"Super Seed" Opens its Offline Store in Hangzhou

Abstract: "Super Seed", a plant-based personal care brand, opened its first store in Hangzhou, China at Kerry Centre with an area of about 300 square meters. This is the second "Future Plant Farm" of the brand to be opened in China. The first offline store was opened in Shanghai.

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According to CHAILEEDO's observation, "Super Seed", established in 2020, is a plant-based personal care brand that focuses on "plant extracts + clean formulas", with the average price of its products within 100 yuan, mainly for young users aged 18-25.

Although "Super Seed" was established less than two years ago, its GMV growth rate is very fast with an average monthly GMV of more than 1.493 million in 2021. Most of the growth for GMV comes from product repurchase with an overall repurchase rate of around 35%.

In July 2020, "Super Seed" launched its first product, "Cedar Shampoo", which uses a botanical formula with cedar as the core ingredient and focuses on scalp cleansing efficacy, and has been sold nearly 2 million bottles in total (as of November 22, 2021, the number of units sold in the whole network channel statistics), becoming the star single product of "Super Seed".

In the Chinese shampoo sector, Seeyoung, as "China's No. 1 silicone oil-free scalp care brand", focuses on silicone oil-free scalp care, with a healthy wash formula of "7 non-additive formulas". During the pre-sale period of the Chinese Double 11 Shopping Festival in 2021 alone, 100,000 sets of Seeyoung Ginger Hair Shampoo were sold out in Li Jiaqi's live streaming(Li Jiaqi: the top live streamer in China), with sales of more than 7 million. Currently, in its flagship store on the Chinese e-commerce platform Tmall, the highest selling product is Seeyoung Silicone-free shampoo/conditioner with total sales of 1.86 million in the Tmall channel alone, priced at $8.8.

The international brand L'Occitane also focuses on organic personal care, with its products focusing on nature and its claim that the raw materials come from Provence. In its Tmall flagship store, its categories include body care, facial care, hair care and so on. Compared with "Cedar Shampoo" of "Super Seeds", the same type of botanical formula, the highest-selling shampoo is L'Occitane Intensive Shampoo with total sales of 200,000 units and a price of $41.8.

According to "Super Seeds", the reason for choosing to start with shampoo is that this sector is a big enough and relatively competitive market. According to Euromonitor's forecast, the market size of hair care will exceed $10 billion in 2023. By 2026, the market size is expected to reach $11.4 billion. But there are few products that really work well and bring high repurchase and the overall repurchase figure for the broader market is perennially below 10%. Almost every consumer has several different shampoos at home and they are often switched, which is an opportunity for innovative brands.

But "Super Seed" is not just a shampoo brand, but built a concept of "skin forest" to create a personal care product system. Currently, the product line of "Super Seed" covers three major segments: scalp care, facial care, and body care. According to the different efficacy and core ingredients, it is divided into several botanical series such as "Blue Lotus", "Cedar", "Chlorella vulgaris" and "Sea Buckthorn", and matched with corresponding botanical IP and interesting introduction. The design of the outer packaging of each series of products also applied the corresponding botanical color scheme.

"Super Seed" focuses on retaining the original colors and flavors of plants in its products. Each plant series not only has its own IP image but also the outer packaging design of the products corresponds to the plant color scheme creating a certain degree of interest through relatively uniform copy and drawing style.

In March 2021, "Super Seed" launched the construction of offline self-owned channels, and the first offline image store was officially opened in the New world of Shanghai, Shanghai in mid-December 2021. The second store landed in Kerry Center, Hangzhou.

The store of "Super Seed" focuses on the concept of "skin forest", and the product areas in the store are divided into face, head and body series, specifically in the individual area display cases with individual plant products on display. The plant IP images were placed on the booths and a plant gallery filled with plant installations creating a "future plant farm" for users.

"Super Seed" chose the direct business model in the offline market to gain a foothold in the brand's mind for improving its bargaining power. "Super Seed" also tends to send a signal that natural and sustainable personal care products will become mainstream.