When it comes to dry cleaners, we are all familiar with them.
They are scattered in the corners of the community with an area of several square meters. This type of store is usually run by a couple, just like the dry cleaner in the movie "Fireworks in the Daytime", the man is rigid and the woman is kind. In my impression, dry cleaners are just small vendors, and have nothing to do with "everyone's lady".
It is hard to imagine what a small dry cleaner can do and what kind of waves it can stir up.
But there is such a company that has grown strong by relying on small dry cleaners - Otto Xifulai. The founder Luo Qingbo went from a layman to opening his first laundry shop, from six or seven employees to dry cleaning stores all over the country, and has grown rapidly at an extraordinary rate. Now it has presence in more than 20 provinces, cities and autonomous regions. The revenue capacity in 2016 is fierce. On the day when physical stores were widely hit by e-commerce, the expansion speed and considerable revenue of Otto Xifulai were admirable. Its success is almost an inspirational legend of ordinary people's counterattack for many small and medium-sized enterprises. It has to be said that this is a brand that has studied human nature very thoroughly.
Luo Qingbo is not tall, usually likes to wear a white shirt, clean and simple, nodding and smiling, very professional. Chatting with Luo Qingbo will completely overturn your previous narrow understanding of laundry: in his view, laundry is no longer a simple cleaning, every piece of clothing is a work of art created by the designer, and a professional laundry master is to continue the life of this clothing and let it continue to be perfectly displayed next time.
In 1997, Luo Qingbo came to Shanghai for the first time. In order to make a living, he entered a factory that sells dry cleaning equipment. After entering the factory, he was given two positions to choose from, one for management and one for laundry. Luo Qingbo, who had a unique vision, abandoned the worldly prejudice and chose the latter. He said that since laundry is a technical job, he wanted to learn a skill. The factory's laundry room, with a total area of more than 200 square meters, is filled with various professional laundry equipment. Luo Qingbo goes to work at 8 am every day and gets off work at around 7 pm. There are more than 10 employees in the laundry room who are dedicated to laundry, and they have to handle hundreds of clothes every day. Here, every piece of clothing has to go through a strict process. He has to keep a good "quality control" in every process. The process starts with picking up the clothes. After picking up the clothes from the tenants, they must first check whether there is any damage, and then classify and code them according to the fabric, washing method, color fastness, brand, etc. of the clothes.
Before cleaning, they must also go through a pre-treatment to clean the stained parts specifically. Each type of stain requires a different detergent. He has to choose the right one from more than 10 types of detergents in the laundry room. After these two steps, a piece of clothing will enter the formal cleaning period, dry cleaning or water washing. After washing, it needs to be dried, ironed, etc. After a set of processes, a piece of clothing will take at least 3 hours to be cleaned.
Luo Qingbo, who had just entered the industry at that time, was not satisfied with learning how to wash clothes cleanly, but spent a lot of time studying the problems in cleaning technology and marketing services. For this reason, he traveled thousands of miles to France to learn the world's most advanced laundry technology and equipment knowledge. As we all know, the off-season is a very worrying problem for the dry cleaning industry. By chance, an old customer brought his sneakers to him for cleaning. In order to serve customers well, he did not dare to neglect it, and the customer was very satisfied. This episode gave him inspiration. Luo Qingbo quickly launched the shoe washing business and was loved by a large number of users.
After several years of exploration, the fully automated shoe drying and washing equipment was finally successfully developed in 2015 and obtained the national utility model patent (ZL 2015 2 0398138.1). Since then, Luo Qingbo's "laundry and shoe washing store in store" model has been fully opened, attracting investors from all over the country to come to Shanghai for visits, learning and franchise. Therefore, Luo Qingbo registered the "Ote Xifulai" brand and embarked on the route of chain expansion.
With the large number of Chinese consumers traveling abroad to shop and the popularity of various overseas shopping websites, the consumption market of luxury goods clothing and bags in China has grown at an astonishing rate. The niche luxury goods market that was out of reach in the past is gradually developing into a huge market. However, there is a lack of professional stores in China that can effectively handle the cleaning of genuine leather for luxury goods clothing and bags. In first-tier cities such as Shanghai, the cost of washing a luxury bag is between 150 yuan and 1,000 yuan, while the cost of cleaning consumables is only a few yuan, and the monthly salary of a skilled luxury goods caregiver can easily exceed 10,000 yuan. This is a huge gold mine that is dying. The "one-stop service laundry club" has once again become a hit and has been favored by many customers. Many investors agree with his understanding and judgment of the laundry market. The benefits of this model can be summarized in three parts: including multi-sensory consumption experience, better logistics and consumer services, and strong and long-term brand relationships.
"Every customer who comes to our store for the first time will be amazed." Luo Qingbo said proudly that anyone who has been to this store will be left with a very deep impression. With curiosity, we followed Luo Qingbo into the Shanghai Songjiang flagship store for the first time. What caught our eyes were the beautiful toy dolls, leather bags and leather goods, as well as the bright European-style decoration. Whether it was the appearance design, the sense of grade, or the operation mode, it completely overturned our views. It doesn't look like a laundry shop, but more like a high-end club. In order to better provide value-added services to customers, in his laundry club, the downstairs is the washing area, and the upstairs is the cafe, chess and card room, and even the bar.
With the development of mobile Internet, Luo Qingbo keenly saw the opportunity of online and offline business integration: multi-sensory consumption experience is the "tip of the spear" to deal with online laundry platforms without offline stores. Luo Qingbo spent two years to develop the physical store online laundry and marketing service platform "Xi E Ke" in 2015, and took the lead in developing a single offline business into an online and offline dual-channel business. With the promotion of the "Xi Yi Ke" platform, Aote Xifulai gradually integrated the franchise store business all over the country into one platform, integrating all headquarters marketing resources, strategic customer resources and franchise store common operations, and thoroughly solving the long-term pain point of "chaining but not locking" in the chain service industry.
In order to further occupy the laundry consumption market in various regions and improve the profitability of franchise stores and the scale of single stores, Aote Xifulai headquarters tried the "new model of laundry club partnership" in 2016. The headquarters selects some franchisees, and with the support of the headquarters and professional institutions, they take out some store shares in the place where the store is opened, and directly develop some consumer customers with high-quality personal connections and super consumption ability into member shareholders. In addition to their own strong consumption ability, these customers can also mobilize the surrounding people to provide a stable source of high-quality customers for the store. These members are not only shareholders, but also customers of the laundry club, and sales staff of laundry services. The local personal connections of investors directly lay the customer base of this store.
Luo Qingbo's reality is to be a time-honored enterprise that can be passed down for a hundred years. To achieve this, it is necessary to establish a long-term and stable mutually beneficial relationship with franchise stores and customers, and the strongest bond between the three is shared profits. In order to better implement this marketing plan, Luo Qingbo began to organize a bigger chess game and explore a "community service empire" in the post-Internet era, using laundry as a starting point to mobilize more high-value-added products and service consumption. Closely interact with consumers, enhance stickiness, let consumers become members, let members upgrade to shareholders, let both customers and merchants wear "golden handcuffs", share the profits of brand development together, and ultimately achieve a win-win situation for consumers and stores.
Physical stores have been hit by e-commerce, and most companies have rushed to the online to seek vitality. Luo Qingbo has created a stunning new world in the cold "physical winter". The iron-clad business flow of the Internet industry has no unchanging rules, nor does it exist for a long time. If you want to be invincible in this fiercely competitive e-commerce attack, you must continue to innovate.
Drucker was interviewed by a reporter when he was 96 years old and about to die. The reporter said, "You have lived for more than 90 years, written 90 books, and you are about to die. Tell me, what is the position of business?" Drucker said: "Only shoes are real.