Source title: Luo Qingbo: Reinventor of China's Dry Cleaning Industry
If you count carefully, Luo Qingbo has been in the laundry industry for more than 20 years. In these 20 years, no one could have imagined that this laundry worker who started from the front line could stir up the industry and create a laundry empire that could change the entire Chinese dry cleaning industry.
Back to June 2016, the high-end laundry brand Aote Xifulai, which was founded by Luo Qingbo, had just launched an unprecedented "Partnership Plan" in the industry. This plan seeks to establish a closer long-term cooperative relationship with its franchise stores and consumers through investment, equity participation, and partnership dividends.
Once the "Partnership Plan" was promoted, it attracted the attention of countless peers. You know, Aote Xifulai has always had a benchmark position in the industry that leads the trend. What's more, less than a year ago, Luo Qingbo had just led the company to successfully develop the physical store online laundry and marketing service platform "Xiyi Ke". The heat ignited by this new thing has not yet faded, and he threw another "blockbuster bomb", which is really amazing.
As expected, the two major innovations that came out in succession triggered a disruptive change in the laundry industry. People can't help but be very curious about how this pioneer in the field played this unusual combination of punches.
[Continuously breaking through to achieve advanced transformation]
Change with the times and follow the trend. Every leap of Luo Qingbo is closely related to the development trend of the industry. Entering the second decade of the new century, almost all traditional industries have undergone fusion in the baptism of the Internet wave. Against this background, Luo Qingbo, who has a keen sense of smell, caught up with the trend and quickly promoted the launch of the O2O laundry platform "Xiyike". However, unlike many other pure online laundry platforms of the same period, "Xiyike" avoided the service loopholes that may be caused by the pure online model at the beginning of its birth. In order to always put the quality of laundry first, Luo Qingbo adopted the expansion of a single offline business into an online and offline dual-channel development. That is to say, the function of the "Xiyike" customer terminal is mainly focused on helping customers to quickly place orders on mobile phones, convenient door-to-door collection and delivery, and enjoy laundry services without leaving home, while the core laundry process is still rooted in offline stores. In the past, the professional and standardized laundry services were further "pushed" to the customers. This not only brings the benefits of the Internet economy to consumers, but also helps to increase the operating income of stores.
Luo Qingbo's scientific planning of "Xi Yi Ke" has provided valuable ideas for opening up a broader market for the laundry industry, but this cannot be regarded as the most important stroke in the development history of Aote Xi Fu Lai. If "Xi Yi Ke" is an inevitable choice to keep pace with the times, then the "Partnership Plan" is a pioneering and advanced innovation. The reason why the launch of this plan has attracted everyone's attention is that this marketing model will completely rewrite the long-term dilemma of "linking but not locking" in the laundry franchise.
"There are many chain franchises in China now, which are linked but not locked. We ourselves have encountered many problems when doing chain franchises. The franchisee has learned your technology, and you can't lock it at all. Even in this industry, many brands simply don't lock it, and pull it after collecting the franchise fee. In fact, this has caused great harm to the industry, which will affect more investors to enter this industry in the future and lead to the industry's depression."
How to break through and solve this phenomenal problem? Luo Qingbo has been thinking about it. For the brand, the fundamental reason for not locking in the chain is the short-sightedness of focusing on immediate interests, and not forming a real "community of shared destiny" with the franchisees. "Since we all know that the laundry industry is a sunrise industry and that opening a store can make money, why don't we dare to invest in franchisees ourselves?" After figuring out the reason, he began to brew a feasible shareholding plan and directly invest in franchisees in cash. Once you become one of the shareholders of a franchisee, the two sides will have a long-term interest relationship. You can share the profits and share the responsibilities for the decline in performance.
Relying on the online cash register management system developed earlier, Otto Xifulai can follow up the business performance of each store in real time and effectively provide follow-up support services. Once a store encounters operating problems, the marketing team at the headquarters will consult with the store in a timely manner based on the data analysis results to develop targeted solutions to boost performance. Under such a mechanism, Otto Xifulai's franchised branches can avoid the fate of prosperity and depression.
【Marketing and Technology Walk on Two Legs】
There is no doubt that the "Partnership Plan" is a harbinger of fusion for the entire laundry industry, but it is not comprehensive enough to simply regard it as an innovation to upgrade the franchise model. In Luo Qingbo's conception, "partner" is a two-way marketing strategy, and the recruitment targets are also open to consumers. Simply put, the "partner" facing consumers is to bring annual benefits to consumer customers. As long as you become a long-term user of Otto Xifulai, you can change your identity to become a "crowdfunding shareholder", making consumption itself a long-term investment behavior. In this way, you can not only enjoy the extremely preferential consumer prices, but also get corresponding dividends at the end of the year.
Such admirable marketing strategies are just the tip of the iceberg of Luo Qingbo's many pioneering actions. As early as 2005, he innovatively launched the "laundry and shoe washing store-in-store model", which alleviated the seasonal sales dilemma common in the laundry industry at that time. Even in the dry cleaning off-season in the hot season, the store can still rely on cleaning shoes to drive business.
Since shoes can be washed, can leather goods and accessories be included in the cleaning range? The answer is of course yes. With the substantial growth of luxury consumption in China, there is a growing demand for luxury cleaning in the market. So in 2008, Luo Qingbo began to formally target this potential market. He first led the entire team to visit Europe, Italy and other luxury manufacturing countries to learn advanced cleaning technology. After returning from the study, it took only one year for Otto Xifulai to launch the "Ecological Laundry Club" for one-stop cleaning of clothes, shoes and bags.
The concept of "one-stop cleaning" became popular in the industry overnight, attracting peers to flock to it, and even gave rise to widespread plagiarism and imitation. For a while, online laundry shops claiming to be "the first one-stop cleaning system" sprang up like mushrooms after rain, making it difficult for consumers to distinguish the authenticity.
However, the real strength of Otto Xifulai cannot be imitated. As the saying goes, "it has always been imitated, but never surpassed." Innovation in business model alone is not enough to support a laundry company to go further. For Luo Qingbo, if the novel marketing model is the secret weapon for Aote Xifulai to stand out from the crowd, then the cutting-edge and advanced laundry technology is the ultimate magic weapon for its invincibility.
Luo Qingbo, who has rich front-line experience, originally came from a technical position. "In 2000, China's laundry technology was still relatively backward. When I opened my first laundry shop, I mainly focused on overcoming the technical difficulties of laundry." As a young laundry brand, Aote Xifulai successfully developed fully automatic shoe washing and drying equipment in 2005 and obtained two national patents. With the support of this technology, Aote Xifulai also became the first pioneer to bring sports shoes and leather shoes cleaning services into the laundry industry.
In the subsequent entrepreneurial journey, Luo Qingbo never stopped investing in technology research and development. In just a few decades of development, the laundry industry has entered the stage of intelligent laundry technology competition. Otto Xifulai has also kept pace with the times. It has not only developed the fifth-generation fully enclosed environmentally friendly dry cleaning equipment (K4) that has won the recognition of international authoritative organizations and national patents, but also built a 2,000-square-meter intelligent assembly line central washing factory in East China to provide laundry services for 50 million middle- and high-end families.
"If you want your store to be profitable, you must expand your sales ideas in addition to relying on the technical system." If you ask Luo Qingbo what he relied on to overcome all the difficulties, the answer is the dual-core drive of innovative washing technology and breaking through the traditional business model.
[Industry ecological optimization is the foundation of development]
Although technology and marketing advantages are the key to Otto Xifulai's competitiveness, Luo Qingbo does not want to use this to grab the market and achieve a permanent solution. In his eyes, Otto Xifulai's technological progress is to contribute to the industry. Every step the brand takes should bring aggregation and siphon effects to the laundry industry, attracting those who originally did not go out to wash clothes to experience high-quality laundry services.
"I often tell our franchisees that the arrival of the Xifulai brand in a certain city is not to grab the market. Our existence is not to grab business because of our large scale and good technology, but to lead the local laundry industry to make the market cake bigger. Only by expanding the industry can we get better development space."
Luo Qingbo always formulates brand development strategies from the perspective of the entire industry, so he attaches great importance to the necessity of healthy development of the laundry industry. "For the past ten years, we have been cultivating the laundry industry and have been thinking about how to better improve the industry system so that consumers can trust this industry and be willing to send their clothes to us for cleaning." Due to the chaos and disorder of the laundry market in the past, roadside shops with poor standards and quality, and some blindly profit-seeking chain brands have brought a lot of negative impacts to the development of the industry. Now, if we want to save the industry's reputation and arouse everyone's confidence in the laundry industry, we can only ensure that every piece of clothing that enters the laundry shop can achieve results beyond their expectations when it is returned to the customer.
"Although technology can keep a company in the leading position, in the laundry industry, washing technology is used to improve the quality of laundry. Imagine if we are very conservative and hold the technology in our own hands, then the whole industry will only have us wash clothes well, while other laundry brands with insufficient technology will wash customers' clothes badly every day. This will only lead to consumers losing trust in the industry, and ultimately no one can grow big." Luo Qingbo particularly emphasized the importance of technical exchange and sharing in the laundry industry, especially in today's era of continuous improvement in the quality of life. Many clothes are made of high-grade fabrics, which cannot be washed with ordinary water. In the face of such a huge potential market, only by upgrading laundry technology and standardizing laundry processes can we further improve the service capabilities that meet the requirements of the times.
A truly branded corporate leader will often not only focus on his own popularity, reputation and influence, but also do his best to promote the upgrading and optimization of the entire industry ecosystem. Only by making the cake bigger can we go further. It is very appropriate to apply this principle to China's dry cleaning industry. As long as people wear clothes, there will be a demand for laundry, and laundry services, as a rigid demand in people's daily lives, determine the infinite possibilities of the development prospects of the laundry industry. Only by creating a good market consumption environment can we ensure the sustainable development of enterprises. It is based on this point that Luo Qingbo led Otto Xifulai to a higher platform and opened up a broader vision. People have reason to believe that such an ambitious enterprise can achieve greater success.
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