Underwear Consumption Potential Is Huge, It Is Necessary To Create New Concepts And Highlight New Function Points

Recently, the underwear brand savage x Fenty of Rihanna has made a lot of moves. First, it opened its first physical store at fashion show in Las Vegas, the United States. A week later, it announced the completion of a $125 million round of c-round financing. There was also news that it would open the largest physical store on the most prosperous linfratt Bush Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.

Characterized by bold and inclusive design, savagex Fenty has attracted much attention since its debut in 2018. The diversified sizes, various categories of products and relatively affordable pricing have made the brand gain a lot of users. From the development of savagex Fenty, we can also see the change of underwear consumption - consumers' demand for underwear has gradually returned to "pursuit of comfort", and more and more emerging underwear brands have redefined "sexy" with the idea of "pleasing themselves".

Create new concepts and highlight new function points

Once upon a time, Victoria's Secret held the top position in the field of underwear. The annual sexy show and the beautiful Victoria angel made the brand pay attention. However, with the rise of "her economy" and the awakening of women's consciousness, "virgins" have gradually been replaced by some new brands that pay more attention to women's physical and mental pleasure.

"No feeling", "high tech", "no size"... These new underwear brands find new function points and bring many new concepts to the traditional underwear market, so that the products can better meet the needs of consumers for comfort, simplicity and freedom of underwear.

In 2012, Neiwai (demand area: 70-200 square meters) appeared as a pioneer of domestic rimless underwear. At that time, the underwear market was the world of sexy underwear and functional underwear.

From "making an underwear that allows people to be free physically and mentally", starting from the zero sensitive series underwear both inside and outside, the company has gradually expanded its products to home wear, Neiwai active sports products, men's underwear series, ready-made clothes, etc., and has become a medium and high-end lifestyle brand focusing on personal clothing.

With the first exploration of comfortable underwear both inside and outside, some new brands have found a new breakthrough on this basis, bringing comfortable underwear to the public vision.

For example, uberas, founded in 2016, has become a "overnight hit" with no size underwear. In order to make it easier for consumers to choose suitable and comfortable underwear, ubras created "no size" underwear in 2018, exporting underwear as a standard.

Bananin banana, located in the company of somatosensory technology, started with the innovative "no feeling underwear" and adhered to the route of "body feeling 24 hours", and continued to use fabric technology and product design to improve the body feeling experience of consumers.

There is also milk sugar pie, which focuses on large size comfortable underwear. Aiming at the category blank of underwear above c cup, through the products of different chest types and sizes, it creates underwear that takes into account comfort, supporting stability and appearance, and is more suitable for large chest consumers. Livary Mio, which focuses on the scene of underwear, divides underwear into seven types through deconstructive underwear design, which meets the needs of women in six major life scenes (workplace, home, date, party, travel, fitness) and three special periods (pregnancy, physiological period, postpartum recovery period).

In fact, no matter what kind of concept emerging underwear brands appear, the comfort wind has been promoted by them, extending from the underwear single category to the whole category of personal clothing, and the audience has gradually expanded from women to all customers of men, women, old and young.

Optimize service, pattern marketing, truly touch consumers

Because the contemporary consumers pay attention not only to the products, but also to the values conveyed by the brand behind the products. Therefore, in addition to launching multi-dimensional products that subvert the traditional, emerging underwear brands also pay more attention to service and marketing, so as to establish effective communication with target customers and increase consumer stickiness.

The store is an important starting point for new underwear brands to improve service. In the past, most of the offline stores of underwear brands were opened in traditional department stores. Nowadays, young and fashionable shopping centers have become the first choice for new players.

For example, aiming at high-quality business district channels both inside and outside, it has opened more than 140 offline stores in 39 cities across the country, and has settled in benchmark shopping centers such as Beijing Sanlitun taiguli, Shanghai Changning raffles, Shenzhen Wanxiang Tiandi and Changsha IFS to create their own brand independent stores. Some stores also have accurate 3D body scanning equipment, which can quickly recommend exclusive styles and sizes to consumers through accurate body data collection in 6-10 seconds.

In addition, the off-line experience store in jiaonei introduces RFID technology, which brings a non-interference shopping experience; The offline stores of milk sugar pie can book professional chest management consultants and services... It can be seen that in order to cater to the consumption habits of modern women, brands are also very attentive to offline experience.

Of course, in order to better reach consumers, emerging underwear brands have formed their own set of tactics based on "she marketing".

Both inside and outside focus on telling stories around women's self-worth, so that consumers have a sense of identity and yearning. In 2020, the marketing project of "no body is nobody" was launched at home and abroad to convey the concept of "no body is insignificant", which aroused a warm response in the whole network. This year, the project ended, and the brand also opened an offline space on Anfu road in Shanghai to simultaneously display the photography and documentary works of "the road of body and mind, learning from a glimpse".

The marketing of ubras is mainly based on social media. Through the promotion and communication of brand spokesmen Ouyang Nana and Liu Wen, as well as a number of female stars, plus KOL's grass planting video and copywriting, the comfort and convenience of the products are conveyed, which effectively improves the brand's popularity and influence. Jiaonei, on the other hand, has gained more attention through cross-border marketing in addition to relying on single products to gain popularity. At present, jiaonei has carried out cross-border co branding and IP cooperation with animation, catering, games and other fields, integrating the concepts of youth, public welfare and environmental protection into product design.

In this respect, the traditional underwear brand also began to change. Weimi began to change her traditional and perfect sexy image, chose more large models and models of color, and restored the swimsuit line. In 2020, Weimi launched the brand propaganda video of "be yourself, stand up for you" in China, outputting and guiding positive values; AMO launched a series of female topic marketing to support women's self-development from the spiritual level

Capital continues to increase, domestic giants have not yet appeared

Emerging underwear brands have gradually won the hearts of consumers, and also attracted the attention of capital. Savage x Fenty, mentioned in the beginning, has accumulated a total financing of US $310 million since its establishment. On the contrary, domestic underwear brand financing events are also continuous.

Since 2015, six rounds of financing have been completed at home and abroad, and the latest round D financing has reached US $100 million; In August 2018 and September 2020, ubras announced that it had completed two rounds of financing, including a round of financing of 50 million yuan and B + round of hundreds of millions of yuan; Jiaonei, which has also completed two rounds of financing, has a valuation of 2.5 billion yuan after the completion of several hundred million yuan round a financing, setting a record of the highest domestic underwear brand value in the past decade.

In addition, there are milk sugar pie, liquaryio, Suji liangpin and other brands, which are also supported by capital.

The rise of new brands promotes the transformation of old brands, but the domestic underwear industry is still facing the situation of lack of giants.

Although the emerging brands focusing on comfortable underwear are committed to subverting the tradition, they are also facing the challenges of strong product substitutability and low consumer loyalty. And the old brands and even other brands are constantly adjusting the brand tonality and product design, resulting in a serious homogenization competition between new and old brands.

According to public data, the scale of China's underwear market has increased from 327.3 billion yuan in 2016 to 495.1 billion yuan in 2020, with huge consumption potential. In the future, whether there will be more innovative underwear categories is still unknown. Whether it is a new brand with strong momentum or a traditional brand with positive changes, it still has a long way to go to become the enduring head company in China's underwear market.