Allbirds Shanghai Opens China'S First Store, Wants To Enter More Social Networking Platform

In April 6th, Silicon Valley and New York's popular leisure sports shoes brand Allbirds opened the first store in the Chinese market, located in Shanghai Xingye Tai Gu Hui, Tmall flagship store and China official website were also synchronized.

The founder of Tim Brown said that they considered entering the Chinese market a few years ago, while the behavior patterns of Shanghai consumers were similar to those of New York.

We have previously reported this 3 year old footwear start-up company.

The selling point of Allbirds is that they turn the high-end New Zealand wool materials into everyday wear shoes and sell them at the price of 95 US dollars.

Unlike traditional footwear companies that engage in wholesale business, Allbirds is also known for its direct contact with consumers and omitting the "DTC" of channel intermediaries.

As one of the representatives of a group of DTC consumer brands in the United States, the sales volume of Allbirds broke through 1 million pairs in May 2018, and in August it received $50 million C round of financing.

It is reported that the valuation is about 14 billion, including investors, including Leonardo Dicaprio.

Since the price of wool rose in 2018, they have also introduced shoes made from South Africa Eucalyptus (upper) and Brazil cane (Sweet Foam sole).

But another co-founder, engineer and Joey Zwillinger, a renewable energy expert, told the curiosity daily that they preferred to consider themselves as fabric technology companies.

"Sports shoes are a very global market, and our positioning is between fashion brands and sports shoes brands."

The price of the Chinese market is 899 yuan for each pair of shoes, of which a high price is 1099 yuan.

At present, Tmall sells 51 pairs of Tmall wool shoes.

You can see that the Chinese plation specifically avoids running two words.

"Our big advantage is that we are a DTC brand, which reduces the profits that middlemen must earn and can be used to invest more in R & D."

However, unlike the US market, Allbirds has inevitably opened up cooperation with Tmall in China. Joey said, "China is the only market that they invest in next to the United States, where e-commerce is developing faster than the US. Allbirds hopes to apply the experience learned here to other markets outside China."

For example, online ordering, logistics flow from stores.

Allbirds refuses to talk about competitors in the global or Chinese market, because they think their consumption experience is different, and from a strict market positioning, they are neither sports shoes nor fashion brands.

But considering that Chinese consumers do not know much about Allbirds and a completely different retail environment, their advantages will be weakened in China.

The store in Shanghai uses the same raw wood tone as other brands in the world, and the seat of the test shoes can be leaned forward. Some details reflect the localization, such as "the Bund neon purple" shoelace and "5 good".

But in addition, this is an ordinary shoe shop. There are not too many intelligent elements, and more in the form of presentation to introduce the brand's production process and Research story.

The brand experience of copying the so-called "directly facing consumers" is dispersed into more links and contacts in China, such as brand introduction of WeChat public number, Chinese official website, Tmall store, and physical store.

"We are very neutral to social platforms, and we are not electric providers."

TimBrown said that they have hired an employee who can adapt to changes in the local market to maintain technological leadership. Apart from Tmall, Allbirds is also considering other social / e-commerce platforms in China, but everything is still under way.

"One principle is that we need to have direct communication with our customers, and we have to meet this point before we consider it."

According to the plan, Allbirds will open four stores in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing and Chengdu in 2019, and the partners are Swire Group.

At present, Tim and Joey have set up a team of 25 people in China. 6 of them are responsible for operation and after sales service.