Taobao original clothing designer brand "ear" growth record

We can easily distinguish clothes from materials: cotton, silk, and wool; we often distinguish between regions: China, Japan and South Korea, and Europe and the United States. However, it is difficult for us to give a designer a very clear classification of style. Even if it is a designer with outstanding characteristics, he can design clothes with different visual differences in different moods. So for designers, the brand represents its own unique style.

Ear has been a representative new generation of designer brands on Taobao. Its designer Nie Yurong is a Hunan girl born in 1988, and she and her boyfriend Sun Lei jointly run the ear brand on Taobao.

At first, the reporter has a hard time telling what style this is. If you think it is small and fresh, then it may tell you that it is a heavy taste when you next come up with new ones; if you think it is very elegant, then the next time You may receive a very strong visual impact.

Early born

In 2009, after graduating from the Fashion Design Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Nie Yurong was prepared to continue going abroad. Sun Lei was the head of the landscape school of the same school. At that time, he worked at a Beijing-based central enterprise and helped NIE Yurong prepare for going abroad.

After getting London University of the Arts offer, Nie Yurong has six months of free time. She remembered that once the university teacher had assigned a homework assignment that was to let each classmate think of a brand that was his own, Nie Yurong had split the “Yue” in his name into two halves. “Are there ears” was born.

Nie Yurong began to use this time to put some of his own designs on Taobao. Not so much selling as sharing, many clothes are orphaned, because Nie Yurong's studio did not find a representative factory, but through his own sample masters, so the clothes are often in short supply.

However, with the approaching school days, Sun Lei's heart is not getting more and more interesting. While helping Nie Yurong to prepare information, he does not want to talk about an exotic love. At this time, Nie Yurong is also experiencing a struggle at the crossroads of life. On the one hand, she is reluctant to shun Sun Lei. On the one hand, she tries her best at Taobao, gains recognition from many people, and gives Nie Yurong an unprecedented sense of accomplishment.

Based on these two points, Nie Yurong decided to delay the first year to go to school to concentrate on taking care of his Taobao shop. Sun Lei also likes such decisions in private, spare time, to help Nie Yurong to operate Taobao shop.

This "wait and see" really rewritten the future life path of the couple.

Business is getting better and better, but the ear's supply chain can't keep up. Customers often have to wait ten days and a half to get clothes. Nie Yurong decided to abandon the country and left Beijing with Sun Lei for six years. He went south to Guangzhou.

The division of labor between the two is very clear, Nie Yurong is mainly responsible for products, and Sun Lei is responsible for operations. The product is self-evident, and the operation is almost one person busy. From photography to typesetting to copywriting, he almost single-handedly does everything. Later it was impossible to take care of it and only invited one person to help.

At present, the whole eared team is only less than 20 people. Sun Lei took several people's lives. The page that often boasts ears is good-looking, and Sun Lei is particularly proud of it because it was all he drove out at night.

Dream theme

During the entire interview process, Nie Yurong and Sun Lei most talked about the ear, which is a source of creative inspiration for a designer brand.

There is a phased keyword for eared design inspiration. This year's keywords are dreams, and then each season's newcomers will derive more specific themes around this keyword, such as: flower girl, twin flowers, sea food, sugar water shop, one day and so on.

The dismantling of these themes is a very interesting process. There is a very delicate connection between these themes and dreams. For example, a flower shop is a dream for many girls when they were young. The element of “flower” was used by Nie Yurong in the fabric of clothes. Most girls have their own sisters or girlfriends, so the twin flower series often appear in pairs. The concept of “sweet water shop” is very easy to understand. Guangzhou Street is full of sugar and water shops. After school, when he was a child, he used a pocket money to buy a bowl of dessert to solve the problem. It was a childhood memory of many girls.

"Actually, these are all small dreams, but when they are big, our dreams are not so pure. We hope that there will be ears that will remind people to recall the childhood truths of their childhood." Nie Yu-Rong feels that these themes are all restoring the lives of people. Scenes.
The recent issue of "one day" actually represented the dream of Nie Yurong and Sun Lei. Asked their morals, the two smiled. Sun Lei told the reporter of “The World Online Business”: “When I was in Beijing in the past, I was on a two-season, I was working steadily, and almost all of my weekends can be arranged by myself. But now, we basically have a rest for a month or two, so we all want to have Your true 'one day' is completely your own and you can do whatever you want, even if you are sitting and doing nothing. Now it is really a kind of happiness.”

Nie Yurong looked at Sun Lei quietly on the side. In fact, this is also the dream of many people in society today.

There are ears to choose models and other families are different, most brands will use the same model to ensure the unity of product style show, but there are ears like to use atypical (that is, non-professional models) to show their products. For example, when taking the “Sea Food” series, Nie Yurong found a fisher girl on the seashore to be a model. “We don’t want ears to be endorsed by a certain model or a certain style, but we also hope that eared products can Embed in a scene, and this scene is experienced by each of us, everyone can be deducted." Sun Lei felt that the ear style can be varied, as long as the soul is consistent.

As a designer brand, the earliest new frequency can be said to be quite high. Usually twice a month, about 20 new models. Less than a month's development cycle, for only 5 people's ear development team, you can imagine the intensity of their work. The design is also a kind of high-consuming mental work. When asked whether it is often tangled until late in the evening, Nie Yurong laughed and said "often, and this state will continue to circulate."

Sun Lei also devoted much attention to the details of the copy. The copy of the sugar water shop series is very interesting. Since it is called sugar water shop, it is related to various kinds of desserts. The pattern is changed into a "cream dripping down look." The folds of the sleeves follow the design of "sugar-water curtain curtains". Such as "the sandwich watermelon stick ice", there will be a copy of the imitation of sweets before each copy. This is really an appetite for food eaters. Think of the kind of pocket money that the youngsters used to hold their pocket money to look at the boss to give him a bowl of double skin milk. The ear is to bring the buyer's thinking into that scene.

D2C problems

The reason for leaving Guangzhou for Guangzhou was to find a better supply chain, but the situation in Guangzhou is not optimistic.
Designer brands often encounter a bottleneck. They are pursuing the quality of products. However, because they are entering the long tail market, the quantity of single shops is relatively small, which leads to very high processing costs.

“We often need to go to the factory. The wife often tells me that your style is so strange. If you can't sell it, you can just add a lace or something. You can sell it.” Nie Yurong recalls many times and each The kind of bitterness that can't be understood and supported by a garment factory when dealing with a garment factory. “The boss of a family factory knows that we graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. It's even more strange how we would come to Guangzhou to drum up such strange clothes.”

It is not understood at the end of the supply chain that the original intention of Nie Yurong cannot be shaken. Sun Lei thinks that designers should actually be selfish. They will have a more unique aesthetic vision than ordinary people. They need to better integrate various elements and present them to the eyes of consumers. People who can appreciate will naturally become its fans, and those who do not understand will automatically filter. The designer brand is not a man-made piece of popular money, it wants to be a unique one in the consumer wardrobe.

There are no ear explosions. In their stores, the number of clothes that can sell three digits is counted. One year, if you sell one thousand items, you will already have ear explosions. But Nie Yurong looks very open, designer brand is cut into niche needs.

Therefore, the principle of ear is that the design of the clothes must first pass their own heart this pass, and then get the recognition of the old customers, coupled with the Taobao platform to support the designer brand, and finally have their own living space.

Many ear-friendly materials need to be customized, not only because of the requirements on the quality of the fabric, but also because ears often add exclusive elements to the clothing. For example, throughout the new autumn collection series, Nie Yurong has incorporated the image of a tumbler, tumbler. The glasses became a special pattern that was used on most new fabrics. Due to the relatively small volume, manufacturers are not willing to help ear modification fabrics, and ears have to be processed on their own.

China has always been a big manufacturing country, and it has weak protection of intellectual property rights. Eared products are often copied. In the early days, this kind of situation plagued Nie Yurong. “A creative idea that we wanted to find out overnight, people took it easy, and used inferior fabrics to produce clothes that cost less than our cost, and the profit was even higher than we did. Even There will be customers to complain that we are plagiarizing other people's money, the price is still higher than theirs.” This situation has more experience, Nie Yurong was relieved, the designer brand's core is the designer, plagiarism is always lagging, as long as there Ears insist on doing their own products, and how others can't imitate their ears.

Accumulate old customers

Since the audience of designer brands is relatively small, in terms of operations, Sun Lei pays more attention to the shops themselves, and does not work too much on marketing.

The ear's conversion rate is only about 1%, on the one hand because their products are not popular on Taobao, followed by their prices, which is relatively expensive compared to the broader market.

But what's commendable for their ears is their old customer buying rate. The purchasing rate of old customers in the new phase can exceed 50%, and it can also reach 20% to 30% in peacetime. Passengers in a single piece of 1.5 to 2 pieces, the customer unit price of 300 yuan, higher than the average women's level.

Although the customer's growth is slow, it is not a bad thing in Sun Lei's view, especially the emergence of platforms such as accent, which affirms the ears of these new designer brands. Since Taobao is willing to give these brands more opportunities to show up, designers can return to their original responsibilities and do a good job.

When they first came to Guangzhou last year, ears had raised prices and used discounts to attract consumers. However, this proved to be more harmful to old customers, and consumers who were attracted by low prices were mostly buying and selling. This result caused Sun Lei to die of sales-for-sales sales. "We have reverted our price system back to the original, and we no longer excessively use price reduction methods to sell products."

Ears have their own promotion rhythm, the number of discounts is very small in one year, may be once in the middle of the year, once at the end of the year, on the one hand is to give back to the old customers, on the other hand is to reduce the pressure on the stock. When interviewed by reporters, there are ears that are undergoing mid-year promotions, and summer dresses will buy two get ones for a limited time. Last year's autumn clothes will be sold at a discount of 50%. Sun Lei said that after the promotion, all products will be restored to their original prices.

There are more thoughts on the ear to communicate with customers. For example, a small column for a buyer's show is actually through the communication with the buyer to show the life scene that the ear product actually reaches the consumer and is presented as a part of the aesthetic of the buyer.

The first girl who was interviewed by the ear was a news editor. Sun Lei described her as a woman with a very aesthetic and refined life. “She likes meloskine's stationery and likes Chagall's paintings. She wears beamed clothes. , plain clothes, but also wearing ear clothes."

Next, Nie Yurong hopes to have his own physical store online. In fact, as early as in Beijing, Nie Yurong had worked with art stores such as Beijing 798 and Sanlitun village to conduct physical sales. However, this piece was left unattended after traveling south.

Before leaving, Sun Lei told reporters that if he had the opportunity, he still hoped that Yu Rong could go abroad to study. Ears would have to go all the way. He needed more strength to support. Apart from those that Taobao platform could give, he still needed to exercise his internal strength.