why is Modern China Tea Shop the YCY of milk tea industry?

At the end of December, 213, it was very cold. Under the overpass of Jiefang West Road in Changsha, Hunan Province, a tea shop opened.

This is quite out of place. Few tea shops open in winter. The peak season of milk tea is summer. At that time, in winter, everyone can only drink 1 billion fragrance a year. Not only is the timing wrong, the products are strange, and the decoration is not pleasing. Changsha's literary youth scolded on the Internet: "It's gaudy." The boss has no experience, so the first cup of milk tea made in the new store was "messed up" and put in good polysaccharide.

but this store survived. Why? The boss said, because the location is good, "a good dock sells shit." He wants to run the store well, make money, buy a house and a car, and join in more, and the business is almost done.

But what I didn't expect was that five or six years later, the tea shop under the overpass suddenly became popular, and it was searched in Weibo three times a year. Customers from other places can't get through, so they find a substitute to drink on idle fish and have an eye addiction. Fans even exaggerated to publish a "book of ten thousand people's blood" on Weibo, begging it to open Changsha.

If there are rice circles in the milk tea industry, then Xicha and Naixue are the official promoters, and this milk tea shop named Modern China Tea Shop is the "top stream". It suddenly became popular, and it was scared by itself. Others also doubted: Is your business ability ok? How far can you go by popularity?

when I opened the store, Modern China Tea Shop's boss, Lv Liang, was 34 years old. From the first day, his posture was very low. He told customers that everyone has a permanent claim for a cup of fresh tea. No matter when you buy tea, you can always ask for a new cup at any store as long as you feel it tastes bad. One reason is to attach importance to service, but the more important reason is that they often make mistakes and often "basket gourd ladle". No matter how bad the service is, others will not come.

A few years later, Pan Pan, an investor of Naixue and Tiantu Capital, also invested in Modern China Tea Shop. When explaining why he voted for these two milk tea brands at the same time, he emphasized: "Modern China Tea Shop has the ability to communicate with customers."

but at the beginning, this ability was also forced out.

In his early years, Lv Liang was fond of opening his mind. He set up a covered restaurant, and everything was ready. He only waited for the signboard to hang before opening. On a whim, he first made an empty signboard, then drew four question marks and hung it outside the store. Originally, I wanted to make a stunt, but as a result, no one asked, and I couldn't hold on during the trial operation. Opening a tea shop this time, he is honest, not tossing, just want to survive in the winter in Changsha.

I didn't want to imitate the prevailing model at that time, and made milk tea with non-dairy creamer and creamer. Lv Liang designed the product as "fresh tea+milk+cream+chopped nuts". Then you can't poke it down with a straw. You have to teach customers to eat nuts and cream with a straw first, then stir it, and finally drink tea. The names of milk tea are also strange, such as "Latte in a secluded orchid" and "Oolong in sound". They have to explain to customers over and over again what this thing is.

If you want to communicate with customers, you have to be WeChat official account. Lv Liang invited the young artist who called Modern China Tea Shop "gaudy" on the Internet at that time and treated him like a baby. The little girl has a good sense of network, changed from part-time job to full-time job, and didn't write too seriously, calling herself "Fish Man". Later, Modern China Tea Shop made a hot search on the receipt because she casually wrote: "We will sue them when we have money".

This is for those dealers who have joined under the name of Modern China Tea Shop. Because of honest and frank, it has become a golden sentence, and the effect is comparable to that of Yang Chao's sentence "I am the hope of the whole village".

this WeChat official account, he writes everything. Since a long time ago, the monthly food safety report has been published. The oranges are broken, the lemons are moldy, and there are mosquitoes in the cups. Write them down and then rectify them. Failure is the norm. Offline activities often fail. Every time I write an article to apologize, even if my office is stolen, I have to draw a cartoon.

In the company, Lv Liang is an uncle who is hard-working and plain-living. When his down jacket is broken, he sticks it with electrical tape. Other people also have personalities, except that the little girl is "Fish Man" and the designers are called "Chicken One, Two and Three". This personality continues to every drink in Modern China Tea Shop. They do online elections similar to AKB48, and each product has its own fans.

Because of this, fans allow Modern China Tea Shop to make mistakes. Why? Because they knew it was not perfect. This tea shop looks stupid and has weaknesses, but it is very vivid. These are advantages in cultivating idols.

not perfect, but fond of powder. Some stories that are often mentioned are that one rainy day, a shop assistant lent an umbrella to a customer, and later all the shops had umbrellas. A girl complained in the shop that her shoes had worn her feet, and the clerk sent a band-aid. Later, all the shops had small medicine boxes. A student finished the college entrance examination, and the clerk filled in his membership card number as his ideal score. Some new drinks are even named by fans. If the new product is put on the shelf and reflected flatly, it will come back as soon as the fans call.

Modern China Tea Shop's first hot search was when the founders of Xicha and Naixue chatted with each other in a circle of friends. A fan said on Weibo that if Modern China Tea Shop travels all over the country, it should be arranged clearly. This Weibo won 2, likes.

Liu Jia, a tea planner in Changsha, said that colleagues in Changsha often talk about what Modern China Tea Shop's core competitiveness is. To put it bluntly, "it is the maintenance of fans. At this point, Xicha didn't do it, and Naixue didn't do it."

In the past two years, she has often been asked by some local bosses: Can you make me a shop similar to Modern China Tea Shop and move to our county? Hearing this, Liu Jia quickly persuaded him that it was too difficult. This whole system was made by Modern China Tea Shop from birth, so fans can accept it. Is it possible for you to do it now?

YCY was questioned about his professional level when he debuted. Modern China Tea Shop was also born at the grassroots level. After being promoted to the national vision, he didn't have to be questioned by others. The boss himself was already scared and felt that "Germany is not worthy".

after three years of opening, this tea shop finally welcomed the first professional manager in history. He Yiting, a girl who graduated from four famous universities in Changsha and got her first job in the super girls program of Hunan Satellite TV, had worked in commercial real estate for tens of thousands of people before joining.

At that time, Modern China Tea Shop was working on the third floor of Taiping Street Store in Changsha, and He Yiting ran up to have a look-for three years, all the employees of this company were two in the brand department, two in the finance department and two in the personnel department. That's all, there are always no more than ten people.

in the first week at work, she was half dead with anger. Every quarter, the store will use a lot of printed materials. She asked her subordinates: Where are the company's printed materials order record and bills for the last quarter? I don't know Do you still have the invoice? It's gone. What about the printer's quotation sheet? Ask three questions and don't know.

The subordinates were also surprised: "Ah! It turns out that regular companies work like this. "

Lv Liang graduated from junior college and got his undergraduate diploma by taking the self-taught exam. There are rumors on the Internet that he came back from studying in Australia, which is all imagination. He said that people who can come to the milk tea industry didn't run very well in the first half of their lives. "No one has good grades, and no one with good grades will come here to make a living."

Modern China Tea Shop was recruited by the school, and the personnel supervisor told Lv Liang that there was no need to go to the university town in Changsha, and only by going to a vocational school could people be recruited. In 218, the company's engineering department finally recruited the first graduate student in the company. In this regard, the department director has been proud for a long time.

In He Yiting's view, this so-called "poor running in the first half of life" means that employees have not received professional education. After she arrived at the company, she did one thing, giving her subordinates a form and asking them to write down what to do next. In the professional environment, this form is invisible and has been in everyone's mind for a long time, but Modern China Tea Shop should write it down because it will be more difficult to institutionalize and scale it.

Lv Liang's sister, who is also one of the founders of the company, works as a manager here, but can't use computers. She is the only person in the company who works with paper materials now. This is perhaps unimaginable in an institutionalized large company. This is true in Modern China Tea Shop, but it may not be applicable in the whole industry.

At the same time, in the south of Hunan, Xicha in Jiangmen, Guangdong, and Naixue in Shenzhen were both teams led by the founders of the post-9s generation, and by that time, Ma Zhuang was already better.

Nie Yunchen, the founder of Xicha, whose idol is Jobs, thinks that Apple is the greatest company, so the IT department has the largest number of employees in Xicha. Peng Xin, the founder of Naixue, was the manager of an IT company before starting a business. He lived exquisitely. In order to meet the needs of urban women, he took photos and adjusted them more than a dozen times according to the size of his palm.

Some time ago, Lv Liang had a chat with Nie Yunchen, the founder of Xicha. They have different anxieties. There are a lot of negative news this year, such as endless food safety issues, such as quality control, such as disputes between shop assistants and takeaway brothers. As a head brand, he has too many troubles.

At that time, Nie Yunchen said to Lv Liang, "It's very kind of you to be anywhere."

What Lv Liang is worried about is whether this kind of love can last long. He thinks that people like Modern China Tea Shop because they help the weak. "It's hard for people to have a good impression on large-scale things, and it's just a lot of criticism and questioning about the head brand. There are brands that copy hi-tea and Naixue. Why is everyone's reaction not so great, but copying Modern China Tea Shop is not allowed? Because the tea face is small and needs to be protected. "

When Aidou is a trainee, you can be tolerant, but when she starts singing and filming, the requirements may be different.

He Yiting, who works as a brand in Modern China Tea Shop, understood the meaning of the word "fans" early because her first job was in super girls. From the beginning, she decided to make Modern China Tea Shop a nurturing brand like TFBOYS, and grow up with fans, all of whom are pro-mom fans.

But once she went to a training course, she met people from Xibei Youmian Village and said to them, "Your Xibei is great. You have developed well in the past two years." At that time, people replied to her: "We have been in Xibei for 22 years."

This sentence gave her a shock, and she had to stop and think about it-"Cha Yan became famous in drinks relatively early, and it belongs to a child star. It is Andy and Zray. However, some people have gone through a longer period of precipitation and dormancy before coming to the audience, which is already very solid. I'm also thinking, is it right for us to do this? Growing up in the spotlight is not an easy task. "

They have to face the same problem that traffic stars face, that is, how to make peace with their own people. People in Modern China Tea Shop are too well-set, which they managed by themselves in their early years, but people have more faces. Once these faces are placed in the public eye, can they really stand scrutiny? Lv Liang is not sure.

A very realistic example is that Modern China Tea Shop wants to raise prices, but dares not. The signature product, a cup of Youlan Latte 17 yuan, was priced two years ago. In recent years, raw materials, manpower and other peripheral costs are rising, and according to the truth, prices are also going up. But what is embarrassing is that the fans' setting for Modern China Tea Shop is an "iron handyman" (honest man). What Lv Liang is worried about is that if it goes up, everyone will think that "if you are red, you will go up", so they will take off their powder, so they have been carrying it, and until now they have not come up with a good solution to this matter.

There was a question about pricing in Modern China Tea Shop in Zhihu, and it was full of praise from fans. The founder of "Mourning Tea" wrote a passage: "As a profit-oriented organization, it is necessary to maintain a reasonable profit rate. The gross profit of tea brands is the bottom line. People need money, rents need money, and water and electricity also need money. If Modern China Tea Shop's gross profit was really less than 25%, it would have died a long time ago. I hope that fans will be rational and don't push Modern China Tea Shop to the dead end of compressing profit margins. "

The dilemma set by people also bothers Lv Liang himself. In WeChat official account, Modern China Tea Shop, he is a man who rides an electric car around Changsha. But in fact, riding an electric car is not because of poverty, but because of the road conditions in Changsha business district, and driving is simply unrealistic. In fact, he has a car at home, which he thinks is not bad, but every time he thinks about driving, he has to think about it: if I drive out now, if someone sees it, will it collapse? On second thought, I'd better forget it.

the tea industry is no longer what it was five years ago. With the inflow of capital and the upgrading of consumption, the market has become fully competitive today. By this year, the competition is more intense. Xicha is led by Tencent and Sequoia, with a valuation of 9 billion. When the economy is in a downturn, tea has become a rare new track, and all the top organizations want to participate. "It's hard to squeeze in if you break your head" and "you can win if you can get in", and Xicha chose the best two.

It turned out that Lv Liang wanted to be a small and beautiful tea shop, and only one item was needed. "But now, the exam is decathlon." Capital, creativity, team, culture, products ... one item counts. What capital wants more is to push Modern China Tea Shop to the front of the whole country.

In May this year, an offline market was held in Modern China Tea Shop, which turned over. According to the plan, customers can exchange the points of buying milk tea for the area around Modern China Tea Shop that day. Many people rushed to the event site from far away, only to find that there were too many people to squeeze in. The admission rules have changed again and again. The people who arrived in front failed to enter, but the people who came behind went in. Change the perimeter for a few dollars, and charge postage.

At the bottom of WeChat WeChat official account that day, there was a large-scale scene of "powder turning to passers-by". If this is regarded as a team training in planning and execution, Modern China Tea Shop can be said to have failed. However, some fans earnestly wrote: "I don't know if you are a particularly young team. What I want to say is that to hold an event and run a comprehensive event, you must invite experienced people to organize and plan, and the role of apologizing in business is minimal."

But after this activity, one advantage is that they used to be asked every day: Why didn't Modern China Tea Shop leave Changsha? They say they are not strong enough, and others don't believe them.

this time, everyone believed it.

It really takes time for grass roots to love beans to grow up.