Chupin, 21st Century Innovation Capital Research Institute

With the rise of Z generation and social platforms in China, in the past two or three years, a large wave of e-commerce has appeared in the outlet of new consumption, and countless new consumer brands have sprung up. With the help of online celebrity’s new traffic portal, through cooperation with Li Jiaqi, Viya and massive Xiaohongshu KOC, it seems that the brand has become popular and "out of the circle" overnight.

Behind the rapid rise of domestic beauty is the blessing of capital. According to the "2021 Beauty Industry Trend Insight Report" released by CBN Data, in 2020, the beauty industry disclosed that the investment and financing amount was 4.812 billion yuan, a growth rate of 324% compared with 1.135 billion yuan in 2019. With Dongfeng, Perfect Diary and Winona’s IPO, Winona’s parent company Betaine (300957) went public in March this year.

Starting with flow

Back in 2016, Huang Jinfeng just stepped down from Yu Nifang and established Yixian E-commerce (YSG.N). The company name is Huang Jinfeng to pay tribute to his alma mater, Sun Yat-sen, and Chen Yuwen and Lu Jianhua, the co-founders of FMCG brand, are friends of Huang Jinfeng’s college classmates for many years. Zhang Lei of Gaoyan Capital once asserted that China must have a chance to give birth to a new L ‘Oré al, but is the "new L ‘Oré al" a perfect diary? Perhaps it is still open to question.

Undoubtedly, the capital blessing of the "golden owners" has provided it with a steady stream of power. Since March 2017, Yixian E-commerce has launched the first perfect diary of cosmetics brand. With its cost-effective products featuring "big brand replacement", it has a consumer group that meets its positioning among many high-end brand cosmetics. Whenever users have complaints about the experience of perfect diary products, there will always be something like "only a few tens of dollars, what else do you want!" Comments. In a short period of three and a half years, Yixian E-commerce has completed seven times of financing and gone to IPO, and the capital lineup behind it is also extremely luxurious, including Gaoyan Capital, which holds 13.8%, Zhenge Fund, which holds 10.5%, and Gaorong Capital, which holds 9.2%, as well as many big-name investment institutions such as Boyu Capital, Tiger Global and Sequoia China. It has been revealed that in last year’s round of financing, "new shareholders came in by grabbing, otherwise they were done by old shareholders."

Obviously, the business model of Perfect Diary is the most typical "Internet play" in recent years. It was pushed to the market after relying on funds to seize the market crazily, and its fast-moving speed is also a "double-edged sword". According to the national enterprise credit publicity information system, there are 38 patents of Perfect Diary (Yixian E-commerce), all of which are appearance patents, and there is no core R&D patent information such as component technology.

From 2018 to 2020, the sales and marketing expenses of Yixian e-commerce were 309 million yuan, 1.251 billion yuan and 3.412 billion yuan, respectively. The overwhelming advertisements revealed the new generation of consumers’ cognition of the perfect diary. In fact, spending money on marketing has achieved a lot. Generation Z has gradually become the main force of consumption. Nowadays, brands can quickly establish consumers’ minds and brand awareness by using the effects of online celebrity and stars. Packaging theme design with "ingenuity" and "face value" and cross-border joint names can quickly capture consumers’ hearts. In the beauty track, cross-border joint products have exploded in just three years, with a growth rate of nearly three times.

The turning point occurred in February 2018. The keen marketing team of Perfect Diary found that many users published brand color testing and grass planting content on Little Red Book. Planting grass on the surface is actually dark and wide, which makes Perfect Diary see the possibility of new users’ growth. The data shows that in June 2017, the number of users of Little Red Books was only 50 million, but it surged to 100 million yuan in March of the following year, and the user activity was close to 30 million, three times that of a year ago. Perfect Diary rode the express train of Xiaohongshu, and the sales volume was singing all the way.

Product dilemma

However, beauty brands have to speak with products after all. Despite the large number of new products on the Perfect Diary, there is still no impressive and timeless big single product. On the cost side, big single products do not need to be upgraded repeatedly, which is difficult to be eliminated and does not require high new product promotion fees. However, the money of the perfect diary is spent on advertising, and the product research and development that needs real money most is far from enough. Perfect Diary’s R&D expenditure in 2020 is only 67 million yuan, accounting for 0.93% of revenue. In 2018 and 2019, it is only 3 million yuan and 23 million yuan.

As a result of the lack of research and development, although the products are dazzling, they have always changed their forms and the repurchase rate is not optimistic.According to the data of CICC Research Institute, after trying to cooperate with Xiaohongshu, Tik Tok and KOL, the sales of Shiseido, L ‘Oreal and Estee Lauder all increased by more than 60% in 2020, while the sales of Perfect Diary increased by only 22%. In addition, another major "injury" of Perfect Diary is its low gross profit, which positions the brand as "big brand replacement", but its gross profit margin is 10% to 20% lower than that of Estee Lauder and Huaxi Bio. If you want to break the dilemma of low gross profit, the simplest and most direct way is to raise the price, but rashly raising the price will inevitably affect the biggest "advantage" of the perfect diary-cost performance. Therefore, Perfect Diary came up with the method of "reducing the quantity without reducing the price". Under the condition of normal lipstick net content of 3 to 4 grams, the "small heel" lipstick is only 0.8 grams.

At present, there are more and more enterprises on the national makeup track, and with the extrusion of foreign competing products, "cost performance" is no longer the most important cornerstone for domestic products to break through. At the moment when market recognition is increasing, quality is the goal that domestic beauty brands need to pursue.

Today, the domestic beauty industry has a perfect supply chain and industrial chain, which provides a very fertile soil for domestic brands to go to sea.According to CBNData’s "2021 Beauty Industry Trend Insight Report", Guangzhou has become a well-deserved incubator for new beauty consumer brands.According to the report data, nearly three-quarters of Tmall sellers in Guangzhou are mainly engaged in "face value industry" such as beauty care, which is 1.6 times of the national proportion; Guangzhou has more than half of the number of domestic cosmetics companies filing.In the past three years, the sales of Guangzhou beauty and skin care brands on Tmall platform have nearly tripled, such as Perfect Diary, Flower West, Tangduo, Zhiben and Runbaiyan.

Obviously, the biggest possibility for domestic brands to choose to go to sea is that their domestic losses are serious, and they urgently need to open up new markets and take international routes to raise prices for future research and development of high-end products.With the listing of Yixian e-commerce, I once said that I would take the perfect diary of domestic brand Thorn Road. The best interpretation of going out to sea is to try to acquire international brands and then turn to high-end market development.On October 30, 2020, Perfect Diary announced that it had reached an agreement with Pierre Fabre Group of France to acquire its high-end beauty brand Galénic；; On March 2, 2021, Perfect Diary said that it had reached an agreement with Manzanita Capital, a venture capital institution headquartered in London, to acquire its high-end skin care brand "Hermes in makeup remover" Eve Lom.The successive high-end acquisitions have made Perfect Diary’s cash flow tight. According to the annual report, the net cash flow generated by Perfect Diary’s annual business activities in 2020 was 983 million yuan.

At present, the most popular beauty products are lipstick, eye shadow and blush. According to the data of China Commercial Industry Research Institute, the export volume of beauty cosmetics and toiletries in China in 2020 is 999,000 tons, up by 4.3% year-on-year. With the help of e-commerce brands such as Tmall and Amazon, it is easier for new brands to go to sea.

In the future, it is still unknown that the perfect diary plan will cost billions of dollars in marketing expenses. However, when the heat and sales shine, will the perfect diary develop "luminous" products that will make the market refreshing?What consumers are more concerned about is how to gain a foothold in the market where new products are repeated after eating the perfect diary of traffic bonus.

The product business model of Perfect Diary is DHC, that is, Direct to Customer. In the list of foundries published in Perfect Diary, Ying Teli, Kosmeishi, Shanghai Zhenchen, etc. are all foundries of internationally renowned big-name nature halls, Polaiya, Dior, Chanel and Maybelline. With years of OEM experience,These foundries also have both design and R&D capabilities. It is not difficult to understand that behind the endless stream of new products, the R&D expenses account for only 0.9%.What will be the next step of the perfect diary under the loss? Obviously, the product quality of Perfect Diary can’t compete with the same brand, but the price is in an awkward position of "more than enough, more than enough". Consumers are paying for its "eye-catching" theme and packaging, and the name of "ZARA in beauty industry" is well deserved.

Although the performance of Marubi Co., Ltd. (603983) does not rely too much on marketing, it is also labeled as "single product". Marubi Co., Ltd. has three brands: Marubi, Chunji and Love Fire, and its core brand and revenue force are Marubi, which accounts for more than 90% of the company’s total revenue all the year round.

The advantage of Marumi lies in the solid foundation of its inherent customers. Since 2017, Marumi’s net interest rate has always remained between 20% and 30%, and Polaiya (603605) has also remained above 10%.

Track change

It is not easy for Marubi to cultivate high-end products and face the fierce competition in the cosmetics market with high gross profit margin when only Marubi brand stands out.Marubi’s gross profit margin in the first quarter of 2021 was 63.91%, which was 2.29 percentage points lower than the 66.20% at the end of 2020. Compared with the gross profit margins of benchmark enterprises Polaiya (64.09%) and shanghai jahwa (64.56%) in the first quarter of 2020, Marubi no longer has the advantage of high gross profit margin.

At the moment when the explosion of beauty products has sprung up, Marubi shares urgently need to find new consumption points to make consumers pay for high prices, so as to seize new profit growth points and highlight the encirclement. It is worth noting that on November 12, 2020, Marubi announced that it planned to abandon the original "make-up" fundraising project. The investment in the new project is estimated to be 276 million yuan, which will mainly focus on skin care products, supplemented by make-up products. After completion, it is expected to add 3,382.5 tons of skin care products and 200 tons of make-up products, fully reaching the annual output value of about 596 million yuan, which will continue to deepen the layout of the company’s skin care industry chain.

From this point of view, Marumi shares plan to abandon the fast-growing makeup track and turn to the skin care track.Not only that, Marumi shares also intend to invest in food and beverage and new retail consumer industries. On October 29th, 2020, Marubi announced that the company intends to jointly invest with several partners to set up an industrial fund with a scale of 100 million yuan, which will mainly invest in domestic and foreign high-quality or high-growth enterprises in consumer industries related to food and beverage, condiments and new retail, so as to build an ecological circle of food industry. One of the limited partners is Shanghai’s "coming to Iraq".Marubi Co., Ltd. said that this investment direction has a certain correlation with the company’s main business, mainly functional foods related to beauty.

The domestic beauty cosmetics who are striding forward all the way, the "circle" is getting bigger and bigger, but it seems to be getting farther and farther away from what people expect.After the rapid rise of national cosmetics with capital, what will be the next step? After the "fan economy" and "face value economy", Chinese cosmetics still need to rely on high-quality differentiated items to gain a foothold in the market.

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Focus on the Yan value economy on the tuyere

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For drinking tea, it is obvious that ordinary white porcelain bowls can meet the demand, but why do we prefer porcelain tea set with fine workmanship? When writing, the arm rest is used to prevent the arm from being stained with ink. Obviously, as long as it has the function of putting the arm, why do we pay attention to its material and the carving on it? When we are moved by the beautiful artistic conception of an ancient poem, when we are fascinated by the exquisiteness and elegance of a handicraft, what do we get from it? What can those humanistic details and artistic values bring to our lives? Or, is culture "useful" or "useless" to our life?

The "uselessness" of culture is also "great use"

In the dialogue session hosted by Bai Yansong at the 15th Cultural China Forum, Pan Lusheng, chairman of China Folk Writers Association, pointed out that "useful" means "practical" and "useless" means aesthetic "useless". Material and spiritual use and life use are both useful and practical, while useless is also useful and even useful.

Pan Lusheng introduced that in Lin ‘an City in the Southern Song Dynasty, the palace culture, the literati culture and the street culture were integrated, which formed the idea of "craft for practical use", and also created a life style of unity of practicality and aesthetics in the Southern Song Dynasty. During this period, the weaving technology was superb, and the fabrics made were dense and light as cicada’s wings. Not only were there various types of yarn, Luo, Qi and Ling, but the silk reeling and embroidery techniques were also superb. The gardens in the Southern Song Dynasty are like three-dimensional landscape paintings with pavilions and winding paths, which contain the spiritual complex and aesthetic artistic conception of literati. From the clay figurines of children in the Song Dynasty in Zhenjiang Museum, to the Children’s Plays in the City in Taipei Palace Museum, from the white porcelain children’s pillows in Dingyao in the Palace Museum, to Song Jin’s Paintings of the Hundred Immortals in Cleveland Art Museum in the United States, all of them reflect the aesthetics and interest of life in which humanities and art are combined with street life.

In contrast, in today’s fast-paced diet and fragmented culture, modern people no longer seem to have an attitude of attaching importance to life aesthetics, and traditional crafts no longer pursue use value. In this context, should we learn from the ancients and return to the "elegant life" way of the Southern Song Dynasty?

"The handicraft tradition of the Southern Song Dynasty is historical and contemporary, which runs through the traditional Chinese aesthetic spirit, lifestyle and cultural taste." Pan Lusheng said. Therefore, he proposed to develop a new economy of Song rhyme culture, take people’s life needs as the guide, enhance cultural life experience, and study how elegant lifestyle can be integrated into today’s life, so that people can gain a sense of cultural identity.

Pan Lusheng believes that, on the one hand, by reviving traditional crafts, we can explore how to better inherit and utilize traditional craft and cultural resources at present, inject the culture of Xixiang into education and cultural communication, and serve people’s spiritual and cultural life. On the other hand, through the development of cultural industry with cross-industry barriers, traditional craft culture can be transformed into the resources of contemporary Song Yun cultural industry, creating higher economic value, thus better serving people’s material and cultural needs.

"Cultural pension" is worth looking forward to.

On the aesthetic level of life, the "usefulness" and "uselessness" of culture may be a philosophical proposition, but in the medical field, the "usefulness" of culture is indispensable. According to Zheng Xiaoying, academician of the Academy of Sciences of developing countries and director of the Peking University Population Research Institute, culture is even more "useful" than science and technology.

Zheng Xiaoying said, "Everyone’s ultimate wish is to grow old healthily and say goodbye to the world happily. This is by no means a problem that can be solved by relying solely on science and technology or medical means, but a realm that must be achieved through the combination of culture, art and technology. In this sense, the infiltration of culture is more important than the development of science and technology. "Zheng Xiaoying believes that" medical art education should be integrated into medical education so that every doctor can accumulate deeper artistic accomplishment and cultural heritage. "

Zheng Xiaoying pointed out that cultural blessing is also needed to deal with the problem of population aging. She introduced that with the intensification of the aging process, the life expectancy of China’s population is also increasing rapidly. However, most of the increased life expectancy is unhealthy, that is, life expectancy with disabilities. Among the disabled people in China, 53% are elderly people. To solve the problems of these elderly disabled people, we need the support of science and technology, but more importantly, we need the support of culture. "Let them be happy and enjoy the benefits brought about by the reform and opening up to the maximum. This is not a problem that can be solved by a simple assistive device."

At the same time, Zheng Xiaoying emphasized the concept of "cultural support for the aged", which is a way to support the aged on the premise that the material needs of the elderly are basically guaranteed, on the basis of meeting spiritual needs, on the basis of communicating emotions, exchanging ideas and having a healthy body and mind, and on the purpose of publicizing individuality, advocating independence and enjoying the spirit of happiness and pleasure. "Cultural pension meets the spiritual needs of the elderly. For the elderly without children, this pension model is particularly important." Zheng Xiaoying said.

How to realize the mutual integration of science and technology and humanities

Undoubtedly, the integration of culture, art and technology can make people’s lives better. So, as an individual, how should we start from ourselves and realize the integration of technology and humanities? This is also a question that Wang Yuming, an academician of China Academy of Engineering and an expert in fluid sealing engineering technology, is often asked.

Wang Yuming laughed and called himself a "science man". "However, although my main business is mechanical engineering, I am not" mechanical "culturally. He is a student of Mr. Ye Jiaying, a consultant of the Chinese Poetry Society, the director of the Poetry Working Committee of colleges and universities, and the president of the Tsinghua University Lotus Pond Poetry Society. It can be said that he is a person who perfectly balances "poetry and distance".

When answering the question "how to realize the mutual integration of science and technology and humanities", Wang Yuming believes that in terms of values, science and technology and humanities and arts are both pursuing truth, goodness and beauty, and they are essentially interlinked; In the mode of thinking, both of them need logical thinking and inspiration epiphany thinking, which can promote each other. The same is true of many masters of science and technology (such as Einstein, Yang Zhenning, Qiu Chengtong, Gu Yuxiu, Qian Xuesen, etc.). However, the most important thing is to have a "pure heart" in both scientific research and literary creation.

On the "Use" of China Culture from the Outside

The Chinese culture has a long history, and the "useful" culture not only created the fashion life of the ancients, but also injected spiritual strength into solving modern social problems, and also brought about an impact on the civilized development of neighboring countries.

In the dialogue session, Cheng Yonghua, former Japanese ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to People’s Republic of China (PRC) and executive vice president of China-Japan Friendship Association, introduced the "use" of Japanese culture to neighboring countries. He said that China’s culture had a profound influence on the Korean Peninsula, Viet Nam and Japan. Take Japan as an example. The Sui, Tang and Song Dynasties were the historical peaks of Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges. During this period, ancient Japan sent 19 groups of envoys to China to study, with a maximum of 600 people at a time. In addition to sending envoys, a large number of international students also came to China from ancient Japan. Many of them stayed for many years, and some even stayed in China to work as officials in Chang ‘an until they died and were buried in Chang ‘an. In 645 AD, the ancient Japanese carried out the "Dahua Innovation" movement, abolished the monopoly regime system in big noble, and established an ancient centralized state with reference to the rules and regulations of the Tang Dynasty in China. During the Song Dynasty, more and more Japanese people came to China to study. Jian Zhen, a monk in the Tang Dynasty, traveled eastward to preach the precepts to Japan and was honored as the ancestor of Japanese Buddhist legalists. The Tang Zhaoti Temple complex built by him and his disciples in Nara, Japan, embodies the architectural characteristics of the Tang Dynasty and is the largest and most beautiful building in Japan’s existing Tianping era. Japanese characters are also born out of Chinese characters. At first, there were only languages but no characters in Japan. In asuka period, Buddhist classics introduced into Japan along with Buddhism made Chinese characters penetrate into Japanese life. The first Chinese characters were used by ancient Japanese as phonography, but they were troublesome in the process of use, so heian period invented katakana and hiragana with reference to the radicals and cursive scripts of Chinese characters. In addition, the present Japanese court music-gagaku,It is also music from the Tang Dynasty in China.

Cheng Yonghua said that Sino-Japanese exchanges have a history of 2,000 years. Today, Japanese young people are still attracted by China’s rapid economic development and technological innovation, and feel that "they should go to China to see more and communicate more".

Whether it is "practical" or "useless", the China culture of the same strain needs and deserves to be passed down and carried forward by contemporary people. As Pan Lusheng said, culture is a nation’s overall lifestyle and value system. If the ancients’ fashion is integrated into contemporary life, we may be able to create a pioneer culture with temperature, connotation and taste in the new era.