Strategic Investment in France's Ricci Family. How Does USHOPAL Gain Momentum in China's Luxury Perfume Market with Juliette Has A Gun?

Shakespeare wrote both tragedies and comedies which present contradictions and love as well as empathy for the mundane people and mockery of the society. Just like Hamlet, there are a thousand “Juliettes” in a thousand people's eyes. Each perfume represents a different side of the sexy "Juliette". And every consumer can find her own "Juliette". USHOPAL is optimistic about China's new luxury and beauty makeup market. Through the dual drive of capital and operation, Juliette Has A Gun came to the stage in the Chinese market, firmly implanting brand characteristics into the beauty makeup circle in front of China's new luxury, and purveying more possibilities for cross-border fashion trade.

The attitude of Chinese consumers towards perfume has made a hundred and eighty degree turn with the rise of a new generation.

From the rare use of perfume in the past to the frequent purchase of various high-end perfume and infatuation with niche perfume in recent years, perfume consumption has become a habit for young consumers nowadays. As the huge potential in the domestic perfume market is awakened and the new luxury niche brands become popular, Juliette Has A Gun is the one with the most unique characteristics and personality.

01

New luxury salon perfume market soars

Ushopal Group moves first with Juliette Has A Gun

The consumption habits and psychology of being willing to accept recommendations and then buy the products have made the younger generation of Chinese consumers more receptive to niche perfumes. 

According to the perfume market forecast report released by Euromonitor Consulting, although the perfume market shrunk by 15% this year, it is expected to reach 12 billion yuan in 2023. However the market for high-end perfume, which has been showing a dynamic growth trend in the past ten years, will grow by 18% this year and the sales growth rate is far higher than that of other products. 

"As consumers' pursuit of exquisite taste improves, their attention will shift from skin care and makeup to perfume." Stephanie Yao, Senior Research Analyst of Euromonitor Consulting, said. 

Since this year, KILIAN and FREDERIC MALLE, the two most noteworthy luxury fragrance brands of Estee Lauder Group, opened their first stores in Shanghai, China in June. LVMH Group's Italian salon perfume brand Acqua di Parmahave also entered the Chinese market.

It is not widely known that in early 2019 just before the boom of China’s niche perfume market Juliette Has A Gun, a French new luxury salon perfume brand, began to take root in the Chinese beauty perfume market under the leadership of USHOPAL, an international new luxury brand group.

Romano Ricci, founder of Juliette Has A Gun, is the great-grandson of Nina Ricci, a well-known French high-end fashion leader, and he is the eldest grandson of the Ricci family. Romano Ricci disdains "soulless perfume" produced by large factories in mass production which he has witnessed since his childhood. In 1946 Nina Ricci's son Robert created his first perfume, Coeur Joie. In 1948 Robert brought about another perfume, L 'Air du Temps, which has become the brand's most popular perfume. To this day it is still one of the bestselling perfumes in the world. 

Growing up in a family with French haute couture and perfume culture genes, Romano Ricci is naturally full of love for fashion and perfume, so he asked himself "If Juliette in Shakespeare refuses to die and brings a gun to save herself and Romeo, what kind of perfume would this super sexy and colorful woman use?” 

His bold idea attracted a legion of top perfumers and connoisseurs including Francis Kurkdjian. As a result, the eldest grandson of the Ricci family led the world's top fragrance smellers, perfumers and formulators to use the rarest fragrance sources to create the new luxury salon fragrance, from which Juliette Has A Gun was born.

According to a survey by Boston Consulting Group, Chinese consumers' spending on the fashion market has been continuously increasing and is expected to reach 200 billion US dollars by 2020. The report also pointed out that the changes in China's fashion market in the next decade would be a far cry from those in the last decade, so the most effective development mode should be keeping pace with the fashion market development trends. At the same time, these companies should also fully understand the changes in China's population and consumption habits. 

This shows that the Chinese fashion market grows very fast, and it is particularly important to keep up with the pace of Chinese fashion consumption. To quickly and comprehensively operate an international brand, particularly in a market that is not completely mature such as the new luxury salon perfume market, the most effective way is to have all-round in depth management including brand positioning, consumers psychology, and utilization of all sales channels. USHOPAL and Juliette Has A Gun quickly started to enter the Chinese market in an all-round way through strategic cooperation from both operational and capital levels. 

After entering the Chinese market, Juliette Has A Gun has quickly gained momentum with its unique brand DNA under the leadership of USHOPAL and achieved fruitful results .

02

From off-line cohesion to on-line boom

From content range to operation depth

Juliette Has A Gun's success matrix comes from USHOPAL's full-angle optimization

USHOPAL has attracted much attention in the industry since its establishment and has become the booming engine of many overseas new luxury brands as an international new luxury brand group. As China's trade market further opens to the outside world, there are more and more trade modes in China's beauty market including cross-border e-commerce, market procurement trade, and comprehensive foreign trade services. USHOPAL has introduced Juliette Has A Gun, a high-quality brand, into China through the combined utilization of capital and operation Against this backdrop. At the same time, it has also brought the concept of European international new luxury salon fragrance to the Chinese market.  

USHOPAL’s outcome clearly shows that the Group has absolute operational advantages in China's beauty market during the Double 11 shopping festival. This is just another case to prove why Juliette Has A Gun has chosen to cooperate deeply with USHOPAL. It should be noticed that Juliette Has A Gun, which just debuted in Tmall in September 2020, successfully attracted attention of consumers during the Double 11 shopping festival and shared the TOP3 salon fragrance category with Jo Malone Zumaron and Atelier Cologne.

USHOPAL has also combined brand culture with market characteristics to carry out two-way promotion of products and brands while stirring up the consumer interest of Generation Z with vertical Internet community marketing. At the same time, it continues to explore the possibility of data optimization behind the new retail model, providing extremely satisfactory consumer experience in the new retail and new logistics models. 

Juliette Has A Gun is a good example. The brand has established a super loyal consumer group in the Chinese market within 12 months, and hurtled to the TOP3 of high-end perfumes as a dark horse in the scuffle during the Double 11 shopping festival. Ten thousand sets of perfume were sold out in only one hour, setting a new record for high-end perfume sales in livestreaming. It also marked the start of the brand order reconstruction of the new luxury salon fragrance in the Chinese market. 

The relevant person in charge of USHOPAL told CBO reporter that when Juliette Has A Gun first entered the Chinese market in 2019, the brand didn’t rush to promote the brand name and its products online. "Consumers in the Chinese perfume market didn’t have in depth knowledge about the brand, which required guidance." At first Juliette Has A Gun invited influential bloggers in the perfume field to carry out professional brand and product promotion. This was different from the strategy most beauty brands used for promotion, where they hired top KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) as soon as they entered the Chinese market.

“The KOLs, with whom Juliette Has A Gun cooperated at first, may not have a large number of fans and cover a wide scope but they are all the most professional and authoritative persons in the field of perfume, showing strong vertical promotion effect.” The person in charge stressed.

Further, the brand began to promote itself through perfume bloggers in the professional field.The content and flow spontaneously created by perfume lovers and consumers also further expanded the fame of Juliette Has A Gun through word-of-mouth promotion. "All this was completed through promotion and dissemination in offline channels." The person in charge said. 

By doing so, it stabilized the foundation of brand recognition and gave top priority to promoting brand culture and influence. It was not until September 8, 2020 that the brand flagship store was opened in Tmall. Thanks to the cumulative effect of early promotions, on the brand activity day on September 9, it surprisingly towered over all competitors in Tmall perfume category within 24 hours.

03

Multi-brand and multi-channel

USHOPAL's Chinese brand Bonnie&Clyde is on a roll

Leading the global new luxury and beauty makeup integrated business  formats

With the increasing popularity of the beauty makeup market, capital flows into the market, presenting an agglomeration effect. From Sequoia Capital to Hillhouse Capital, capital support always stands behind new Chinese beauty brands or beauty integrated stores.

The market of China's beauty industry will reach 500 billion yuan by 2022 according to the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute. Including the perfume category with a small base but huge market prospects, it has already become a trillion-dollar market.

However, even with the support of capital, it is difficult for many foreign brands, especially luxury brands that already have mature markets, to achieve further development. These brands are very picky in selecting their partners for deep cooperation, especially strategic capital cooperation. Pure capital investment, even that with ordinary channel resources, has been unable to attract these successful overseas brands. Therefore, industry leaders that provide capital with resource attributes and channel advantages, such as USHOPAL Group, are precisely the partners that luxury brands desire to work with. USHOPAL has fully demonstrated its strong market distribution ability and channel integration resources, persuading these brands to become its strategic partners at the capital level.

Upon entering China overseas, luxury brands will find the core of their brand is diluted in cross-cultural communication if they only engage in simple distribution and brand management. In addition to sales growth, the brand itself has not gained the value growth that the Chinese market should have delivered. USHOPAL's team has outstanding experience and ability in this area. They not only communicate deeply and understand the inherent value of overseas brands, but also enable the brands and their bestselling products to be localized through early interaction with hordes of KOLs, making these products easier to root in China's consumer culture and e-commerce environment. 

The final marketing strategy is also defined based on the joint fine adjustment plan of the USHOPAL team and the brand. Apart from the consideration of the number of fans and their characteristics, USHOPAL is more focused on accurate KOLs or channels whose vertical depth is more matched with fan portraits. Juliette Has A Gun's great success came largely from USHOPAL's very fine-grained community content delivery at the beginning. 

The more basic and profound cooperation with the brand lies in USHOPAL's strong supply chain system matching cross-border e-commerce which covers 5 countries with more than 20 self-operated warehouses. The logistics and warehouses in the retail background have ensured the balance between cost and timeliness through artificial intelligence data management, thus lifting the barriers of brands entering the Chinese market and greatly abating the constraints of poor shopping experience of purchasing cross-border commodities.

It is reported that USHOPAL always aims to introduce overseas brands into the Chinese market. From the high luxury beauty brand Chantecaille, the Spanish royal skin care brand Natura Bisse, to the new luxury salon perfume brand Juliette Has A Gun, these Internet influencer overseas brands have achieved many “0 to 100 million” sales miracles in the Chinese market. This could not be possible without USHOPAL Group's precise positioning, strong operation and other all-round support. 

During the Double 11 shopping festival this year, under the leading operation of USHOPAL Group, the sales of Natura Bisse Yuebishi, a Spanish high-end skin care brand that has successfully formed a brand effect in the Chinese market, increased 280% year-over-year. This showed a healthy development trend. The sales of its neck cream increased 260% year-on-year, leading the category trend. In addition, the sales of Chantecaille, a luxury beauty brand from New York, also increased 267%. Over 10,000 of Algologie’s bestselling products "EUXIR DES VAGUES” were sold. As well, Anastasia Beverly Hills, founded by Hollywood's famous "Queen of Eyebrow Makeup" Anastasia Soare, saw a sales increase of 217% during the shopping festival. 

In 2020 USHOPAL Group, while achieving a GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) of more than 1.1 billion, set up the only Chinese team managed global new luxury and beauty brand integrated platform Bonnie & Clyde. USHOPAL has begun to lead domestic luxury and beauty consumption through the "China Made Global Luxury Model". Its outstanding product selection ability and amazing logistics advantage featuring “direct delivery of cross-border goods in the same city within 4 hours" have improved the consumption experience of overseas brands to a new level in the industry.

On September 25, Bonnie & Clyde opened its flagship store in Shanghai HKRITaikoo Hui, where the per customer transaction exceeds 5,000 yuan and a plethora of single transactions exceed 10,000 yuan. The other two stores are open in Shanghai Jing'an Kerry Center and Xintiandi (New World) K11, respectively. Bonnie & Clyde enables domestic trend consumers to directly access new luxury goods globally with their full channel expansion. Its flagship store in Shanghai HKRITaikoo Hui is home to the first Chantecaille counter in the Chinese mainland as well as a huge Juliette Has A Gun brand wall. Behind each door is a unique “Juliette” ‘perfume of the soul’ that can provide brand fans with a completely new experience.

Guo Lu, founder and CEO of USHOPAL Group, once told the media, "Quality product selection is the key first step to provide the best consumer experience." 

At a time when most retailers are unsure about how to move forward after the pandemic and blindly provide discounts, Bonnie & Clyde has created personalized one-to-one VIP services needed by the younger generation of consumers in the new consumption era through full-channel marketing strategies.