Cai Hongliang was born in a small mountain village in Pan 'an, Zhejiang Province, and graduated from 1997 higher vocational school. He worked as an apprentice in mechanical and electrical maintenance, an electrical repairman, and opened an electrical repair shop himself, but he never made any money.
Cai Hongliang, 19 years old, decided to change places and came to Xiasha District of Hangzhou Entrepreneurship Base. Don't underestimate the place of Xiasha, where Foxconn, Master Kong and other Fortune 500 companies have settled.
Cai Hongliang was working in an electronics factory called Yidele. People are working, but their minds are all on starting a business. Cai Hongliang has seen Xiasha Industrial Zone all over, asking for dormitory, canteen and no convenience store!
At the beginning, Cai Hongliang immediately borrowed 50,000 yuan, first opened a convenience store downstairs in Yidele dormitory, and set up a stall in the commercial facilities. Cai Hongliang's small convenience store has facilitated tens of thousands of people.
And Cai Hongliang finally got lucky, earning over 10,000 yuan a month and making money!
In 2002, Cai Hongliang went to work in Xiasha Higher Education Zone and immediately had an idea. "Hangzhou Xiasha Higher Education Park, with an area of 10.9 1 square kilometer and about 200,000 teachers and students, is the largest higher education park in Zhejiang. Why not open a convenience store here? "
But the industrial zone is easy to enter, but the university town is difficult. Who doesn't know that college students' business is easy to do? Cai Hongliang had to find another way. Can't you get into the university town, and can't you get into the surrounding area of the school? Cai Hongliang found that the living area near the school was crowded but lacked of grocery stores.
In this way, the first herbal essence was born. The name comes from the story of Shennong tasting a hundred herbs. It is not afraid of failure, try more.
They all run grocery stores, but Cai Hongliang is different.
There are many kinds of snacks, such as cakes, nuts, sweets and spicy strips.
Optional sales, each guest can choose what he wants when he arrives at the store.
The emphasis is on quality and low price. Cai Hongliang considered that the students' fees were not high, and the unit price of the products he chose was around 10 yuan. And the price is relatively modular, for example, 6 yuan a catty of vegetables can be weighed together, and you can take whatever you want, which is humanized.
Good location, good products, good sales model, and the reputation of herbs spread among college students immediately. Cai Hongliang's turnover in two months reached 270,000.
Slowly, pharmacies blossomed everywhere on the campus of Xiasha University. In 2006, there were more than 140 offline stores with annual sales of10.50 billion. Cai Hongliang's herbal flavor is very famous in Xiasha.
Advanced course in industrial economics (eligible for doctoral degree)
According to this routine, it is not impossible for herbal shops to spread all over the country.
But 20 10, no e-commerce, no business. According to official statistics, the online retail transaction volume of e-commerce in China in 20 10 was 523 10 billion. Cai Hongliang who lives in Hangzhou is in the center of e-commerce. Ma's Taobao is in full swing. How can Cai Hongliang not be moved?
At 65438 on February 6 of that year, Baicaowei officially settled in Tmall, and Cai Hongliang immediately set a sales volume of 6 million in the first month, which made the team tremble! Later, Cai Hongliang spent almost 200,000 advertisements a day.
In fact, the herbal essence in the field of snack food was the first to touch the net. Three squirrels were founded on 20 12, and the good shop announced that it had touched the net in the second half of 20 12.
Cai Hongliang is more comfortable without an opponent. Daily order 15000. After opening the store for 4 months, the food category ranked first. You know, at that time, the daily turnover of offline Baicaowei store was less than that of 200 yuan!
Just as everyone cheered for the flowers under the Baicaowei line, Cai Hongliang announced that more than 40 offline/kloc-0 stores will be closed one after another and fully transferred to the offline!
But the team doesn't think so. In case online is unsuccessful and offline accumulation still exists, Cai Hongliang firmly believes that online sales are the general trend.
"Online and offline crowd coverage is different, online crowd coverage is very wide, and people with one mouth are your customers." It can be said that the market is wireless and resources are limited, and what Cai Hongliang has to do is to make an infinite market with limited resources.
In this transformation, Cai Hongliang changed his life. Moving from offline to online is not so simple, which means that Cai Hongliang has changed from a channel retailer to a manufacturer.
Of course, this is not difficult for Cai Hongliang who has been deeply involved in the food field for 12 years. Soon, Vietnamese cashew nuts, Australian macadamia nuts, South African pecans, Brazilian pine nuts, American paper walnuts, Turkish hazelnuts, California pistachios and other 12 categories all became Cai Hongliang's bag.
In China,, pineapple cake, Taiwan Province Province, Yunnan beef jerky, Lin 'an Carya cathayensis, Jingjiang dried pork, Zhuji Torreya grandis, Xinjiang Jujube and Cai Hongliang have established ecological planting bases for products in six producing areas.
In the production, Cai Hongliang insists that 100% does not add additives, preservatives, flavors and artificial colors, but uses plant extracts; Cai Hongliang took the lead in putting into aseptic closed production workshop and physical preservation system to store raw materials, semi-finished products and finished products in cold chain at a specific temperature.
With products, there is no shortage of supply chain. Wei Zhe, the former CEO of Alibaba, also gave Cai Hongliang advice: "In any era, its variable is to improve efficiency, especially the Internet, and intermediate links must be reduced".
Cai Hongliang also kept this in mind and spent two years perfecting the supply chain and logistics system.
In 20 14, Cai Hongliang invested 400 million yuan to establish nine storage bases in China, covering North China, East China, South China and Southwest China. This storage capacity is the largest in the field of snack e-commerce.
So how to improve efficiency? Artificial intelligence, of course! Cai Hongliang spent more than 40 million yuan to set up a delivery warehouse integrating picking, inspection, sealing and weighing.
Subsequently, a number of fully automatic picking and packaging machines were purchased to make the process fully automatic. No matter how many orders the user places, the robot will enter the battle in minutes, with a daily delivery capacity of 400,000 pieces, and 90% of the orders will arrive within 48 hours.
It is not impossible to rely solely on hard power. Cai Hongliang is also a good Internet marketer.
With constant interaction with Huang Jianxiang, Cai Hongliang took advantage of Huang Jianxiang's popularity in Weibo to personally interact with Huang Jianxiang, and they had a quiz on the three popular events of the World Cup in Weibo. Both sides promised that the losing side would send 1000 packs of snacks to the fans of the winning side.
During the interactive period, Weibo's comments exceeded 2,000 and were forwarded more than 1000 times. The number of fans of Cai Hongliang increased sixfold in three days. However, the market research report of Baicaowei shows that 70% of consumers are women, but most of the people watching the World Cup are men. What can we do?
Cai Hongliang is also throwing caution to the wind. Together with Huang Jianxiang, he performed the hilarious short play "Huang Jianxiang Demonstrates Girls' Correct" Posture in the World Cup ",which made men realize that the key to solving the problem is to invite women around them to watch the game.
According to incomplete statistics, the video reached 294,000 times a day after it was launched in Youku.com, while Tudou exceeded 320,000 times.
In addition to online hot push, Cai Hongliang also invited international first-line players such as Ronaldo and Messi to send jerseys for customers to sign. Based on the activity principle of "the highest order gets the signature jersey", it is said that the CEO of a listed technology group bought nearly 65,438+10,000 yuan of snacks for Messi jerseys!
Taking advantage of this east wind, Cai Hongliang created the 5. 17 Food Festival. At 9: 00 am on May 15, in an office building on Chun Qing Road in downtown Hangzhou, Cai Hongliang was invited as a deliveryman to deliver food to Miss Liu.
Advanced courses in finance (eligible for doctoral degree)
Seeing Xu Shaoxiong coming, the employees were surrounded by three floors inside and three floors outside, and there was an endless stream of photos and signatures. Then there is the process of sending friends, Weibo, and consumers to bask in welfare, that is, the process of sending herbal medicine circles crazily.
Cai Hongliang can find feelings more and more. "After 70, it is already in the second line of consumption, and the consumption power after 80 s and 90 s is getting higher and higher. Whoever can please young people better will win the market better. "
Cai Hongliang attaches great importance to the user experience. As early as 20 13, Cai Hongliang put forward the "old customer reform". Before August 15, Cai Hongliang began to send mooncakes to old customers, which won the hearts of many fans.
With wave after wave of marketing climax, the annual sales of Baicaowei in 20 14 exceeded 10 billion. 20 15 double eleven, Cai Hongliang reaped amazing sales of 65,438+56 million in one fell swoop.
But what you don't know is that Cai Hongliang is losing money, but Cai Hongliang said, "We don't regard Double Eleven as an opportunity to make money, but as the best opportunity to give back to consumers once a year."
Never thought, from August 2065438 to August 2006, Baicaowei was wholly-owned by Haoxiangyou Jujube Industry at a price of 960 million yuan. So suddenly, what is the reason?
First, I am addicted to traffic, but traffic is not money, and the conversion rate is not enough. According to a 20 15 statistic of iResearch, there are currently more than 6 million sellers on Taobao, and only 30% of them really make money; There are more than 60 thousand sellers in Tmall Mall, and less than half of them can make a profit.
Second, product innovation is not strong enough. Wine is not afraid of the deep alley, and food is not afraid of the narrow alley. Some media commented that Cai Hongliang put more energy into packaging and copywriting, "killing loneliness with food" and "not afraid of God opponents, but afraid of pig teammates". The trick of network marketing works once, but it is useless to use it repeatedly.
Third, money is spent on traffic promotion, platform commission and express logistics. The three expenses account for 6 1.4%, 69.8% and 68.8% of the sales cost respectively. This also means that most of the revenue contributed by online sales has been taken away by e-commerce platforms and express delivery companies.
And the users who spend money to burn out are not reliable. Per capita consumption is not as good as a year. The average unit prices of Baicaowei 20 13, 20 14 and 20 15 were 163.20 yuan, 15 1.35 yuan and 65438 yuan respectively.
But this is not the end of the whole play. On September 1 1, 2065438, Cai Hongliang announced in Weibo that he would be banned for three years and would no longer be interviewed by the media. In the next three years, Baicaowei will focus on enterprise transformation, and we will wait and see.