Xiaomi cross-border new retail? Lazy Convenience Store creates eye-catching IP

Core introduction:

1. What is a lazy convenience store?

2. Xiaomi’s cross-border new retail?

3. Where will convenience stores go?

Recently, as Beijing Mitang Cultural Creative Co., Ltd. received tens of millions of Series A financing, its "Lazy Man Convenience Store" project has entered the focus of many parties. According to Tianyancha data, this is the fourth round of financing that Mitang Culture has received since 2017. It is worth noting that the earliest angel round of financing in August 2017 was jointly invested by Shunwei Capital and Xiaomi Group, and the investor in the second round of financing in March 2019 was Yuemi, a company belonging to the Xiaomi ecological chain. science and technology. From this point of view, Mitang Culture, as the only cultural and creative enterprise in Xiaomi’s ecological chain, can be said to be an outlier among outliers.

01 Lazy Convenience Store

Lazy Convenience Store The store is actually different from its literal meaning. It is not a convenience store tailored for lazy people with the help of the current "lazy economy", but a cultural creativity built with "laziness" as its core. Since its inception as a scene-based creative IP, it has been creating new products and new consumption scenarios around the cultural atmosphere and fresh voices in the lives of young people today through representative character settings and content.

According to the content of its official website, the project has been holding limited-time business activities offline in the form of "pop-up" in recent years. At present, the popularity is average, but Its IP image has indeed attracted some young audiences. But as far as the "convenience store" in its name is concerned, compared to a convenience store in the traditional sense, this project is more like a variant convenience store focusing on cultural and creative products.

Judging from the online platforms of Lanren Convenience Store, most of the products sold in its stores are blind box figures, trendy toys and beauty products. , apparel, snacks and drinks, and various cross-border co-branded products, etc. In its offline activities, most of the products sold are Internet celebrity trendy products as well as limited-edition contact lenses, coffee, T-shirts and other products through cross-border cooperation with brands in many fields. In other words, the products in lazy convenience stores are not convenient for lazy people, so much so that one customer said frankly: "For lazy people, any store that does not provide home services and daily necessities cannot be considered a convenience store." As a cultural and creative store, the number of SKUs in its store is just over 100, which is far from the thousands or even nearly 10,000 SKUs in similar stores.

02 Xiaomi cross-border new retail

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It is reported that Lanren convenience stores currently only have a few long-term offline stores in cities such as Shenzhen and Hangzhou. Guangzhou, Shanghai and other places we have been involved in are all short-term operations of about 25 days, which is obviously not conducive to cultivating consumers' brand awareness, which is the so-called "not enough to be out of the circle". But from the perspective of the industrial chain, Mitang Culture’s long-standing water-testing behavior may not be shouldering Xiaomi’s strategic intention to enter the new retail and cultural and creative fields.

For most Japanese convenience stores, the target users are determined to be young people from the beginning of the location selection process. The white-collar workers of the company will then tailor the product structure to the target group based on their consumption habits. On the one hand, community consumer groups are abandoned, and commodities such as rice, noodles, grains, oils, and condiments are displayed as little or as little as possible.

On the other hand, in response to the characteristics of white-collar workers who need light meals, convenience stores have introduced products such as lunch boxes, rice balls, bread, ice cream, drinks, etc., and furthermore have set up dining areas in the store for customers to dine. , convenience stores for taking a nap; as for young people’s preferences for chasing trends, some convenience stores choose to display various Internet celebrity snacks, Internet celebrity drinks, and Internet celebrity bread on limited shelf positions, and further increase differences through brand selection. sex.

In addition, convenience stores will also increase user stickiness by helping with printing, placing exclusive power banks, and providing various value-added services such as hot buns and oden cooking. The lazy convenience store of Mitang Culture takes the IP route and shapes its brand image before products, and subsequent products will naturally be built around its IP. This can ensure its differentiated competitiveness to a great extent and greatly improve customer retention. Overall, it lays the foundation for its subsequent actions in retail and provides almost unlimited possibilities.

03 Development Direction of Convenience Stores

At the beginning of this year, the Cultural Consumption Conference hosted by the Beijing Municipal Party Committee At the event, Zhang Xiaoyin, founder of Lanren Convenience Store, as the winning brand owner, said frankly: "Cultural consumer brand innovation cannot be limited to purely offline models." With the entry of a new generation of Internet capital, the online competition of "variant" convenience stores will also Pull back the curtain.

An industry report released by the China Chain Store and Franchise Association shows that there is still room for improvement in my country's consumer market. At present, domestic consumption accounts for 38.8% of GDP, while that of major developed countries in the world is above 50%. Moreover, my country's tertiary industry accounts for 53.9% of total GDP. There is still a certain gap between China's major developed countries and there is huge room for improvement.

The report also mentioned that in 2019, the number of convenience stores in China increased from 91,000 in 2015 to 132,000, with a compound growth rate of Nearly 10. In terms of the proportion of stores, the top three are Yijie, Kunlun Hospitality and Meiyijia. Among them, Yijie and Kunlun Hospitality are both petroleum-based convenience stores. They use the gas station network to conduct national layout, and the industry concentration is high.

As a small retail format that mainly sells instant goods, traditional convenience stores naturally have the advantage of being close to customers through offline scene layout. In addition, other Shopping is convenient and the operating hours are long enough. These characteristics together constitute the unique advantages of offline convenience stores.

The lazy convenience store focuses on the cultural atmosphere and fresh voices in the lives of young people today, capturing key elements such as "lazy" and "trendy", and develops new products and new products. Creation of consumption scenarios. Through IP to show life attitude, and to transplant highly condensed and representative life scenes, it creates alternative convenience stores that are highly differentiated from similar ones both online and offline. From the perspective of improving competitiveness, in general, Xiaomi This innovative experiment may provide some inspiration to traditional convenience stores.