O2O transforms traditional service industry in many ways, taking hairdressing as an example
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The hairdressing industry is a basic need for most women and represents traditional local life. In theory, the market is huge and there is a lot of money to be made. According to public data from the Sutu Research Institute, the transaction volume of local Internet life services accounts for 37% of catering and food, 27% of leisure and entertainment, 19% of travel and hotels, 9% of beauty and hairdressing, and the remaining 8%. In 2011, the hairdressing industry's turnover was 100.6 billion yuan, and is expected to reach 230 billion yuan in 2014. Although it is not an explosive growth, it is relatively stable. However, in the field of "hair salon O2O" which is gradually being transformed by the Internet, there are no particularly large investment projects disclosed so far, but there have been many vivid "death" cases. In this article, we mainly select the hairdressing O2O that have had a certain influence on the industry since 2013 to see what paths they have taken or have not taken. Before we officially start, we need to clarify several characteristics of this hairdressing O2O: 1. The hairdressing industry is very close to our daily life, but the overall process of Internetization is very slow; 2. The main contradictions between the supply and demand sides of the hairdressing industry are concentrated and obvious. In addition to the obvious local characteristics, the main contradictions in the hairdressing industry can be attributed to two keywords: trust (the contradiction between customers and hairdressers about hairstyles and the cost-effectiveness of hairdressing products), and discount cards - the latter involves the main profit model of hair salons; 3. In resolving the contradictions, hairdressing O2O projects have chosen different entry angles, but there is still no mature, large and comprehensive project that can solve the two "keywords" at once; 4. Whether it is investment or product development, there are currently no giants involved in this field; 5. Since hairdressing is not a high-frequency demand, each click needs to be able to bring higher value - although some hairdressing O2O projects have found their own profit model, most of them are not so lucky. Apple Promotion has seen several models of hairdressing O2O: 1. This customer-centric model mainly selects the required hairstylist by displaying hairstyles, or recommends nearby barbershops through LBS, and is supplemented by a review system to more accurately select hairstylists. This type of product has different attempts to resolve the contradiction between "trust" and "discount cards": 1. Meimeidou [Features] focuses on C-end protection: online integration and the implementation of transparent regulations to ensure the interests of consumers. [Form] App (iOS, Android) [Financing] In November 2012, Meimedou received millions of RMB in seed angel funding from Qingsong Fund. The Meimedou App, which was launched in June 2012, focuses on protecting customer experience while making hair appointments as its core content. According to its official website, Meimedou has accumulated millions of users. Meimeidou hopes to solve two significant problems in the traditional hairdressing industry by meeting customer needs: one is the salon card recharge, and the other is the opacity of the products used by hairdressers. Many consumers have experienced situations where a hair salon has closed down and they have no way to get a refund for their recharge cards, or they have encountered "sky-high bills" after a hair salon session. In response to these two points, Meimeidou launched the "Meimeidou One Card" (available in all salons on the platform) to ensure that the recharge amount will not be "refunded nowhere"; on the other hand, when users make an online appointment with a hairdresser, they can see the products used and the price tags - the "Meimeidou Consumer Protection Plan" clearly states that hairstylists are not allowed to make sales during the haircut process, otherwise they will be "taken off the shelves". In addition, if the customer is not satisfied with the final cutting effect, he or she can make an appointment for the same project for free within two weeks. However, this "pass card" model is equivalent to taking away the management rights of hairdressers and recharge cards from hair salons. As we all know, the purpose of the barber shop launching the pass is to attract regular customers and deposit funds in advance. Not only that, but kickbacks will be given to employees to encourage them to promote their own membership cards - this in itself has formed a closed loop within the store. Meimeidou wants to take away both of these powers from the hair salon (which affects the fundamental interests of the hair salon). Unless she can bring significant growth in customer traffic and revenue to the hair salon, she will probably face many obstacles in the future. 2. Fashion Cat [Features] B-side management system: allows users to evaluate hairstylists, but returns the management rights to barbershops [Form] App (iOS, Android) [Financing Status] Its official announcement in August 2013 that it had received millions of RMB in angel investment. As a product that also helps customers "find barbershops/stylists", Fashion Cat positions itself as a "high-end hairdressing O2O platform" and launched the "Fashion Cat Wangpu" at the end of June 2014, attempting to solve the current situation of the separation between vertical O2O offline experience and online management - especially in the hairdressing industry that attaches great importance to user loyalty. To this end, Fashion Cat Wangpu has developed a management system for barber shops. The store manager can use this system to manage and monitor the business operations of the entire store and the work of the hairdressers, provide better and more accurate appointment information to each hairdresser, and judge employee performance based on customers' evaluation of the hairdresser. If Meimeidou is deepening the C-end experience, then Fashion Cat's idea is to deepen the B-end control, establish a suitable reward and punishment system, return the management of barbers to the barbershops, and also reduce its own operational pressure. 3. Products that have become shooting stars: a. Fangxinmei If we talk about the prospects of the hairdressing industry in 2013, there is one product that will definitely be mentioned horizontally - Fangxinmei. Moreover, its founder Xu Dandan is also the founder of 3W Coffee and chairman of Lagou.com. Fangxinmei completed an angel round of financing of 4 million yuan in October 2013 - it sounds like everything is going smoothly, but Xu Dandan also announced at the same time that he would no longer serve as the CEO of Fangxinmei, and the Fangxinmei team would be handed over to the core team of Keketuan. In April 2014, Fangxinmei announced that it had entered bankruptcy process. After opening the Android App, I found that Fangxinmei is based on guiding users to enter (that is, step by step from the user's perspective to finally decide on a barber), it has complete and neat functions, and is endorsed by a successful entrepreneur. It can be said that it is still a good product even now. b. Meimi , which was launched on November 25, 2013, helps users choose hairstylists based on a question-and-answer mechanism. They believe that ordinary hairstyle demonstrations cannot make customers trust the hairstylist. Through a series of questions and answers to determine the hairstylist and then give a review, customers can find the right hairstylist. c. The Jianbu.com App, which was last updated in August 2013, has now been removed from the shelves. However, through some simple introductions, we can roughly guess that its model is just a simple hairdressing appointment model, which should include hairstyle display, finding hairstylists, checking nearby barber shops, coupons, etc. It is not difficult to see from these dead products that their common feature is that they only tried to solve the relatively easy-to-solve pain points in the hairdressing industry - helping users find suitable barbers, but failed to create a suitable mechanism to bring stickiness or higher added value to this kind of low-frequency demand, so they eventually failed. two. Starting from hairstylists 4. Bobo.com [Features] Gaining users’ favor through mature UGC discussion forum [Format] web, iOS, Android, WP [Financing] RMB 8 million in Round A, RMB 10 million in Round B [Profit model] Both online advertising and offline activities should be profit points In early 2010, Bobo.com hoped to solve the problem of hairstylists’ needs to keep up with the trend through a format similar to an e-magazine. But at that time, Bobo.com could not actually be considered an O2O product. After growing to a certain scale, Bobo.com began to try to set up a learning discussion area based on UGC content. Later, this discussion area gradually took over the connection function between hairstylists and consumers. After launching the Bobo Hair Assistant App in July this year, Bobo.com formed a closed loop between hairstylists and users by opening up the question-and-answer session. There are many high-quality UGC contents in the hairstyle sharing of Bobo.com, and the selected hairstyles are another integration of the contents. According to its official disclosure, Bobo.com currently has 350 cities, 380,000 hairstylists and about 20% of daily active users. In the newly launched mall on the Bobo.com App, one can not only purchase hairstyling tools, but also learn hairdressing tutorials (such as online tutorials or offline tutorials spontaneously organized by a salon). It can be said that a complete set of services between hairstylists has been completed. The newly launched Bobo Hair Assistant App focuses more on the C-end, and through connecting with Bobo.com, it attempts to build a "Quora" for the hairdressing industry. Hairstylists only need to look at the circles on Bobo.com to see what needs people nearby have and take the initiative to accept orders. Customers can judge whether the content posted by hairstylists on Bobo.com meets their requirements. Shi Liangrui, CEO of Bobo.com, once said, “It is too difficult for a startup to capture both consumers and hairstylists at the same time, so in the beginning (Bobo.com) only served hairstylists.” [Similar products] a. Shangmei: It was just launched in July 2014. Its idea is roughly the same as Bobo.com. It competes on the quality of content producers. Since it was launched not long ago, its data is not perfect, so we will not compare it here. b. Leshow.com: Currently it is still focused on technology sharing for hairdressers. 5. Dead product: MeiLiao [Feature] A social software for hairdressers [Form] iOS [Situation] Has been removed from the shelves. MeiLiao was originally intended to be a social software for hairdressers, but its survival time did not exceed 1 year. Similar vertical social products include "Yimi Work", a social network for migrant workers, and "Mint", a social network for weight loss. However, whether it is interest-oriented or career-oriented, once you choose "vertical social networking", you will face a ceiling on the total number of users and the resulting product stickiness issues. Another O2O model for hairdressing is to start from vertical interaction between hairstylists and between hairstylists and customers, and it has become one of the recent trends in new products. Starting from the hairdresser, this model can to a certain extent better resolve the conflict of distrust between customers and hairdressers (bypassing the tough nut to crack with discount cards), but this vertical + social feature determines that it will eventually lead to a "dealer takes all" situation. three. Advancing both B-end and C-end in parallel, trying to resolve two contradictions 6. Amy Cloud [Features] Trying to resolve two contradictions at one time [Form] App, web page, own tablet [Financing Status] Undisclosed [Profit Model] Tablet sales, value-added services on the B-end (geolocation advertising, premium membership features), discount cards and barber shop revenue sharing on the C-end Amy Cloud is quite special, and this product has generated a unique profit model. Its strategic deployment is to advance both B-end and C-end apps online, and rely on traditional hair salon chain groups and hair style learning centers offline - not only that, they also customized proprietary tablets. The B-side App is called Meifatong. This software can only be tried for 3 days. If you want to continue using it after 3 days, you need to purchase an Amy Cloud tablet. The main function of this app is to allow users to enter the store, take a photo online, and let "Hairdresser" recommend a hairstyle design suitable for the customer based on the customer's face shape, scalp condition and skin color. It also uses its own program to let customers see the final possible style (similar to PS) to avoid customers' distrust of the hairstylist. In addition, Meifatong also has functions such as membership management and cashier management. On the C-end, it is positioned as the customer's image consultant and is connected with the B-end - that is, when customers try out the Hairdressing App on the B-end and take photos, their data (scalp, face shape, skin color, first hairstyle, selected hair products, etc.) are imported to the C-end, so as to provide users with personalized maintenance knowledge and activity recommendations. The brand effect of Aimeyun has begun to take shape. They promote their B-end products through cooperation with first-class hairdressing academies, and on the C-end, they have laid a large network through large chain organizations such as Mingfa Shijia and Dongtian Modeling. Aimeyun mainly helps shops increase their sales volume and solve the problem of customers' lack of trust in barbers. Management is still left to the barbershops (this is different from Meimeidou), and it has begun to try "tongka" to a certain extent. [Similar products]: Stylr Stylr's model and promotion methods are similar to those of Amy Cloud. It is currently only targeting the Singapore market and will soon enter Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Jakarta, Indonesia. The idea of combining soft and hard tactics is actually similar to the mainstream promotion idea of many domestic industries. It uses hardware to control traffic, but it is not limited to traffic. Its strategy is to cooperate with national chain stores and hairstyling training institutions, which is a good entry point. In summary, the pain points of the hairdressing industry are obvious, but also stubborn. Looking at these "hairdressing apps" that have only become popular in the past two years, it is not difficult to find that if they only do simple "traffic diversion" work, even with the support of capital chain, it will be difficult to support it, because the Internet level of the hairdressing industry is relatively low. The hairdressing O2O industry is difficult to do business in. In this regard, e-commerce insider Zhuang Shuai once summarized the reasons why hairdressing O2O has not really touched the pain points of the industry: 1. Currently, there are not enough core hairstylists on the beauty and hairdressing O2O platform, and users pay more attention to regionality, so the hairdresser side of the platform is difficult to do; 2. For barbershops, the Internet will not become an important channel for acquiring customers for the time being, and hairstylists will not have much motivation to update information on these O2O platforms; 3. Users' distrust of the hairdressing industry cannot disappear because of existing products; 4. The hairdressing O2O profit model itself has problems. There is a high turnover rate among hairstylists, especially good ones, who often start their own businesses. If the cost of acquiring customers is borne by the barber shop, this creates a contradiction. In fact, barber shops are still keen on the traditional model of issuing cards to attract customers. The advantage is that it can accumulate funds, obtain cash flow, stabilize customer base, and truly minimize the losses caused by the loss of hairdressers. In contrast, the existing hairdressing O2O models mostly solve the problem of establishing superficial connections between barbers and customers, but very few of them really touch the "bones" and involve the opaque cost prices of barbershops or the barber industry, and the semi-forced (extremely high prices if you don't apply for a card) discount card system. |
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