.77%; After deducting non net profit - 152 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 35.29%.

Now, more popular in the market, perhaps more are Martin boot brands Dr. Martens, timberland, sheepskin brand ugg, and some new women's shoes brands focusing on comfort characteristics.

How should the whole traditional women's shoes industry break the ice and seize the new generation of young women in marketing, design, quality and other aspects? The quick answer to this question may be the key to break the women's shoes brand.

　　 The decline of old women's shoes

With the changes of the times, the old women's shoes are losing their strength, and some women's shoes products have even become the "burden" of performance.

On January 18, 2022, a performance forecast was issued on Saturday, which said that it was expected to lose 430 million yuan to 645 million yuan in 2021, among which the bad debts and falling prices of shoes business were the main reasons. The expected loss is the biggest since it went public on Saturday in 2009.

Saturday performance forecast, chart / official announcement on Saturday

The reason for the loss was that on Saturday, the epidemic had a great impact on offline commercial sales, which had a great impact on the digestion of the company's shoes inventory. In addition, the company's additional expenses due to business transformation led to the shoe business in a state of operating loss throughout the year. The scale of operating revenue and net profit of the two fashion new media companies controlled by the company decreased significantly.

In addition, the company implemented the 2021 equity incentive plan at the beginning of the year, resulting in amortization costs of about RMB 80.08 million, which also had a great impact on the company. Among them, the weak performance of footwear products is the main reason for the sharp loss on Saturday.

According to the business understanding of a moment, we have owned some private brands such as St & SAT, D: fuse, SAFIYA and fondberyl on Saturdays, and have a certain popularity in the women's shoes market. But with the popularity of online sales in recent years, the offline business is difficult to do, and the pressure of traditional shoe and clothing enterprises is naturally increasing.

　　 It is not only Saturday that the old women's shoes brand has declined, and Belle group has not been able to avoid the decline.

Belle group delisted from the HKEx in 2017. Before delisting, the last financial report of belle group showed that as of February 28, 2017, the revenue of belle group was 41.707 billion yuan, up 2.2% year-on-year; The net profit was 2.403 billion yuan, down 18.1% year on year. In the financial report, Bailey said that the decline in profits was mainly due to the sharp shrinkage of higher profit footwear business revenue and profits, which could not be offset by the growth of sports apparel business with lower profit margin.

From listing in 2007 to delisting in 2017, who would have thought that Belle would come to such an end in this decade.

Originally, at the beginning of its establishment, Bailey achieved rapid development by relying on shopping malls, offline stores and other channels. When it was first listed, its market value was as high as HK $67 billion. During the subversion period, the number of stores exceeded 20000. However, what Belle never expected was that after 2013, the e-commerce era began to rise. Those shoe enterprises taking advantage of e-commerce gradually left Belle behind, and Belle failed to catch up with this wave of e-commerce.

According to public data, in 2015, the net profit of belle group declined for the first time in nine years since its listing, with a decrease of more than 38%. By the end of 2016, Belle International had reduced the number of stores by more than 7000 compared with 20738 stores at the peak.

Of course, the root cause of Bailey's decline is not only external factors such as e-commerce impact, but also internal reasons such as the decline of its own products and brand strength. Under the change of the times, Baili failed to keep up with the change of consumer demand, and the design of women's shoes gradually failed to meet the needs of the new generation of consumers.

Coincidentally. Daphne, a Taiwan funded women's shoe group with the name of "the first brand of women's shoes in mainland China", has closed 1256 stores annually in the past five years since 2015, according to the Southern Metropolis Daily. In 2020, Daphne decided to close all offline stores. Compared with the historical peak, Daphne's share price has plummeted by 98%, and the company's total market value has dropped from HK $19 billion at its peak to HK $350 million. In the first half of 2021, Daphne's income dropped sharply from 212 million yuan in the same period of the previous year to 50 million yuan, with a year-on-year decrease of 77%.

Similar to Bailey's decline, strategic mistakes, blind expansion and old-fashioned brand design are also important reasons for Daphne's decline from its peak.

According to Caixin, Daphne and Baidu cooperated to invest in the B2C platform "Yaodian 100" in 2010, initiating the operation mode of "online shopping + store pickup". Daphne has injected 300 million yuan into the platform and closed other distribution channels such as Jingdong, haole and letao.

Unfortunately, Daphne's online strategy didn't work. Two years later, Yaodian 100 website stopped operation, which also let Daphne miss the best time to transform e-commerce. In addition, due to the continuous decline in product quality, this has exacerbated its own decline.

　　 In the face of business difficulties, some enterprises choose to develop with reserve strength and try to break through the encirclement, while some enterprises begin to weaken women's shoes business and turn to diversified development.

Women's shoes brand changed its name from "Foshan Saturday Shoes Co., Ltd." to "Saturday Co., Ltd." in early 2016, women's shoes brand began to increase investment in social e-commerce, live e-commerce and other fields, and purchased Yuanwang network, a live e-commerce company, with a price of nearly 1.8 billion yuan in 2019.

According to the financial report, in the first half of 2021, Yuanwang's online sales volume of Gmv (e-commerce turnover) was about 3.6 billion yuan, about four times that of the same period last year. At the beginning of this year, it was announced on Saturday that the shoe sales business was planned to be packaged and sold, only the footwear trademark was retained, and the products were transferred to live broadcasting.

Different from the comprehensive transformation on Saturday, Daphne still wants to save her decline by hiring star endorsements and introducing new brands. But even if it launched a lineup of stars such as Nicholas Tse, Quan Zhixian, and Liu Shishi in 2015, it still couldn't recover its declining business.

According to Beijing business daily, Xu Xiongjun, a strategic positioning expert and founder of Shanghai Jiude positioning Consulting Co., Ltd., once said that the reason why traditional shoe enterprises are depressed is more due to the difficulty of large-scale offline expansion and transformation. When the consumption environment changes, it is difficult for traditional shoe enterprises to quickly transform the new retail mode because of redundant offline stores. When the cost is doubled, the product homogeneity is serious, and the brand aging is difficult to adapt to the changing needs of consumers. Finally, they have no choice but to decline.

　　 What brands have seized the opportunity when consumers' aesthetics have changed?

Looking at the women's shoe brand market, the new brand has a completely different way from the old brand in terms of product and marketing, which also allows it to harvest more young female consumers.

　　 Nowadays, more and more women, in order to improve their work efficiency and practice pragmatism, often regard comfort as the primary standard for choosing shoes. The world of comfortable shoes is becoming more and more lively. For a while, the popularity of high-heeled shoes dropped sharply, and durable and comfortable women's shoes began to occupy the headlines, and attracted the attention of investment institutions.

According to 36 krypton, in the middle of last year, high-heeled shoe brand "7or 9" completed tens of millions of yuan in pre-A round and round a financing. The pre-A round of financing is exclusively invested by Zhonghui capital. A round of financing is led by Fengshang capital, and Zhonghui capital continues to invest.

Financing situation of 7or 9

Beijing Business Daily reported that more than 90% of the revenue of "7or9" brand comes from online. At the beginning, it came into public view relying on the private traffic of more than 200 wechat groups (200-300 people) and the promotion of e-commerce platform. During the period, with the promotion of xiaohongshu and Shuo Yin, he accumulated fans.

In addition to 7or9, Dr. Martens, timberland, ugg... These new brands of women's shoes dominate the list in terms of sales performance. If you observe them carefully, they all share a common feature - comfort.

Dr. Martens's air wair sole design is comfortable and durable. Timberland is known as "not rotten", while ugg is called "fashion counterattack of ugly shoes", which has captured the hearts of thousands of girls.

At present, the number of fans in the official flagship store of ugg Taobao is close to 3 million, with prices ranging from hundreds to thousands of yuan. The official flagship store of Dr. Martens has 1.64 million fans. Some popular Martin boots are often out of stock. In 2021, ugg and Dr. Martens are among the top three women's shoes on tmall's double 11 brand list, which can be said to be very popular.

In fact, comfortable women's shoes are really occupying the market step by step. Sales of all beauty sports shoes increased by 37% in 2017, while sales of high-heeled shoes decreased by 11% in the same period, according to the retail tracking data of U.S. market research institutions. Among them, the sales of high-heeled shoes with heel height of 7.6cm and above declined the fastest.

In addition, the awareness of healthy life has driven more people to pursue sports shoes. According to Euromonitor statistics, the market scale of China's sports shoes industry has reached 183 billion yuan in 2019, close to 58% of the whole sports shoes and clothing market.

According to the "2020-2025 China Women's shoes industry competition pattern analysis and investment strategy consultation report" published by the China Economic Industry Research Institute, the current changes in consumer demand will lead to dumbbell shaped growth in the market, the consumption polarization trend is obvious, high-end brands and low-end brands are increasing rapidly, while a large number of intermediate brands are obviously declining.

At the same time, due to the enhancement of consumers' sense of fashion collocation, the affordable women's shoes brands with heavy styles have developed rapidly in recent years. Many local brands compete fiercely in the middle and low-end brands, focusing on the product fashion and cost performance dimensions.

It can be seen that with the change of consumers' aesthetic and demand, only those shoe enterprises that grasp the latest demand can seize the opportunity in time.

　　 How to catch a new generation of young women?

When women's aesthetic changes, high-heeled shoes gradually fade out of sight. This means that if women's shoes brands want to catch the hearts of young female consumers, they should not only have clear marketing ideas, but also follow the trend to catch up with the changing consumption trend of young women.

So, what kind of shoes can capture the hearts of young women? This can be seen from the popular footwear items in recent years: Chanel with thick heel, Dior with cat heel, and CK with durable wear. These women's shoes are all close to the direction of comfortable heel drop.

　　 In the new brand to seize the trend and strive to develop at the same time, old shoe enterprises are also looking for development opportunities.

Red dragonfly, an old brand of women's shoes, began to try a new marketing and sales model in 2020, which will drive sales through the way of direct broadcast with goods. According to the annual report data of red dragonfly in 2020, the proportion of Red Dragonfly online channel sales increased from 23.7% in 2019 to 30.8% in 2020. The annual online sales increased by 12.68% year-on-year, of which the online sales in the second half of the year increased by 73.2% compared with the first half of the year.

Tianchuang fashion, the parent company of isscat, a women's shoe brand, is also adjusting its business according to the market demand. Its way is to analyze customer demand through big data, and then build a large-scale intelligent production line, so as to timely follow up the changing needs of users.

According to the third quarter report of Tianchuang fashion in the third quarter of 2021, the main business income of shoes and clothing plate was 1.268 billion, an increase of 7.92% over the same period of last year.

In addition, Qianbaidu company, which owns brands such as Qianbaidu, Yifan, taiyangwu and Mio, has been constantly adjusting its products in recent years to adapt to changes in consumer demand. It is reported that at present, Qianbaidu will launch 250-300 types of women's shoes every quarter, to meet the diversity of consumer demand with a variety of styles.

After the privatization of the former "shoe king" Belle, Hillhead capital held 56.81% of the shares of belle and became the controlling shareholder of belle. In recent years, Belle has also made frequent moves. It has not only invested in the fashion brand initial, but also controlled the light luxury women's shoes designer brand 73hours. It can be seen that belle is preparing to make a comeback.

Under the changes of the times, the women's shoes market is changing rapidly. New and old brands are chasing the new aesthetic direction. Only by keeping keen on market changes can they stand in the fashion trend.