Blue Ocean Building Encountered "Middle-aged Crisis"

The slogan "Men should visit the Blue Ocean House twice a year" made me look forward to this men's wear brand that was popular all over the country at that time. Now, when I really walked in, I found that there were very few people in the blue sea building.

In addition to the dazzling variety of earthy men's wear, the deserted business of the store shows that this national brand has long lost its popularity.

However, no company will give up the struggle.

Recently, Blue Ocean Home Brand Management Co., Ltd. applied for two trademarks, Meta Universe and Jiayuan Universe, which were classified as "25 categories-clothing, shoes and hats" internationally, and the trademark status was "trademark application in progress".

In fact, this is not the first time that Blue Ocean House has "rubbed" the hot spot of virtual economy. As early as 20 18, we had cross-border cooperation with Tencent's mobile game "Jedi Survival: Stimulating the Battlefield" with the theme of "Wearing the Blue Ocean House to Stimulate Eating Chicken".

Behind this deliberate innovation is the dilemma of inventory accumulation, large and small debts and difficult offline development of Blue Ocean House. Although the brand layout of Blue Ocean House is no longer limited to men's wardrobes, the middle-aged Blue Ocean House has been silent for a long time in the overall young clothing market. The saying "going to Blue Ocean House twice a year" seems to be really just a mockery.

By exploring offline stores and analyzing brand pain points, this paper takes you to understand the following three questions:

1, the Blue Ocean House, known as the "man's wardrobe", is anyone still going?

2. Why is Haishu House busy with hot spots in the universe?

3. After the wave of consumption, how can an old brand like Blue Ocean House break the circle?

"Men go shopping twice a year, Blue Ocean House", "Men's wardrobe, Blue Ocean House". With two catchy slogans, Blue Ocean House once really became the first choice in many men's closets.

Of course, from today's point of view, the Blue Ocean house is obviously "lying". With the successive layout of several brands, the ambition of Blue Ocean House is no longer limited to male consumer groups. As early as 20 1 1, Blue Ocean established the "Eichitoo" women's clothing brand, which broke the monopoly on men's clothing brands.

In addition, Saint Kai Nuo, a high-end custom suit and shirt brand established on 20 14, OVV, a high-end women's clothing brand established on 20 17, Lanhai Youxuan, a lifestyle brand, and Black Whale, a trend brand for children and adolescents, are all attempts by Blue Ocean House to expand its business territory.

Parity list

Why on earth did Blue Ocean House rapidly expand its brand category? Can the once proud men's wear brand no longer support the backbone of Blue Ocean House?

According to the map of Gaode, there are currently 52 stores in Wu Hanyou, most of which are concentrated in non-first-tier business districts such as Wuchang and Hankou. There are not only places where Wuhan university students are occupied by traffic, such as Optics Valley, but also the ruins of the old Wuhan market, such as the lower gate of the Yellow Crane Tower.

At 6 o'clock in the evening on weekdays, I came to the Blue Ocean Building in Guanggu Pedestrian Street. Although it is not as lively as the weekend, in the evening, many students from surrounding schools and other consumers gather on the pedestrian street.

This blue ocean house is located in the middle of the pedestrian street, which is not the best choice for transportation from a geographical point of view, which is mainly determined by the gradual decrease of people flow from the outside to the inside of Guanggu Pedestrian Street.

Blue Ocean House's in-store scenes are shot in odd and even numbers.

Despite some psychological preparation, I was quite surprised by the popularity of stepping into the store.

/kloc-there are only about two or three pairs of customers in the 0/50 square meter store. After explaining my intention to buy a down jacket, the clerk recommended the one with the highest sales volume, and the price was around 700 yuan.

According to observation, the goods in the whole store are arranged in a traditional and basically parallel structure. The price of down jackets ranges from 300 to 1600 yuan, and the price of casual pants ranges from 168 to 598 yuan, while the average selling price of sweaters with the highest sales volume is around 300 yuan.

According to the clerk, sweaters can sell about 30 pieces a week, but the sales of coats and down jackets are poor, such as leather shoes and belt shirts.

On the other hand, in view of the online attention to the inventory of Blue Ocean House, there are about 400 products in the warehouse, which is slightly crowded compared with other clothing brands.

After half an hour's experience in the store, on the whole, Blue Ocean House has realized the original brand slogan of "Men's Wardrobe".

Blue Ocean House has a full range of men's wear from bottom to top, which meets men's one-stop shopping needs. However, compared with the early Uniqlo and Blue Ocean House, the Blue Ocean House now has a higher frequency of follow-up and recommendation, which may bring a bad shopping experience to customers like me who prefer free shopping.

Then once again, through the search of Gaode map, we found that OVV, the newly established high-end women's clothing brand of Blue Ocean House, has only opened three stores in Wuhan, one of which is located in K 1 1 high-end business circle not far from Guanggu Pedestrian Street. By observing the store layout, we can also find that, in sharp contrast to the men's wear brand of Blue Ocean House, the store clothing layout is loose and there is more room for activities.

After being guided by the shopping guide to join the OVV shopping recommendation group, it is found that the overall brand sales price of OVV is about 1000 yuan, the average price of down jackets is about 2000 yuan, and the fabrics are all white goose down. The overall tonality of the brand is high, which is also in line with the positioning of high-end business districts in Wuhan, such as K 1 1.

Of course, from the overall layout, the category of Blue Ocean House involves both mid-range and high-end, so it is slightly biased to compare OVV directly. However, the offline experience can still reflect many clues and problems in the operation of Blue Ocean House, including the most criticized inventory accumulation.

The latest financial report shows that Blue Ocean House's revenue in the third quarter of 20021410.60 billion yuan, up 20.2% year-on-year; The net profit was 2,065,438 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 58.7%.

By the end of September, 20021,there were 7,537 stores in Blue Ocean House, a net increase of 156 compared with the beginning of the year.

Besides the main brand of Blue Ocean, Saint Kai Nuo contributed the most revenue. In the first three quarters, Saint Kai Nuo contributed about 654.38+0.48 billion yuan to Blue Ocean House, and other brands contributed about 654.38+0.29 billion yuan.

It can be seen that compared with the main brand with deeper brand foundation, other newly expanded brands are still weak in income-generating capacity, and the recent rumors that Blue Ocean House has entered the meta-universe can not help but make people more curious about the next strategic planning of this huge men's wear empire brand.

Why is Blue Ocean House so anxious to leave the clothing meta-universe market? It all starts with the story of the brand's birth 19 years ago.

As early as September 2002, the first Blue Ocean House officially opened in Zhongshan Road, Nanjing. The popular, mass-produced and optional sales model made the brand founded by Zhou Jianping as hot as Uniqlo in Japan, and it was a mess in China at that time.

After more than ten years' exploration and expansion of the chain business model, and the replacement of spokespersons wave after wave, Blue Ocean House has established a brand tonality biased towards "local flavor".

On the expansion speed, Blue Ocean House is not as good as Metersbonwe, Bang Wei and Bang Wei. On brand nationality, Blue Ocean House is not as profound as Youngor. What really helped Blue Ocean House become famous in one fell swoop was the "light asset model" formulated by the company. This mode of "outsourcing" and "joining" seems to be very common now, and it has been skillfully used by Zhou Jianping.

At the upstream end of the supply chain, most of the production links are sold to suppliers by Blue Ocean House in the form of outsourcing. At the same time, taking advantage of the strong position of its own products in the supply chain, it helps Blue Ocean House and suppliers to form two purchasing modes: returnable and non-returnable, which greatly reduces the risks of inventory depreciation and inventory management.

At the downstream end of the supply chain, Blue Ocean House owns the actual operation rights of most stores, and franchisees assume the role of capital contribution and share the sales revenue with the company. While diversifying financial risks, it also ensures that Blue Ocean House has almost the same store operation style all over the country.

Parity mapping of "Blue Ocean Mode" graphics

201April 1 1, Blue Ocean House officially landed in the A-share market; In February, 2065438+200565438+29, according to statistics released by Standard & Poor's, the market value of Blue Ocean Housing Co., Ltd. has exceeded 60 billion yuan. This is not only the success of the light asset model, but also the success of the company's choice of Yin as the endorsement to leave a deep brand impression of "visiting the house twice a year".

The good times did not last long, and the light asset model enjoyed by Blue Ocean House relying on supply chain credit soon began to decline.

During the five years from 20 15 to 2020, the revenue of Blue Ocean House was 654.38+0.583 billion yuan, 654.38+0.7 billion yuan, 654.38+0.82 billion yuan, 654.38+0.909 billion yuan, 265.438+0.97 billion yuan, respectively.

Among them, there is the uncertainty caused by the epidemic, but the accumulated inventory leads to the weakening of core competitiveness under the light operation mode, which may be the chief culprit of the limited growth of Blue Ocean House.

The annual report of Blue Ocean House shows that the inventory balance at the end of 20 15 to 20 18 years was 9.58 billion, 8.63 billion, 8.49 billion and 9.47 billion respectively, accounting for 60.5%, 50.7%, 46.6% and 49.6% of the revenue respectively. In 20 18, the inventory of Blue Ocean House reached 9.47 billion yuan, and the asset impairment loss reached 380 million yuan, up more than 200% year-on-year.

Parity mapping

In the increasingly online clothing market, high inventory basically blocks the way for Blue Ocean House to maintain high income growth and sustained profitability. In 20 18, official website data of Blue Ocean Group showed that the revenue of Blue Ocean House, as its core industry, only accounted for 16% of the total revenue of the Group.

To make matters worse, the inventory turnover days of Blue Ocean House reached 286 days in that year, which was much higher than the direct competitors such as Metersbonwe, Bang Wei, Bang Wei and Mason.

The OEM label under the light asset model, coupled with the contempt for R&D and design investment, makes Blue Ocean House only put more hope on the brand's marketing ability.

In 20 17, Blue Ocean Building began to disclose R&D expenses in its annual report. The data of that year was 25.043 million yuan, accounting for only 0. 14% of the total revenue, and far less than Metersbonwe, Bang Wei, Bang Wei and Mason.

Although by 2020, the investment of Blue Ocean House in R&D has increased to 83.364 million yuan, an increase of 233% compared with 20 17, it is still criticized by many people as "the design of clothing products is too rustic".

In sharp contrast, Yin, Du Chun, Jay Chou, talk show actress Yang Li and the big challenge, running man and masked singer, the growing list of celebrity endorsements and variety show sponsors have made the marketing expenditure of Home soar.

In 2020, the sales expenses of Blue Ocean House will be as high as 2.4 billion yuan, far exceeding the R&D expenses of 83 million yuan in the same year. No wonder many people ridicule that "90% of Blue Ocean's revenue growth is piled up by marketing and publicity".

Faced with the pressure of performance and the query not only from minority shareholders, Zhou Jianping finally broke out. So there was a speech at the annual shareholders' meeting of Blue Ocean House on 20 19, "If you are good enough, you will be the chairman".

165438+20201At the end of October, Zhou Jianping, the founder of Blue Ocean House, officially resigned from the company, and Zhou Lichen, who was only 32 years old, took over the baton from his father.

Now that the banner has been handed over to the younger son, I wonder if Zhou Lichen has figured out how to fulfill the expectations of his father and the outside world and lead the Blue Ocean family, which is still in the middle-aged crisis, out of the quagmire.

Marching into the meta-universe has become the most striking action since Zhou Lichen took office.

When he first joined the Blue Ocean Group, Zhou Lichen spent some time in the advertising department, so he also took changing the brand image as a very important strategic shift, signed Jay Chou as a new spokesperson, and rushed to the beach for the meta-universe, all in this direction.

At the end of this year 10, the company cooperated with Ayayi, the first surreal digital figure in China, to promote the new Aurora series goose down clothing of Blue Ocean House. However, according to the results, in the latest Double Twelfth Pre-sale, the monthly sales volume of space creative series sweaters is only 100+, which can be described as much cry and little rain.

On June 26th, after the news that 165438+ Blue Ocean House applied for the trademark of Yuan Universe came out, the company's share price did not rise as obviously as other enterprises. On that day, Blue Ocean House closed at 6.35 yuan/share, down 1.24%.

Despite this, the relevant person of Blue Ocean House said that there will be more possibilities between enterprises and the Hyperuniverse in the future. Metauniverse has been recognized by many enterprises since it was put forward, including many clothing brands.

Gucci Classic, a century-old exhibition of luxury brand Gucci, is very popular in the online virtual exhibition held on Roblox online game creation platform. A limited edition Gucci virtual package was even bought by players at the price of 4 1 15.

The two major clothing giants are unwilling to be lonely. Nike also submitted seven trademark applications for virtual goods this year for technical teams to develop a series of virtual products. At the same time, in June165438+1October, it was announced that it would cooperate with the metacosmic platform Roblox to develop the virtual world Nikeland, which would provide digital Nike products for users' virtual images. Adidas has reached cooperation with several game platforms with the intention of establishing the brand "adiVerse" in the meta-universe.

Why do clothing brands also like to use the concept of meta-universe? The rise of blockchain technology has enabled artificial intelligence to develop rapidly, and industrial digitalization has become the only way to transform the clothing market that is no longer limited to traditional industries.

According to incomplete statistics, the market size of digital fashion virtual clothing will reach 95.8 billion yuan in 2022.

From the perspective of Blue Ocean House, the combination of clothing industry and the concept of meta-universe makes the registration of defensive trademarks relatively reasonable. This year, many well-known brand-related trademarks, including Netease Cloud Universe and Huawei Meta Universe, have been registered by other companies.

All kinds of signs make investors and brands feel that embracing the metauniverse is infinitely beautiful, but the reality is far more cruel than the ideal. Online business has never been Blue Ocean's strong point.

As early as 20 1 1, Blue Ocean House began to lay out its online business, initially positioning it as the expansion and supplement of offline business. This has also led to the fact that in the past eight years, the e-commerce business income of Hailan House only accounted for 6% of the total revenue, which was far lower than the online income of other competitors at that time.

It was not until the inventory problem appeared that Zhou and his son realized the importance of private domain traffic for the optimization of sales model.

The emergence of activities such as full reduction and discount has also made online business gradually grow into an important business component of Blue Ocean House. In the first three quarters of 2020, the online business income of Blue Ocean House increased by 16.70%, 40.22%, 1 1.27% respectively, and Zhou Lichen even appeared in the live broadcast room with goods.

In 2020, the sales expenses of Blue Ocean House will reach 2.4 billion yuan. It is not difficult to guess that celebrity endorsement fees and e-commerce promotion fees account for most of them. However, after paying the price of "investment for growth", the online business of Blue Ocean House will only account for 1 1.6% in 2020.

In the past Double Eleven Middle School, the highest-selling product of Blue Ocean House with tens of millions of fans turned out to be men's underwear, which also made people laugh and cry.

Although we have invested a lot, we still can't understand the "people and goods yard" mode in the new consumption era. At present, Blue Ocean House seems to be facing the same transformation problems as La Chapelle and Metersbonwe, Bang Wei and Bang Wei. A little carelessness will lead to heavy losses.

Of course, the increasing consumption power of men has also injected new vitality into the once-depressed men's wear market. It is not in line with the logic of market development to blindly sing down the Blue Ocean House.

After 20 1 1 year, the growth rate of men's wear market disappeared, and it has maintained a single-digit slow growth for ten years, which is in sharp contrast to the high growth rate of women's wear and children's wear.

According to the statistics of Industrial Securities research report, in 2020, due to the epidemic, the size of men's wear market shrank to 5 108 billion yuan, down 12% year-on-year.

However, since the first half of this year, the menswear market has suddenly shown a strong recovery trend, which is due to the weakening of the negative impact of the epidemic and the rise of "other economies".

In the past, men's weak consumption power has always been common sense in the market. Some people once joked that "women, children, the elderly and spoiled men" were the most real consumption power rankings.

In the first quarter of 20021,the scale of men's wear category on e-commerce platform reached 20.2 billion yuan, up 30.5% year-on-year. According to the statistics of Industrial Securities Research Report, the top three brands in 2020 are Blue Ocean House, Adidas and Uniqlo, which are 5.0%, 2.4% and 2. 1% respectively.

Since 20 13, CR5 has increased by 6%, CR 10 has increased by 7%, and the promotion of head brand is more obvious, among which the promotion rate of Blue Ocean House is 2.9%.

This is enough to show that from the perspective of growth rate, although the growth rate of its own revenue has been declining in recent years, it can still keep up with the industry level.

On the other hand, according to the statistics of dataway, in the first quarter of 20021,the growth rate of men's wear products in 350 yuan -400 yuan price range was the fastest, reaching 46.7%, which was consistent with the current mainstream product prices of Blue Ocean House.

Up to now, the total number of stores of Blue Ocean House has reached 7,255, which is 10 times higher than that of 655 in 2009. In contrast, during the five years from 20 15 to 2020, the revenue of garment enterprises above designated size in China dropped from 2.2 trillion to 1.37 trillion, a decrease of 38%.

Domestic old men's wear brands are no longer competitive, and Uniqlo, ZARA and H & ampm gradually begin to occupy the online market-oriented sales share and seize the return to male consumers.

After Uniqlo publicly declared that it would enter the sinking market, the layout of the second-and third-tier cities with the largest layout of Blue Ocean House was no longer stable. I wonder if Zhou Jianping, once known as the first person of China's "national brand", can continue to trust Blue Ocean House under the command of his son.

See what you know.

Judging from the situation of offline stores and their own financial analysis, the inventory problem has been a sore point for Blue Ocean House for many years. This brand of head men's wear, which believes in the light asset model, has not found an effective solution in recent years.

Stepping into the meta-universe is also like an adventure for the Blue Ocean Palace to solve the inventory problem in disguise. It is indeed the best blueprint that Zhou Lichen can draw after taking over from his father to make use of the popularity of the network economy and the super-high potential of the virtual economy in the new consumption era to complete the brand rejuvenation transformation and increase sales.

At the same time, robbing the hyperuniverse and solving the most difficult inventory problem seem to be mutually exclusive, but in fact they have become each other's answers.

It is more important to keep your feet on the ground now than to look up at the stars. After all, the simple meta-universe "painting cakes" obviously can't keep disappointed consumers.

As for the future, men's affairs should be solved by men, clothes should be solved by women, and Fiona Fang should be solved by the super universe.

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