With the overall upgrading of residents' consumption level and the popularity of one-stop service, the consumption environment of the traditional home building materials market is changing quietly. Customized home furnishing has become a trend and is popular in the capital market. In 2017 alone, six customized home furnishing enterprises landed on the motherboard, and most of them raised the banner of "whole house customization".

Although there is no complete academic concept to define whole house customization at present, a basic manifestation is that the main business of the enterprise starts from a single category of household building materials and involves in multiple categories. For example, Sofia, which started from wardrobe, now also has flooring, cabinets and wooden doors, and many new categories have new brand names, such as Sofia's Simi integrated cabinet.

Alibaba has done the same for the benchmarking retail market

Dating back to 2008, Alibaba, which has flourished in the field of e-commerce, also opened a new brand beyond Taobao, which is now known as tmall.

In 2008, Taobao launched the B2C shopping mall for the first time. Then, in November 2010, the domain name of "Taobao Shopping Mall Tmall" was independent. This year, the trading volume of Taobao B2C business was already high, exceeding 30 billion yuan.

Then, speed up your run. In June 2011, Taobao Mall was split and operated independently. In September, 38 independent B2Cs were settled. In October, the threshold was raised until the new name Tmall was launched.

In this process, Alibaba has solved the following problems: first, it has solved the problem of the whole category, established a platform, and let various merchants enter, so as to get more users; Secondly, previously, we relied on self support to develop the whole category, developed the third party at the same time of self support, and used the third party merchants to accelerate the development of the whole category; Finally, after the development of the whole category, it is transformed from the original users to other categories, further stabilizing the original users.

Tmall broke the 12-year restriction on Taobao's brand, but for this purpose, Ali took a risky move. At that time, Ali did not expect that tmall would bring such benefits and become a landmark brand supporting Alibaba group.

There is also an obvious difficulty in front of us. For a brand that has already had a certain popularity, behind the shaping of a new brand is a high amount of marketing capital to cultivate users' recognition of the new brand. From the perspective of current Tmall and even JD with the same model, although it has paid some marketing capital, it is obvious that such a decision has brought success.

New brand matrix of customized home enterprises

According to the characteristics of the home furnishing industry and the specific stage of the current customized home furnishing development, most enterprises have taken the first step in the expansion of new categories, and some, such as Sofia, Shangpin Homefurnishing, Zhibang Shares and Oupai Home, have opened up new brands:

The new brands can be roughly divided into two directions, one is the new brand of category expanded on the basis of the original category, and the other is the differentiated brand set up for different consumer groups on the basis of the original customized home brand, which is basically a sub brand set up for the post-80s and post-90s young consumer groups.

As a customized home furnishing enterprise with the largest revenue and the largest channel scale at present, Oupai Home has begun to layout the bathroom products outside the cabinets in 2003; In 2005, the wardrobe business began to be distributed. In 2016, the wardrobe business of Oupai Home has contributed 45% of the revenue growth, becoming a new performance growth engine; By 2010, the category of Oupai furniture has expanded to the field of customized wooden doors, and the new brand name is "Oupani wooden doors". At present, there are 556 independent dealers of Oupani wooden doors; In addition, in 2017, the middle end product "oppoly whole house customization" brand for young consumer groups was born. For oPPy home, it is the expansion of the business model of the whole line, that is, to expand product categories horizontally and harvest consumer groups vertically.

The path of Zhibang shares is roughly similar to that of Europa, but it is a little slow in time. Started from cabinets, set foot in wardrobes, and added two customized sub brands "franfey" and "IK" for the whole house. The same is to adapt to the change of industry trends, promote different brands for different consumer groups, form new business category plans, and customize Zhibang kitchen cabinets, Zhibang wooden doors and franfei whole house for the main consumer groups of the middle class; For the Internet and other just needed consumer groups, we launched the overall customization of the emerging brand IK.

Sofia is quite different from the former two. Since the beginning of its layout of other categories, it has been connected with new brand names. In order to expand the category of big home strategy, Sofia has also set audience requirements for milanna doors, that is, to meet the demands of young consumers after the 1980s and 1990s.

The strategy of holaker, which started from the same wardrobe, is very different from that of Sofia. Although holaker has also stepped into the field of cabinets and wooden doors since 2017, all its new categories have retained the brand name of "holaker", and no new brands have been found.

What is more special is Shangpin home distribution, a representative enterprise of customized furniture. Since 2006, it has always adhered to the C2B business model of two major customized furniture brands, "Shangpin home distribution" and "Weiyi customization". However, although there is no too much publicity, the "Christmas Bird" under Weiyi Custom is still a mattress brand for consumers of different ages and shapes.

From the current development stage and layout of each company, we can basically get the following judgment:

From the expansion of categories to the shaping of brands, it is a change from the perspective of internal products to the thinking of external customers, forming a development model of expanding categories, levels and stages.

For enterprises (such as europai home) whose channel laying is nearly saturated, opening up new brand channels and re establishing direct stores or distribution stores has alleviated the current dilemma of difficult market expansion and entered the consumer market again with another look.

Benchmarking Taobao and Tmall has stabilized the original users. Similarly, while the customized home furnishing enterprises develop full categories and new brands, they can jointly complete the coordination of the big home furnishing strategy. In addition, they will also bind the original users again to a certain extent, deepening the recognition of the brand by users.

In addition, the initial stage of building a new brand is also in the stage of "testing the water". When the road ahead is unknown, it is the safest way to adopt a new brand. In the initial stage of the product not being polished and perfected, the use of a new brand will also avoid damage to the original brand to a certain extent.

Of course, similar to tmall, behind the shaping of the new brand is a high amount of marketing capital to cultivate users' recognition of the new brand. The opening of new direct sales stores or franchised distribution stores is a huge investment for enterprises, and no one can accurately judge whether it is worth the investment before it is verified by the true return.