China Beauty Trends: Offline Store is Irreplaceable Endorsement of a Brand
- Chaileedo Press
- Oct 6, 2022
- 4 min read
Winning in Efficacy, Welcome the Future. On September 22, the 5th Conference on China’s Cosmetics Trends, hosted by CHAILEEDO, was held in Hangzhou with the theme of "Winning in Efficacy". During the conference, Xie Yong, Chairman of Beijing Dr. Plant Biotechnology Co., Ltd. gave a keynote speech on "Trends in Botanical Skincare".
I think that the trend in the future must be traditional. Only the national and traditional ones are international and potential.
For our brand: Dr. Plant, you may not know much about it. This company was founded in 1994, and I didn't decide to open the first offline store until 2004, because we found that the Chinese cosmetics channel hegemony was particularly strong.
What does channel hegemony mean?
To be a brand, the first thing you have to do is to be a channel. There is no second choice, there is only one choice, to open a single brand store. Why does Dr. Plant open single-brand stores?
In fact, early botanical skincare is closely related to Western medicine. Medicine in China is Chinese traditional medicine and Chinese herbal medicine in previous time. Western medicine is essential oils, that is, plant skincare.. Like many clothing brands that were often founded by tailors, many of the old European cosmetic boutiques started out by selling essential oils from plants in skincare stores. Only after industrialization came supermarkets, department stores, and large unified markets like the United States established new rules for large channels. Botanical skincare comes from single brand stores, which is the most traditional way of survival for single brand stores, but at the same time, botanical skincare represents the future.
Why?
The competitive industry and the the environment have long made this clear. The shape of the future must be a single-brand store. The reasoning is particularly simple, because only customers can get the perfect brand experience and service when they go to the store. Of course, some people will think that the Internet era will eliminate offline stores. I take the complete opposite attitude, I think the Internet will stimulate the rapid development of single-brand stores. The Internet is just a technology, our company has 100 people in IT research and development. IT gives wings to single-brand stores, and many of our transactions are already online.
But one thing is very important, the irreplaceable endorsement of the brand, is that there must be a store. Consumers like your brand because it has a store. Why? We can imagine something as important as skincare products. Then a customer bought a bottle of skincare products online and the next day the link can not be found. The customer will think it is not unreliable. But if there is a store, you can go to the store to ask the staff to solve your problem. This is particularly important.
Since we are talking about trends, I would like to review the development path of plant-based skincare of Dr. Plant. Founded in 1994, we were a cosmetic agent in Beijing. As I said earlier, after ten years of thinking, we decided that we had to open a store, a franchise store. At that time, it was also a franchise store focusing on botanical skincare, and many other brands were sold in our place. After another four years, we transformed into a botanical skincare specialty store, a single brand specialty store. By 2014, we worked with the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences to discover the clean beauty from alpine plants. Then our brand Dr. Plant was created. This year, we will focus on the dendrobium ingredient.
Just now at the beginning I said an answer to what is the future, plant-based skincare is the future. Where does it come from? From tradition. We have been using botanical ingredients for skincare since the Han Dynasty. For example, dendrobium has been used in skincare products for a long time, and the local people in Yunnan would use the green thorn fruit to apply to babies when they have rashes. We only did one thing, purify the botanical ingredients, produce them industrially, and then use them in cosmetics. Why is that? Because people believe in tradition and heritage, and it's hard to build trust in something new. For example, some very new chemicals, cultivation methods, its damage we do not even know. Now the industrial age is only about 200 years old, and some chemicals and genetically modified technologies are only a few decades old, so there is a lot of uncertainty. But one thing is for sure, what our ancestors used for thousands of years, this is for sure, that's why the future must be traditional.
And again, a fact, the whitening aesthetics of China and the West are not the same. Westerners like wheat-colored skin while China advocates whitening skin tone. We work with an Italian company that specializes in skin reviews, and they have orders from many brands around the world. The task list for a well-known brand of efficacy products says that they are looking for 30 white women to do a trial. That means they are not doing the test for Chinese people, but for white people. In addition, the skin structure of the East and West is different. Easterners have a thin stratum corneum and high water content in the skin. This determines two problems: if the stratum corneum is thin, the skin is fragile and easily sensitive. If the water content is high, it means less hydration products can be used.
Our skin must be natural and safe, what is natural and safe? It is plant skincare. Now the country has also started to encourage various special plant cosmetic ingredients, so there is no need to worship those ingredients whose names you can't even remember, we have good things ourselves, such as dendrobium. We spent 8 years researching dendrobium active essence.
Q & A: Many offline chains have disappeared, why is Dr. Plant so successful offline?
Xie Yong: It is persistence. There is no good way. In fact, it is a very simple thing to say, but I think persistence is one of the most difficult things. I especially like Warren Buffett's quote, "A man only needs to be rich once in his life." We don't need to change careers, we have everything if we do one thing thoroughly, that's the value of persistence.
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