Traditional furniture foundry line to break through

Many factors such as high housing prices, rising rents, and rising raw materials have made it difficult for the Chinese home furnishing industry to “winter”. In 2011, Heilongjiang Endurance Wood Group, Qing'an Houcheng Wood Co., Ltd. and Yichun Gorgeous Wood Co., Ltd., which have been contracted by IKEA for more than ten years, have cancelled the supply contract with IKEA due to low profits. The plight of the factory was exposed through media reports.

However, compared with the coldness of the offline home market, on the emerging e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Tmall, the online consumption of various home furnishings and building materials is very lively. Yesterday, 12 home manufacturers that originally helped IKEA foundry jointly announced that they would prepare to hold a group to the platform of Taobao and Tmall under the Ali Group to find a suitable e-commerce development model. Cao Yuewei, the founder of the 12 collective transformation of IKEA foundry enterprises, said, "We know very clearly that the road to OEM has gone, there is no way, and e-commerce is the trend of the times."

Traditional foundry self-reliant portals are under pressure

If you talk about the typical representative of traditional Chinese furniture foundries, the initiator of the collective transformation of this IKEA foundry enterprise, Cao Yuewei, chairman of the board of directors of Heilongjiang Endurance Wood Group, and the furniture enterprise owner who was together with the IKEA.

Cao Yuewei started his career in IKEA in 2005. After five or six years, the production capacity of Endurance Wood has grown rapidly from 100,000 square meters to more than 2 million square meters. The curtains manufactured by the factory account for 60% of IKEA's global purchases. However, in the past two years, with the doubling of furniture raw material costs, labor costs and transportation costs, and IKEA's strategy of reducing costs, suppliers are required to reduce prices, resulting in profits falling below 5% or even losses. Endurance wood industry lost about 5 million yuan each year." In this context, in October 2011, a number of IKEA foundries including Endurance Wood announced the departure from the IKEA supplier team, and Cao Yuewei led the establishment of the Chinese home furnishing brand “Jiayimei”. However, Jiayimei only imitated IKEA, and Cao Yuewei still did not get out of the predicament.

In fact, on the road to doing their own brands, many foundries have hit the wall when they try offline stores. Shanghai Ao Duo Furniture was previously a professional OEM manufacturer of export lighting products. Li Yonghua, the general manager of its flagship store, told the New Express reporter that Ao Duojiao tried the “O2O” mode in the next store in 2010, but offline. The high rents in the store put pressure on them, and finally had to close the offline stores to concentrate on e-commerce.

The rise of e-commerce, traditional home enterprises to catch up with the "tidal"

Cao Yuewei said frankly, "After taking off the label of the foundry, we have done more than a year of hard work. There have been some twists and turns, and finally we decided to unswervingly do e-commerce."

In October last year, Jiayimei Tmall flagship store officially opened, and quickly opened the situation, only "double eleven" one day to achieve more than 2 million yuan in transaction volume. Cao Yuewei said that the low-price strategy of foreign brands allows OEM suppliers to face low profits or they will be eliminated. By e-commerce, the distance between consumers and factories is shortened, especially in the form of C2B customization. It can be produced on a large scale, and the price of the commodity can be lower. “Taking a pre-sale activity we made on Tmall, for example, a ladder step stool, the price of IKEA is 99 yuan, we are 59 yuan, and in the Tmall shop, it attracted 3,000 orders in just ten days. It may be a year's sales of a store in IKEA. The C2B customized model allows products to be directly delivered to consumers at the factory price, so that sales will be greater, service and quality will be better, and customer value will be greater."

According to data provided by Tmall Furniture Department, in 2012, the turnover of Tmall's home furnishings category reached more than 34 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 300%, of which the furniture category increased the fastest, reaching 324%. This data will be even more impressive.

In fact, not only traditional foundries have benefited from e-commerce attempts, but even many well-known domestic furniture brands have begun to taste the sweetness in e-commerce. According to the data provided by Tmall, on the day of the 1111 online shopping carnival in 2012, the all-friends furniture with a single transaction volume exceeding 100 million yuan broke the sales record of the Tmall platform home; the sales of the Gujia Home Tmall flagship store exceeded 60 million. Yuan; Lin's wood industry more than 58 million yuan, Qumei Furniture's online transaction also reached more than 23 million yuan on the same day, Cool Man with 20 million high sales became the Taobao children's furniture sales champion.

Increase the experience to break through the last obstacles in furniture e-commerce

However, furniture is not the same as 3C products. As a non-fast consumer, the particularity of furniture itself determines its unspeakable sales difficulties.

Some insiders told reporters that furniture is undoubtedly a large consumption in people's daily life. The average person is quite rational about large-scale consumption, and will not buy it on the Internet. Therefore, people pay more attention to experience when choosing furniture products instead. Simple and cheap. In view of this, many furniture e-commerce companies have tried to launch the "experience hall" mode of online and offline, and dispel consumer concerns about purchasing furniture through the display of offline entities, to achieve "online shopping", "offline experience" and "one stop." Seamless delivery and integration of the "shipping installation service".

In addition, the various tools provided by Ali will also help furniture manufacturers to promote the smooth transformation of e-commerce in these traditional enterprises by means of C2B pre-sale. For example, Tmall C2B mode, through the convergence of consumer orders, reverse supply chain production, allowing furniture companies to reduce costs according to consumer orders, scale purchases, zero inventory, zero storage, consumers can enjoy more than 30% of similar styles under the line Affordable.