Two-hour Live Brings 300 million Sales, Indicating That the Booming Period of Garment Factory is Coming!

Live streaming selling is changing the practice and development trend of e-commerce platform. Specifically, connection between factory and e-commerce platform will become more direct and closer. In this regard, both factory and e-commerce platform may usher in a new booming period. 

Two-hour live streaming brings nearly 300-million sales“Oh, my god, just buy it! What a magic color it is! It looks fabulous! After catching sight of such wording, a number of girls are believed to think of the brainwashing marketing image of Li Jiaqi, Taobao's king of lipstick, who changes himself from a makeup artist at L'Oreal counter with a less-than-5000-yuan monthly salary to an Internet celebrity/influencing anchor with an annual income of more than one 10 million yuan. Such transformation is completed in two years. Meanwhile, he is also a Guinness World Records holder: within 5 minutes of live streaming, 15000 lipsticks were sold.

A female anchor, Viya, is another celebrity in Taobao live streaming. On the day of Double Eleven last year, after 12 o’clock at midnight on the previous day, her sales in live streaming room hit 267 million yuan within two hours after start of live streaming, with the all-day sales hitting over 300 million yuan. Each live streaming attracted an average attendance number up to 2.3 million. Her influencing capability is even equal to that of a B/C-list.

According to statistics, in 2018, the influencer sales on Taobao live streaming platform reached over 100 billion yuan, up nearly 400% ; 81 live streaming rooms achieved a growth value of over 100 million yuan, with each room equaling a successful entity; guided by 5 organizations, the volume of transaction exceeded 1 billion yuan; the annual single-consumer (deep pocket owner to buy 10,000-yuan products per day)’s consumption exceeded 10 million yuan. Just in a short period of over 2 years, Taobao live streaming platform has developed from scratch to a one-hundred-billion scale, and it will drive a transaction volume valued 500-billion yuan in three years. To serve the fast-emerging industry, over 600 first-tier e-commerce living streaming incubation companies have grown up with the platform, and most of them are located in Hangzhou. Meanwhile, larger Living Streaming economy is emerging.

According to the 2019 China "618" E-commerce Shopping Festival Report released by QuestMobile, the per capita use time/frequency of live streaming and online shopping users is higher than the mobile e-commerce full-web market data, and nearly 80% of such users enjoy the medium-to-high-level consumption level.

From the Data we can see Taobao live streaming witnesses a DAU of about 8 – 10 million yuan, and about 40,000 anchors per day, resulting in a GMV of 100 billion per year.

The cost for the female anchor who has annual salary of ten million yuan

A post-90s female anchor sunny who enjoys 610,000 fans on Taobao live streaming is the chief anchor of NARS, with merchandise on live streaming targeting middle and high-end women's wear. In her words, “It is normal to get a sale of over 5 million yuan on a single live streaming.” Young chief anchors like sunny with strong influencing ability can earn over 10 million yuan.

To gain a foothold for long-term development in live streaming industry, a good appearance level is far not enough and good contents for live streaming are needed. Besides constant live streaming, anchors may make time to acquire knowledge for more and better expressions.

“For example, I may read books and magazines on marketing, fashion and fabric and accessory, after all, the appearance level is an external factor but not an internal one for a long stay in the industry,” said sunny. For the future plan, she indicated that, besides multi-category and interdisciplinary development, she is ready to set up her own garment brands.

In the next-door live streaming room, Jia Li has just ended a 4-hour live streaming performance, puts on comfortable short-sleeved jeans, sits with legs crossed on a carpet and starts to read color matching-related books, which is quite different from hilarious moments in live streaming. There is a small cake next to her, one third of which has been eaten. As there is no time to have a meal during the performance, so she can only eat a small part of the cake. She has drunk 6-7 cups of water with scaphium scaphigerum next to her, but she still loses her voice.

After seeing the reporter, Jia Li smiles immediately despite of bloodshot eyes. She is a newcomer, being engaged in live streaming for only more than ten days. There are only several hundred people watching her performance, but she tries her best to show products and interacts with fans.

“I do it just because of Viya (Taobao top 1 female anchor), she is my idol. At ordinary times, I will watch her performance to learn from her if I am free. I hope to be like her someday in the future!” said Jia Li frankly. With the performance experience of only over ten days and three-digit number fans, but Jia Li has made a trading volume of over one hundred orders. As long as I am confident and devote myself into this career, I can do a good job!.”

Why celebrity live marketing is hot? 

There are many reasons.

Firstly, with the increase of the cost for e-commerce platform to acquire customers, the live streaming technology can be used to capture traffic and describe products and further reduce the cost of customer acquisition.

In addition, consumers, especially young consumers and those in the markets of cities ranked lower than third tier, highly rely on guidance by an opinion leader. According to the report from QuestMobile, post-90s and post-2000s generations (accounting for 40% of the total) have become the core consumers in mobile shopping industry due to their strong desire for shopping, proneness to induction and impulsive buying, so their online consumption capacity is obviously higher than that of the full web.

There was an industry insider did a survey, users of products recommended by Internet celebrities are generally females in third-tier or fourth-tier cities, as they live in small counties and are not confident of their taste and ability for purchase and selection of products, so they are easy to accept guidance from opinion leaders due to weak selectability.

In case of multiple choices on products, opinion leaders may, via live streaming-based shopping guide, enable part of consumers with weak selectability to reduce the time cost for selection. Live streaming featured by instantaneity and motivation may unceasingly motivate consumers’ mindsets for panic buying and following the trend.

Secondly, consumers have stronger demands for product personalization and become more inclined to seek for immediate gratification instead of delayed one. We find that these Internet celebrities almost change their promoted products every day, as live streaming influencer marketing mainly aims to motivate the buying inclination of users and make a change as required by consumers. If such change slows down, users’ impulsive buying may be usually lessened.

Therefore, from live streaming to ordering, production, logistics and to home delivery service, a one-stop solution for pain points of consumers in product selection is needed to produce products to satisfy plenty of consumers in the shortest time.

Just because of this, e-commerce platform operators also make some changes and turn to cooperating with upstream factories for fast launch and delivery of new products.

Live streaming marketing results in the booming period of garment factories

Live streaming selling is changing the practice and development trend of e-commerce platform. Specifically, connection between factory and e-commerce platform will become more direct and closer. In this regard, both factory and e-commerce platform may usher in a new booming period. 

In the previous C2M and ODM modes, although brand manufacturers can customize the production by connection with the e-commerce platform, the pain point is that there is no traffic or strong way of influencer marketing.

When the live streaming mode is used by the factory and e-commerce platform, manufacturers can be directly connected to consumers and know the specific needs of consumers through the front-end data from live streaming. Specifically, an upstream garment factory may produce several thousand or over ten thousand pieces of clothes in one style. A series of consumption data can be available on the e-commerce platform linked with products subject to the process of material selection, style design, sample making, scheduling and production. The live streaming mode allows for scheme improvement based on the consumption data to make the product closer to the size of the consumer and easier to meet the consumer's demand, as well as to estimate the number of orders more accurately, and to further reduce the overall cost.

Therefore, the sudden prominence of influencer marketing based on Internet celebrity live streaming eliminates the pain point and weakness in this regard. One major competitiveness in Internet celebrity live streaming selling is price competitiveness. Thus, the bottom price and the factory price may be emphasized to ensure small profits and quick returns. After the sales volume is raised to a certain level, the organic search ranking of the brand manufacturer in Taobao platform will be improved automatically to bring higher repurchase rate.

From this point of view, both the Internet celebrity anchor and ODM manufacturer can meet each other's needs, that is, the brand manufacturer provides anchors with competitive factory price, while the live streaming influencer marketing caters for the appeal of the brand manufacturer to traffic to bring higher Brand Propagation Force. Some practices of live streaming selling even allows for promotion of production equipment and logistics storage in factory.

Further, during cooperation between the factory and the Internet celebrity anchor, and with support by more anchor-induced traffic at the front-end of the platform, it’s possible to make substantial adjustment for products as per the feedback data from the platform, reduce product price and improve the speed to create popular series and the inventory turnover rate.

Live streaming has become a new development and growth point for various industries in the e-commerce platform. Let’s take the garment market for example. Since the introduction of Taobao live streaming in Hangzhou Sijiqing garment market in 2015, the sales model has undergone disruptive changes. So far, online sales have soared to about 35% of total sales. Apart from Taobao live streaming, Taobao has created one-million-level new jobs with the rise of the new content industry in recent years. Early in 2015, Taobao began to build a service system for content entrepreneurs. As of 2018, more than 1.6 million people have registered on Taobao platform.

From the above statement, in the new marketing model, the competitiveness in e-commerce market depends on fast and intensive development.