Double 11 begins!

With the annual Nov. 11 Online Shopping Festival ("Double 11") coming, beauty brands start a marathon endurance race. While it is far from reaching the end of the race, many beauty brands have won at the starting point with amazing explosive power.

This year is the thirteenth year of Double 11, which has evolved from the original "Singles Day" to the popular "National Shopping frenzy" with increasingly diverse and complicated game rules. Instead of the straightforward "All 50% off" used in the past, there are endless new approaches such as cross-shop discounts, red envelope rain, team up to win red envelopes, pre-sales with deposit, live streaming....

Yesterday at 8pm (October 20), with the slogan of "pre-sales without the need to stay up late", Tmall Double 11 pre-sales started 4 hours earlier than before. Soon after, #Taobao crashed# and #Double 11 pre-sales# directly rushed to number 1 and number 2 ranks respectively in the WeiBo hot search list, indicating the sales were booming.

How was the performance on the first day? Which beauty products have good news?

01

Li Jiaqi + Viya sold a total of RMB20 billion

Beauty products account for the majority

In recent years, the rise of livestream ecommerce has attracted countless consumers to live-streaming studios'low pricing, and live streaming sales data has also become an important indicator of the performance of the Double 11 merchants. After the end of the first round of pre-sales, it is undoubtedly the sales performance of the two leading streamers, Li Jiaqi and Viya, that can spark discussion among the people and attract attention of the industry.

Public data shows that at 1:00 pm on October 20, the cumulative transaction volume of Li Jiaqi’s live streaming studio exceeded RMB11.5 billion. Viya's live-streaming room recorded an amazing cumulative transactions of RMB 8.5 billion, though it was a little bit lower than RMB10 billion. While during the Double 11 pre-sale last year, Li and Viya realized a combined transaction volume of about RMB 8 billion. In addition, on Double 11 this year, Cherie, ranking third in Taobao live streaming transactions of RMB930 million.

It can be seen that the two leading streamers continue to take the lead, maintaining the duopoly pattern and far surpassing lower level streamers.

In terms of product structure, Li's live streaming studio had 439 products on the shelves, of which beauty products accounted for more than 70%, which was twice the number of 200+ products during June 18 Shopping Festival. On the other hand, the products in Viya's live streaming studio had 499 products. Compared to Li, Viya’s product categories were more complete and beauty products proportion was lower (still more than 50%).

In Viya's live streaming studio, the sales of just one Whoo Tianqidan Huaxian Toner and Lotion set was as high as 350,700 units, contributing sales of RMB558 million.

 △Data source: Taobao data

Among the top ten products sold in Li Jiaqi's live streaming studio, nine were skin care products. Specifically, the "Shiseido Yuewei Bofei Brightening Toner and Lotion" set ranked first with sales of RMB389 million, and more than 1.9 million Winona Soothing and Repairing Freeze-Dried Masks were sold, making it the product that had the highest sales volume.

In addition, according to statistics, Li’s live streaming studio had 213 skin care/bodycare/essential oil products, contributing sales of RMB6.348 billion; and had 78 cosmetics/perfume/beauty tool products, contributing sales of RMB1.044 billion.

As the prime period of traffic throughout the year, during the Double 11 pre-sale period, the live streaming studios of the two leading streamers were unprecedentedly hot. As of 23:00PM, the number of viewers in the live streaming studios of both Li Jiaqi and Viya exceeded 200 million. On the first day of the pre-sale, Li’s live streaming lasted for about 12 hours, with 250 million views, and Viya’s live streaming lasted for about 14 hours, with nearly 240 million views.

Li even asked on his WeiBo: "Usually there are 20 million viewers in mylive streaming studio every day, but today this number is 250 million. So all the girls, where did you come from? "

In fact, a good start of this "ultra-long standby" Double 11 is inseparable from the "extra-long preparing" of the streamers before the pre-sale.

Specifically, enhancing recommendation and lengthening recommendation cycle are effective means to deepen consumers' awareness of products and stimulate consumers' desire to shop.

As early as ten days before the pre-sale, Li opened the "Li Jiaqi's Small Class" about shopping strategies. From October 11 to 18, excluding the press conference of the variety show "All Girls' Offer", Li spent 7 days on the class. He divided the course content into seven sections by product category: toner and lotion, makeup, facial mask, personal care and cleansing, face cream and eye cream, base makeup, and essence, and focused on the introduction of product advantages, ingredients, cost performance and target users of each product, saving efforts for consumers.

Viya also released rounds of recommendation lists and shopping lists, in which she divided products by category and function, and listed keywords, applicable skin types/users, budget suggestions, prices in her live streaming studio, recommendation indexes and other information which were finally presented in graphic form.

In addition to the conventional recommendation operations such as graphic, video, and live streaming, Li Jiaqi took the lead in innovation by cleverly using Excel to organize information, and synchronously updating the products and links on his live streaming studio so that “all girls” can know the progress in real time even if they do not wait in front of the live studio. Many fans praised, on WeiBo Li's team for professionalism, meticulousness, and clean and neat pace of live streaming. Similarly, Viya also adopted this method, which greatly improved work efficiency.

02

Many Surprises in Domestic Beauty Products

Sales of Single Product from Several International Beauty Brands Hits RMB 100 Million

With more and more artificial shopping festivals and increasingly common ultra-low discounts today, many industry insiders marketing tricks Double 11, and consumers continuously complain about the " marketing tricks " of Double 11. However, on the second day of the Double 11 pre-sales, beauty brands successively reported good news, giving a strong positive signal to the worried ones, and demonstrating the resilience and great potential of the beauty category.

According to the data from Global E-businessmen, there are 47 beauty brands and 20 personal care brands whose Tmall pre-sale performance in one hour exceeded that in the whole day of last year.

△Source: Global E-businessmen

In addition, data from Global E-businessmen also shows that there are 14 beauty brands whose Tmall pre-sale performance in four hours exceeded that in the whole period of Double 11 last year.

△Source: Global E-businessmen

Early this morning, Syoung Group Co，Ltd. was the first to publicize its performance. Its own brands including UNIFON and MIHOO, and the brands under their distribution including Neutrogena and Dr.Ci.Labo, achieved sales of more than RMB300 million in total. The popular product Neutrogena Retinol Night Cream recorded sales of 350,000 units, and the popular Dr.Ci.Labo 377 Whitening Essence witnessed sales of more than 210,000 units.

Soon after that, Zhuben, a top brand in the domestic cleansing oil sub-categories released its performance report, that stated its pre-sale GMV exceeded RMB120 million, 10 times more than that in the same period last year; and 1.13 million products were sold in Li's live streaming studio within 1.5 hours.

Lily&Beauty, the well-known online cosmetics marketing and retail service provider, released data that on the first day of the pre-sale, the Freeplus Tmall Official Flagship Store operated by Lily&Beauty saw huge transactions with sales of more than RMB100 million in merely 14 minutes. The star product Amino Acid Facial Cleanser recorded sales of more than 3.2 million units in 4 hours, representing an increase of over 100%. In addition, Freeplus has been ranked No.1 in the Tmall Double 11 cleansing category for 5 consecutive years.

There are many examples of such explosive sales growth in a short time. For example, the high-end domestic brand Lin Qingxuan realized sales of over RMB60 million in merely 4 hours after pre-sale on Tmall, surpassing the number in the first day of pre-sale last year. Bloomage Biotech's hyaluronic acid skin care brand QuadHA saw sales of RMB100 million in 1 minute, RMB200 million in 35 minutes, and RMB300 million in 2 hours and 10 minutes and all the 590,000 products prepared were sold out. Colorkey, a new domestic cosmetics brand famous for its lip glaze, recorded over 1.5 million orders on the first day of the pre-sale.

Many international brands, by virtue of their leading advantages of high popularity, high transaction volume, and high customer unit price, easily achieved the goal of sales being over RMB100 million for single product.

For example, over 210,000 units of "Olay 4th Generation of Little White Bottle Water Essence", a word-of-mouth product in Li Jiaqi’s live streaming studio have been pre ordered shortly before the release of this report. Based on the unit price of RMB499, the total sales is expected to exceed RMB100 million. Even with a 10% refund rate factored in, the sales will be more than RMB 96 million.

In terms of the classic product Little Brown Bottle Eye Cream of the high-end skin care brand Estee Lauder, more than 151,000 units were pre-ordered in Li Jiaqi’s live streaming studio, and more than 84,800 units were pre-ordered in Viya’s live streaming studio, totaling about 236,000 units. The sales total is expected to be more than RMB125 million without refund.

At present, Double 11 has just kicked off, and the fierce competition among brands is on display. Who can stand out in this half-month long-distance race with endurance and strength? Cosmetic Business Online will continue to follow and report.