A corner of Wenheyou in Changsha / Tupelo

Wen/Zuzi

"You've pawned time, so you'll have an unexpected dream."

On the opening day of Shenzhen Super Wenheyou, its official Weibo account released a short microfilm-style promotional video about its birth in order to fit Shenzhen's "peculiar and magical" temperament, and to record the "laughter and tears on the way to making dreams" of Shenzhen people. The whole process.

The above quote is the first sentence of the short film. Those who later patronized Shenzhen Super Wenheyou also discovered that the real meaning of this statement should be: "You wasted your time and queued up for a day just for a meal and a few photos, which in itself is surprisingly magical.

Half a month ago, Wenheyou, Shenzhen, lined up more than 40,000, blocking an entire street.

As a company whose main business is to engage in catering, Wenheyou, whether it is the footprint, or the number of people waiting for a place, has created a record. A great deal of skepticism, too, came with the traffic.

For example, when Wenheyou emphasized its vision of "being a cultural company and becoming the Disney of China's food industry," some people accurately captured the only similarity it currently has to Disneyland, which is the queue waiting at the entrance.

For example, when Wen and Yau cited "a brief escape from reality and a moment of relaxation" as its business philosophy, a number of people agreed, because this large-scale Kowloon Walled City-themed escape room does tend to make people dizzy, confused about north and south.

For example, when Wenheyou positioned itself as a "museum of urban culture", there were many more people who decided that it was just like visiting a local museum, and that one visit was enough.

Entrance to Guangzhou Wenheyou / Photo Bug

It can be seen that over the years, Wenheyou has been in and out of the court of public opinion, but the "food" and "flavor" that should have been the main character seems to have quietly retired.

Does this mean that Wen and You have finally gotten what they wanted, a "cultural company"?

I thought it was a fast-food Netflix under capital

I didn't realize it was really an inspirational history

Let's start by remembering how many shopping malls there are in your city today.

Are there a Starbucks at the front door, a McDonald's or KFC at the back, maybe a Nespresso or a Hi-Tea at the end of the first floor, and chains of all sizes occupying the top and basement floors?

For brunch, lunch, dinner, brunch and afternoon tea, these outlets have been throwing their own seductive scents into the cool air of the mall to lure customers in.

Few merchants can compete with Starbucks for space.

When customers say they're browsing, they're really just browsing.

They only have to look close to find out that the so-called creative food stores are probably just reheating centers for factory bagged food;

the seemingly endless choices are actually just the same dishes served in differently designed spaces; and

at the few remaining stores that have been recognized as trustworthy, the wait is always longer than the wait for a meal.

It's hard to choose what to eat. These stores make up the most popular areas of each mall, but they also create a false sense of prosperity for the city's food scene.

The city doesn't taste good, it only smells like money. It became common for old stores to close and new ones to open, feeding only the neighborhood packers.

Changsha Gourmet Walled City / Tupelo

For Wen and You to stand out in this environment, it must have been a case of "we're different" etched into its DNA at an early stage. But the story begins 10 years ago on Pozi Street.

Pozi Street in Changsha has been a heavy traffic area since ancient times. Once upon a time, it was the northern guest Shan-Shan, the southern guest Suzhou and Hangzhou, money, medicine, cloth, here in a hundred industries competing for supremacy; later it became and the City God Temple, Fuzimiao shoulder-to-shoulder snacks Street.

Together with the Wuyi commercial district, IFS, there is a trend of young people in Changsha must go to worship every day. People who have never been to Changsha have heard the story of the guardianship of Jiefangxi near Pozi Street.

Screenshot from the Netflix documentary "Guardian of Jiefangxi"

Version 1.0 of Wenheyou is a skewer stall run by founder Wenbin alone. He left a lot of legends on Pozi Street in the first 3 months after he started -

Like Ming Ming's startup fund was only 5,000 RMB, he spent 2,000 each on buying a car and materials, and the rest of the money was used to make the IP and signboards, so that people could recognize his stall at a glance.

Or like the invention of the popular snack "sharp ribs", hundreds of people are willing to line up to taste a bite.

And when other stallholders were making up to $400 a day, he set himself a small goal of doubling that amount, and he achieved it.

A year later, Wenbin escaped from his city management nightmare and started a regular business in the 10-square-meter Old Changsha Deep-Frying Society, which caught fire on "Tian Tian Zai Shang"; and then, a year or two later, he opened the Old Changsha Lobster House and created Old Changsha Big Sausage.

Skewers

From a single skewer, to the later 2.0, 3.0 version, Wen Heyou can be said to follow the "old Changsha" this vine, not only to understand the taste of the local people in the snacks likes and dislikes, but also to build up a variety of high-quality ingredients supplier relations, all of these are for the super Wen Heyou planted The first thing you need to do is to get your hands on a new one, and you'll be able to do that.

The business is getting bigger and bigger, there is data that year, 1400 square meters of lobster hall, annual sales can be more than 100 million yuan, but at this time, Wenbin is no longer satisfied with the bit more and more incomes.

In a media interview in 2018, he talked about his understanding of "delicious": "delicious is an emotion, I eat it to make me happy is delicious. It's not just the sense of taste, but ultimately the five senses that move the heart to make up the emotion. Only one sense is guaranteed, and that one sense is not the only one that can bring emotions."

The Old Changsha Big Sausage, which took half a year to develop, became a legend in the sausage world.

One year later, the "brand new species" of the restaurant industry, Super Wenheyou, was born in Hisense Plaza in Changsha.

It is no longer a restaurant squeezed by international brands and kept in a corner by the shopping mall. With a floor space of over 20,000 square meters, the street scene of old Changsha in the 80s has been brought into the interior through a flexible transformation.

The restored scenes of life in Wen and You.

Ice skating rinks, pig farms, video parlors, foot baths, and marriage agencies have all been restored, from the mottled walls to the cyberpunk-flavored cable cars to the silk floral shirts drying outside the "balcony" and the red double-hei enamel cylinders filled with crayfish, one can see what old Changsha looked like before it was transformed.

And when the NPC-like waiters guide customers to sit down, they can smell and taste, but also Wen Heyou from the beginning of the business began to give customers "brainwashing" of the old Changsha flavor.

Customers have also become actors in these scenes.

In the end, Super Wenheyou was able to repay Hisense Plaza's rental concessions with a daily traffic of no less than 10,000 people, as evidenced by the "counting of chopsticks". Its daily turnover rate has reached 8.5 times, and it is rumored to have made a successful return on investment in 10 months.

Asked Wen and Friends and other net red store is not the same where?

The first investment in Wenheyou came after the opening of the Hisense store. The person in charge of the capital later said in a media interview that he saw in the clutter of the super Wenheyou "connecting emotion and mind, a very deep sense of humanity.

With this wave of sentimentality, Wen and Friends went on the road to continue to hang on.

Wen and Friends

Isn't it just a gourmet street with batter?

In the recently popular anime Spellbound Battle, there's this invincible setup. The first thing you need to do is to get your hands on a new set of tools, and then you'll be able to use them in a way that's easy for you to use.

In other words, as long as you're in this space, whether it's the aroma of stinky tofu, the sound of children screaming and playing, or the overly intimate distance between people because of the crowding, it's all going to hit you in your memories, your youth, and take you back to old Changsha in the 1980s, reveling in the hustle and bustle of consumption - and it doesn't matter if you have any memories of that time in Changsha. For that time Changsha has no memories, to whether or not you have reached puberty.

Super Wen and friends, is the field to unfold ah! This is a "must-have" for customers.

"Spells back to the war" five of the field of enlightenment to unfold.

This is an "invincible" move, but is it broken?

Yes. Since it is a dream, Wen and You's greatest fear should be that the customer will suddenly wake up and start to think calmly.

This is not, as long as a thought, in Shenzhen Wen and friends outside the door of a street away from the location of the people in line, you know, "dare I take a car to Guangzhou or Changsha, can also eat faster.

Some people think about it and realize that the strongest selling point of Wenheyou, scene creation, is not so Changsha. Some modern neon lights, dense store signs are also pasted into it.

An article in Art & Design analyzed that, like the super Wenheyou category, the stacking of vertically oriented signboards and the dense flow of information can easily create the feeling of "rich content is worth exploring", which is suitable for taking photos, and is also in line with the current commercial appeal of "everything is Netflix! "

This is the first time I've seen a Netflix site in the United States.

But this kind of bustling street scene must come from a market where capital business is extremely developed.

Telling a story in such a space, telling it well, is Kung Fu.

Telling a bad story can also be "Rooftop Love".

A generation of people, while tracing their time memories of the old city, also collages the subtle influence of Hong Kong film culture on them.

Evidence: rumor has it that in the early days, Wenbin also boasted of being the king of Pozi Street.

That's not a bad thing, after all, this whole culture thing is supposed to be all about blossoming and intermingling. This is a clue to the fact that not only does Wen and You look like a housewife, but they are also doing the work of a housewife.

It wants the land with the shopping malls, and then gives it to the candy chestnut stores, foot-washing towns, and small commodity wholesalers, inviting them to **** together to create a good old time, and the story is beautifully made up, but the actual identity is also a "second landlord".

Guangzhou Super Wenheyou, for example, earlier media reports, the first batch of tenants do not have to pay store rent and utilities, but 30% of the turnover must be shared with Wenheyou. This also led to the late business, Netflix temperament faded, store revenue is not as expected, less than half a year before the breakup before it is too late.

Guangzhou super Wenheyou Figure / Xiaohan

Throughout the life cycle of a super Wenheyou, in addition to the scene in the early stage of the creation of the opening period of marketing, the more to the late stage, should be the protagonist of the more and more missing, turn back to focus on frying their own 200 copies of crayfish.

Into the field of business, but also their own independent business, as in the Wenheyou opened a dispensable branch. In this overcrowded space, people are scattered.

Now we may as well think again, I have to go to Shenzhen Wenheyou queue is the reason why?

Is it that the stinky tofu here smells better than outside? Is it the fact that I can buy a limited edition bag or sneakers that I can't get outside after I queue up?

Is it because I can buy a card at the food court or the food court, and then just stroll around the flat and get the same snacks, but I have to walk through a maze and climb a few more flights of stairs to get my fix?

Oh! Maybe it's because the rest of Shenzhen doesn't have a tea ceremony.

Wen and You want to be a cultural company, but it's always been hard to describe to consumers exactly what kind of culture they're championing, which makes the company as susceptible to being sealed in place as their hand-crafted, customized old-timey stuff.

If you look at other industries, there are many that are similar to Wen and You, but that speak to culture.

Like borrowing the identity of the second landlord to turn over the sincere bookstore, low-margin bookstore is responsible for the transmission of humanities and the beauty of art to the customer, the brand to collect goodwill.

And the spirit of the elevated customers turn around, they can go to the nearby galleries with the same temperament, exquisite restaurants, cultural and creative stores, to fulfill their fantasies of a better life.

In the end, these tenants give back to Chengpin by paying rent, supporting the bookstore's survival.

Chinese consumers are also more familiar with Xiaomi. Xiaomi's phones are cheap because it's an internet company that sells them just to make you a little hundred bucks and make friends.

But when Xiaomi took these friends by the hand, and brought them to many third-party APPs, ideas about design, intelligence, and the future are all colliding with each other in the open platform, and the traffic has given birth to a huge cash space.

Fan culture, which both companies have, is a powerful strength that Wen and You lack.

Perhaps the culture needs to be tested over a longer period of time before it can be recognized; but Wen and You will have to get closer to Sincere and Xiaomi on their way to Disney.

It's not impossible. Some time ago a microblogger said to see the Marvel heroes appeared in the Disney fireworks show, "exploded on the spot". I wonder if the capitalized Man and Friends, seeking to find its gastronomic world of Marvel did not?

Who gave Wen and You

Define the qualifications of the nation's fireworks?

In an earlier interview with China Entrepreneur magazine, Wen Bin talked about the so-called manufacture of netizens, is to propose and solve problems.

How to explain? He cited the example of Ford building a car. Legend has it that if Henry Ford had asked consumers what they wanted, and got the answer "a faster horse," the automobile might not have come into existence.

Calvino also wrote in The Invisible City, "What you love about a city is not the seven or seventy wonders, but the answers she gives to the questions you ask, or the questions she can ask to force you to answer."

As a Changsha waif who has lived on Pozi Street for two or three decades, Wenbin has a precise insight into the huge void that exists in consumers, unnoticed by themselves, the time they have inadvertently, or had to, leave behind them in order to follow the swiftness of the city as it runs forward, past and still precious.

The success of Wen and You in creating a scene has everything to do with the light of the moment in which it is set.

Wen and You visualize these gone ones as a flowery shirt hanging outside the wall that no one has put away; or that sausage that you tasted when you were a child, and then clamored for adults to buy it every day. This is a way of solving problems that goes right to the five senses, and it's moving.

But from another point of view, if we detach from the speed of development of Changsha's Netflix city, there is no entertainment industry, the night economy to bring the influx of people, and then create a super Wenheyou, the possibility is extremely low.

What is the difficulty of using the current economic environment and technology to build a city of the past?

But what about the future?

We see what Wen and You look like after leaving Changsha, in Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Street legend fried snail Ming, order a dish of snails, send a song of Anita Mui.

A year ago in Guangzhou, Wen and You filmed the documentary "Street Chef" about the unfortunate and difficult life of barbecue stalls and beef stall owners, and the stories of their still kind and shining.

Most of the protagonists of these stories were taken in as its tenants. In an interview with 36 Krypton, Weng Donghua, general manager of Super Wenheyou, said that in a situation where itinerant hawkers are generally evicted, Wenheyou is not only "solving the problem of survival and inheritance for the merchants" and providing shelter for the hawkers, but also "passing on the culture of the marketplace and preserving the city's smoky atmosphere". "

Documentary

In the documentary, the fried snail Ming and the old lady Chen, who sells beef minced meat, are very much in line with the city's fireworks of Guangzhou; Wen and You helped them to "take root", which is also in line with the narrative style of the guardianship of the old times.

Dongshan and Xiguan are the old times of Guangzhou, and none of them are in Wenheyou.

But then again, the businesses that have settled in Wenheyou are themselves the "light of the people's choice", having won a brutal battle on the streets of Guangzhou.

Guangzhou people's obsession with food is itself a kind of protection for these vendors, and survival is no longer the most urgent problem they have to solve.

Even if you continue to "wander the streets", there will be many people like and beetroot wrote, 11 pm drive from Shenzhen, 3:00 am until the end of the friend, we go to eat a midnight snack, chat, or just sit in silence. They come in the middle of the night and leave at dawn. "Counting should be a thief, every time you run to Guangzhou to steal a little bit of human fireworks and then turn their heads and flee."

The city of Guangzhou beyond Wen and You. / unsplash

Wen and You, however, has become a spoiler. It extolled its great mission in a high profile, and then immediately interpreted the street smokiness of Guangzhou into a noisy within the gastronomic complex. The more popular the marketplace cultures it creates, the more these cultures detach from the marketplace.

It is said that at the end of May 2020, Wen Bin, who became a new student at Lakeside University, started his studies with this question: "A foreigner goes to Beijing to eat Changsha stinky tofu, this scene is definitely problematic."

A year later, the Shenzhen Super Wenheyou opened, from the "popularity is not good" deep sheng oyster good-looking, he still did not figure out how to solve this problem.

Wen and friends caught in a dilemma. Only solve the problem of Changsha people, it can only stay in Changsha. But out of Changsha, it can't even see what problems exist for people living elsewhere, let alone create anything for them.

Late-Night Dining, which came to China, is not a good fit.

It's a shame that no domestic remake of Late Night Diner has succeeded.

It will take time to solve the problem. Perhaps when the hustle and bustle wears off, and Wen and You start to think like a real Guangzhou drifter or Shenzhen drifter, and think about how to put down roots and survive in the city, then it can truly explain the fireworks here.

Penetrating Wenheyou's disguise - Liu Yuhao

Average daily queue of 3,000 tables, revealing Wenheyou's business evolution - Wu dislike

From roadside stalls to 10,000 people waiting for a seat in line, how did the net red Wenheyou build? -Pinecone Finance

Super IP Wen Heyou, how many more "pits" do you have to step in? -Times

The Guangzhou store is facing challenges, and the expansion of super Wenheyou has two major "hard wounds" - Red Dining

The super Wenheyou has a mixed reputation, and Wenbin's dream of "Disney in the restaurant world" can be realized? -Melting Finance

The underlying logic and boundary conditions of the super Wenheyou explosion of popularity - Shou Wenbin Strategy Consulting

Wind tube Hui quit Wenheyou, how to keep the sentiment narrative fresh?

Wenbin: even if it is a stall, I want to do the brand - Xiaoxiang Morning News

Experienced Shenzhen Wenheyou: when the city culture, into a new consumerism - Rui Qiu

"Zheng Kai hot pot store" why do they love to hang "old signboards "

Guangzhou with Fried Snail Ming - Tank Side Past