On July 24th, on the first floor of Shanghai Heshenghui Plaza, the first newly opened LELECHA.PARK became a new punching place, and young people who came for early adopters lined up in a long queue.
With a number of stalls and a variety of peripheral products, Lele Tea Tea Paradise looks more like a lifestyle collection shop related to tea, and it is also a carnival for young people chasing the new tea trend.
Lele Tea Garden is also the largest store of the brand so far, covering an area of 1,000 square meters.One trend is that most tea brands are there.Work hard against Starbucks in terms of space and consumption experience.Try to open a bigger store. Not only Lele tea, but also CoCo Coco tea, Bayishan tea and Naixue tea.
CoCo, a veteran tea player, is using a modern and larger high-value new store, so consumers no longer have to experience wind and sun when waiting for drinks to come out. CoCo can also get rid of the image of "window tea shop" and realize brand upgrading and transformation. CoCo can say in an interview that it will not sign stores below 80 square meters in the future. In 2019, the number of CoCo stores exceeded 3,000, and the monthly turnover of a single store was between 300,000 and 400,000 yuan. This is a good business data for CoCo Coco, which has a lower unit price.
Ba Yishan, who is extravagant, opened a 3500-square-meter super-large shop, trying to sell the concept of leisure space for high-quality tea. There is an amusement park, a maternal and child room and a dressing room in the store. In addition to the common slides, the amusement park also has facilities such as basketball machines and doll machines. As an important player of new tea, Naixue’s tea has also recently launched blablabar pub, which not only enriches the scene, but also contributes to improving the overall profit of the brand.
The tea-making paradise opened by Lele Tea is one of the richest product forms among big store players. There are 10 stalls in the new store, selling 11 sub-brands, including Lele Tea, TEA GELATO, TEA POPSICLE, BREAD LAB, PILLOW TOAST, PINEAPPLE, BERRYHERE, BOBOCAKE, TEA LAB and TEA FACTORY, including classic Lele Tea, ice cream, popsicle bread, pillow toast, pie, strawberry cake, freshly baked Shufulei, etc.
Tea and soft bags are still the main categories. TEA LAB includes not only classic cheese fresh fruit tea, but also new products such as cross-border brewed beer tea, chicken tail tea, tea-making coffee, tea ice music and so on, as well as cold-extracted tea featuring original leaves. BREAD LAB has several main soft package brands. In order to enhance the brand style, Lele Tea and Michelin-starred chef Christophe Dufossé also launched two cooperative products, MOREFUN BREAD.
Lele Tea Garden also introduced scenes such as tea bars and tea houses for the first time. Consumers who arrive at the store can choose tea leaves and make tea themselves. In addition to selling the main products such as tea and soft bags, the aisle of the store opens up a display area for surrounding products, and puts cups, espresso, tea sets, tea leaves and other commodities.
Opening a big store is a high-investment and high-risk action.Bayishan’s "Big Mac" store spent more than NT$ 200,000 just in the window. According to the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks once chose to slow down the plan to open a shop in Zhenxuan Workshop because of the high cost of big stores.
When a tea brand opens a big store, it is necessary to choose a point with high cost performance as much as possible. Take Xicha as an example. In the big stores in shopping centers, they usually choose a location far away from the entrance of shopping malls to save costs as much as possible. Due to the numerous brands of shopping centers and obvious scale effect, even if the location is not so conspicuous, it can attract a large number of passengers. 36Kr also learned from an employee of a shopping center that many shopping centers attach great importance to the drainage effect of online celebrity tea shop and can generally give a relatively favorable rental price. The same is true for the location of Lele Tea Tea Paradise.Ba Yishan provides another way of thinking. Meilindian chose an industrial park with an area of over 1000 square meters. becauseIn the industrial area, you can get a larger storefront and the rent is lower. Although far from the city center, butParking is very convenient, close to convenient target customers.
Due to the high cost of big stores, tea brands are opening some small stores to provide self-service and take-away services while opening big stores. For example, Hi Tea opened a smart store, HEYTEA GO. There is no cashier in the store, and users can order their own orders through the Hi Tea GO applet.This means that tea players should not only expand brand influence, but also occupy consumers’ minds through new and unique space experiences; It is also necessary to pursue scale, and cover more consumption scenes through small take-out and self-lifting stores that are lightly decorated and light of assets, so as to improve the efficiency. However, because milk tea mainly focuses on leisure and holiday scenes, the demand for diverse scenes is higher than that of coffee that attaches importance to business scenes. Therefore, milk tea shops are still more willing to open large stores to attract tourists.
Behind the growing store is the brand’s helplessness to the reality of the industry.
The iteration of the new tea industry is too fast, and players need to continue to create freshness through differentiated play. On the one hand, they resist the cross-border of catering brands and the attack of coffee brands; Internally, reduce the threat of homogenization competition in the industry.
Because tea products occupy an important position in the food and beverage product mix and can bring a large number of young passengers, major food and beverage giants are opening related sideline businesses. Xiabu Xiabu opened a 200-square-meter tea shop, and Haidilao launched milk tea in 48 cities across the country, so that consumers can buy a cup of tea to quench their thirst after eating hot pot. Western fast food such as McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut are also constantly introducing new seasonal teas, while coffee brands Starbucks, Costa and Ruixing also want to share a piece of this market. Ruixing even created a brand-new brand of deer tea, launched more than a dozen new products at a time, and found a niche Haoran Liu contemporary speaker.
In addition to competition, tea brands hope to give consumers a space to streamline their experience through multiple innovative scenarios, stimulate consumers’ buying behavior with different commodities and consumption links in a relatively complete consumption closed loop, and maximize brand influence. Consumers are too fickle, so tea brands have to speed up the pace of innovation and constantly give new labels to brands to keep these young people chasing the trend.
The bigger the store is, the more categories and SKUs the tea brand can provide, which is based on higher revenue targets. The profit that can be created by selling a cup of tea or coffee alone is always limited. Tea brands are trying to expand the baking business such as soft European bags and cakes, and do a good job of matching tea with soft European bags in order to seek more profit space.
But this road is not easy.The gross profit of soft European bags is between 50% and 60%, which is slightly lower than 70% of tea. According to a source from the tea industry, making soft European bags requires larger stores, more professional pastry chefs, the establishment of a central factory (such as Naixue’s tea, which is made into semi-finished products and then uniformly distributed to stores for on-site baking) and the increase in distribution costs, which cannot be made up by the sales of soft European bags, which is likely to lower the overall efficiency of stores.
New-style tea tries to retain consumers with fresher gameplay, more products and constantly adjusting stores, so as to earn more wins in the competition, which brings them huge financing and high valuation. How to provide good tea stably, control the cost structure and integrate the scattered tea supply chain are all topics that players need to further consider.
After all, new tricks can only bring temporary freshness, but it is difficult to guarantee the long-term brand.
(All the pictures in this article were taken by the author himself)