Nice Wants To Be A Poison, But Poison Wants To Be Nice

After the "NBA" incident broke out, CCTV and Tencent sports announced that they would stop broadcasting NBA games, and many enterprises that cooperated with NBA announced that they would stop cooperation. In the shoe circle, the shoe trading platforms such as poison and nice all urgently removed NBA related products. A story began to spread: "there is an old brother who has hoarded 50 pairs of NBA joint names, and now it is on the roof."

The business of some shoe dealers will inevitably be affected, but it is too arbitrary to say that this incident will completely cool the domestic shoe market. Not to mention the final development of the event itself (Tencent sports has resumed the live video of some NBA games yesterday), NBA co branded shoes only account for a small part of the whole shoe market, and most of them are non limited shoes. The popularity of these shoes is quite different from the "popular" shoes with high speculation prices. I'm afraid everyone's enthusiasm for hot shoes will not disappear for a while.

At the beginning of September, Levi's official public account released the sales information of shoes co branded with Nike. Two pairs of "Air Force 1" Air Force 1 were priced at 1299 yuan for high top and 1199 yuan for low top. Users need to register for lottery on Levi's official website, and the winner will be eligible to purchase. However, at 9:00 a.m. on September 6, when the lottery registration started, it was found that Levi's website had collapsed - 403 Forbidden, and no one could see the registration entrance.

It's not surprising that there are too many people who want these shoes. There are all kinds of rumors about the quantity of shoes. Some people say that only 200 pairs are issued in China. Over limit means super high resale price in secondary market. On the shoe trading app of the day, Levi's co branded price has been close to 20000. Who will let go of the 1500% profit margin? When a large number of users swarmed into the shoe pumping activity page, Nike official and Alipay had a short-term record of being "washed out", Levi's was not immune.

However, 403 did not disappear with time, and most users were still unable to register until the afternoon of that day. In the shoes group, everyone's mood turned to panic, and they began to worry about whether they would not be able to get on the track after the registration time. Occasionally, someone in the group said that the registration was successful, they would be frantically asked "skills". Some people even sell "Levi's agent registration" service on idle fish for 10 yuan each time.

In the scolding of Levi's, a group of friends commented:

He underestimated the shoelace.

Why are the shoes on fire?

Just two days after Levi's co registered, CCTV2 "half an hour of economy" broadcast the special topic of "speculation in the river and lake of shoes", calling for "don't fry shoes, be careful of risks".

Nowadays, the shoe market has changed from a small minority cultural field to a hot economic phenomenon of national concern. The story of "the 95's making millions by frying shoes" has been written countless times by major public accounts. The footwear trading platform continues to be popular. In the past year, the transaction volume of toxic app reached 15.3 billion, and the monthly live users were nearly 8 million. Numerous "Chong Chong Chong" shoes have sprung up, and hundreds of pairs of shoes have been brought into the stadium.

"In a month, there are no more than 10 million brothers to step back. This is the core group." The half joking speeches of group Friends reflect the craziness of capital in the circle.

Fried shoes hot, shoes secondary market is not a new product. When a brand chooses to sell shoes in the way of "limited quantity", they need to queue up and draw lots to buy them. When the supply exceeds the demand, those who can't get it will increase the price, and those who have the goods in hand will be sold at a higher price, thus forming a secondary market for shoes trading.

It has always been a common strategy for Nike, Adidas and other sports brands to keep the resale price higher than the original price. Although speculation can not make a direct profit for the brand, its potential promotion of brand value can create huge profits for Nike and ADI. The popularity of a pair of shoes largely depends on the volume of goods, media exposure, whether it is a joint brand, whether there are stars with goods, and so on, which are all controllable by the brand.

When the color matching of yeezy 350 white spotted horse was first put on sale, there were hundreds of pairs in China, and the selling price was 1899 yuan. As soon as those who got the purchase qualification went out of the shop, some people were waiting to collect their shoes at a price of more than 10000 yuan. At that time, who could have expected that, after a lot of replenishment by Adidas, the market price of white spotted horse was stable at 3000 +. This year, yeezy's sales are expected to exceed $1.3 billion through this limited amount of stir frying and a large number of products of the same series to make money.

Before the advent of the era of "national peddlers", if you want to make money by reselling sneakers, you have to have some channels in hand. Big Taobao stores and big peddlers purchase a large amount of goods from foreign shoe dealers and other channels, and then distribute them to downstream shoe peddlers, who sell their goods to customers in the form of idle fish and micro businesses.

Offline stores are also one of the important channels. When aj1 "barb" was put on sale this year, it was rumored that Beijing's nikelab store had seized more than 200 pairs of shoes and secretly pulled them to an underground parking lot and sold them to a dealer. At that time, the market price of the barb was about 7000 yuan (now 15000 yuan), and the profit of 200 pairs of shoes was as high as 1 million yuan. After the news came out, the public opinion was furious.

But in fact, this kind of operation was once an open secret in the shoe reselling circle. In the shoe circles in Beijing and Shanghai, you can always hear of several "big brothers" who can get all kinds of shoes. The key to a large number of sweepers is their close relationship with stores. If the relationship is good, we can get the stock information of the store at the first time. The two sides cooperate well when selling, and the shoes can be sent to their own people. In exchange, dealers should also help stores ease the inventory pressure of non explosive shoes. At the same time, appropriate price increases can also directly bring more cash flow to stores. Both sides can benefit from it. When the shoes are still in a small circle, the dark box operation between the shoemaker and the store is just a conventional mode.

It is the variety shows and stars that have attracted a lot of attention and the increasingly mature shoe trading platform that has really pushed the acceleration button for the explosion of national shoe frying.

If you ask a shoe enthusiast who has been playing shoes for several years, when did the shoes become popular in China? TA will probably mention one program: hip hop in China.

The broadcast of this variety show makes 2017 the "first year of hip hop in mainland China", and makes rap music break away from the underground and niche category in the mainland and enter the public's view. Rapper, once unknown, has become a national idol. In the program, it's hard to avoid the audience's attention for the AJ shoes that the instructors and players frequently put on their feet. Hip hop singers have a distinctive style of dressing. For ordinary young people chasing variety shows, putting on a pair of mentors / players is the first step to imitate them. After MC hotdog and Wu Yifan put on aj1's "black toe" on the show, the market price of the shoe has doubled directly.

As a "top traffic icon", Wu Yifan's ability to carry goods is particularly prominent. As long as he is up to his feet, "bankruptcy" color matching can return to the secondary market and the price will rise. As a result, before the broadcast of the new season, the whole shoe circle wanted to pry into Wu Yifan's shoes in the program from the released gags and announcements, so as to stock up early and wait for the price to rise.

The shoes in the picture are all yeezy 700, the famous "bankruptcy" series, and the secondary market prices have been depressed

The impact of phenomenal variety shows on young people is undoubtedly enormous. When people around are talking about the content of the program and trying to make themselves "hip hop" and fashion lovers, wearing AJ and yeezy becomes a way to attract attention and gain identity.

The emergence of shoe trading app has greatly accelerated the circulation of AJ and yeezy in the market. Before the appearance of shoe trading app, if you want to know whether the shoes you bought from Taobao store are true or not, you have to take a chance in the post bar and forum, and ask the expert God to help you identify. The sports equipment area of Hupu is such a place for crouching tigers, hiding dragons, and it is also the place where the largest shoe trading app in China, poison, is derived. As a platform, the shoe trading app only identifies and guarantees the shoes, and charges handling fees; Sale and purchase occur between users and users. Such C2C mode, so that everyone has the opportunity to sell shoes to make profits, shoes officially entered the "national dealer" era.

The two domestic trading platforms, poison and nice, have the meaning of "exchanging body". Nice wants to surpass poison and become the leader of shoe trade; Poison wants to be once nice - to be a "trendy community for young people".

Like the tremolo version of fast hand, the fast version of tremolo, poison is more and more similar to nice's competitors.

Poison and nice: past and present

"Buy and sell shoes like stocks," Josh Luber said in 2015. Later, he founded stockx, which is commonly known as the "Green Cross" U.S. shoe trading platform, attracted star investors such as Eminem during the 17-year round a financing, and completed the round B financing of $40 million in the capital winter in 18 years, becoming a new unicorn.

Domestic platforms are also developing rapidly. The toxic app, which has accumulated core users and become the "number one" in domestic shoe trading, wants to transform into a male living community after its valuation exceeds US $1 billion. More intuitively, the male version of the little red book.

When you brush the recommendation stream on the homepage of poison, you can see the contents of perfume, watch, digital, automobile and even cute pet; At the same time, the poison is also increasing the proportion of short video content. You can even easily brush Li Ziqi's shaking tone video on the home page. From this series of operations, we can see that poison is eager to become a more general community.

However, the effect of these efforts is not significant. For most users, no matter how busy the drug community is, they won't stop - because that's not what they're using for. Just like you don't click Taobao to watch news, it's very difficult to fundamentally change the user's usage habits as a large-scale and extremely vertical trading platform. The basis of community is people, not the content and mechanism built in advance; As long as the existence of poison as a "shoe trading platform" is not reversed, the community will always be an edge function.

On the other hand, nice, a shoe trading platform that completed tens of millions of dollars of d-round financing in June this year, is abandoning its existing community attribute and making rapid progress on the road of shoe frying. Nice was founded in 2013, and its early work was photo social networking. In 2014, nice completed three rounds of financing of more than $60 million. After the popularity of the secondary market of sneakers, it resolutely transformed. The platform for resale of sneakers has been online for five months, with a monthly Gmv of over 100 million.

Compared with poison, nice's role is more radical and has made many outstanding contributions to the popularity of "fried shoes". For example, nice's flash purchase and deposit service has directly applied the stock trading mode to the resale of sneakers. Once I bought a pair of shoes on the platform, I had to wait for the seller to deliver the shoes to the platform after placing an order, and then deliver the goods to the buyer after the platform identification. The cycle is about a week. In the flash purchase deposit mode, shoes are deposited in the platform warehouse in advance. Buyers can buy shoes by flash purchase, and then store the shoes in the platform, waiting for price increases to be sold directly. A pair of shoes do not need to be in the hands of users, they can make profits by buying and selling quickly. This function directly leads to the virtualization of the spot transaction of sneakers. What you trade is not shoes at all, but virtual certificates, and the speed of capital circulation has been fundamentally improved.

When you open nice's recommendation stream, you can't see a few photos of users. Instead, you can see market analysis everywhere: what to do with the bear market, how to recommend financial management this month, and how not to use leeks... Big V "Feige" (also a "shoe analyst" stationed in nice) once commented: "nice has made innovative reform and has taken the lead in upgrading itself into a shoe exchange, And poison is still working hard on this aspect of ideological work. "

　 Nice's market plate

Poison may not have done much ideological work at all. First of all, the biggest challenge facing poison is not to continue to dig deep into the shoe market, but how to break through the ceiling of the shoe field to obtain a larger number of users; Second, as the largest shoe trading platform in China, after in-depth contact with relevant national institutions, poison can only hold high the banner of "shoes are not fried".

In contrast, nice must quickly expand its share in the shoe market. Facing the more powerful poison of scale and service, nice has the opportunity to achieve breakthrough by following the upsurge of shoe frying and becoming the promoter of digital shoe trading. In addition, nice has been reported that users can't withdraw cash, which also makes people suspect that nice needs to supplement cash flow through a large number of shoe transactions.

We can also see some clues from the two founders.

Yang Bing, CEO of poison, is also one of the founders of Hupu. In his early years, he worked with Cheng hang to build a Hupu community. Nowadays, the user groups of poison and Hupu are overlapped, but they are quite different. The value generated by the gathering of such a group of younger and more powerful people in the future is undoubtedly what Yang Bing does not want to let go. However, the achievements of poison as a trading platform have become the biggest stumbling block in the transformation community.

Alex, nice's CEO, is much more well-known in the shoe industry than Yang Bing. Zhou Shou was interested in sneakers when he was in high school. In order to buy shoes, he began to "buy shoes from eBay" and sell them to domestic shoe lovers to earn extra money. It is said that he chose software engineering as his major in university to make sneaker websites in the future.

When the tide brand and shoe consumption in China has a fire, his time has finally come. After nice's transformation from photo social networking to sneaker trading, Zhou Shou launched a live broadcast on nice as CEO, as if he wanted to build himself into a shoe circle KOL. The theme of the live broadcast is "how to make money by investing in sneakers". He taught users how to be bullish and bearish and how to arbitrage quickly in the studio. During the live broadcast, he made no secret of his rude words. He said that what he did was the shoe frying platform:

"It's necessary to make money. Who can't make money by flipping shoes? As long as you fry shoes, you want to make money. Today's Chinese shoe culture is not so healthy. Although nice is a shoe frying platform, to put it bluntly, it is a shoe frying platform. We sold so many AJ and coconuts, we believe that our platform is responsible, but I don't think it is wrong. "

This speech caused a lot of controversy. The live video screen was forwarded and criticized by various kinds of sneaker media. "What can nice be like if the CEO is like this?" and "the fashion of shoe circles is led by such people.". In a lot of swearing, Zhou Shou still exposes himself constantly. Recently, I saw him in CCTV's "shoemaking Lake". But this time, he talked about how to improve the risk control mechanism of the platform. Every time he "leaves the court in person", he has a heart that wants to be red. Such a week's beginning will surely run on the road of his persistent shoe trade.

　 What are the opportunities?

In the face of the hot shoe industry, in addition to shoe trading, what opportunities do Internet companies have? On two ideas:

The first opportunity is the community. Poison does not work, for new players, the male version of the little red book is an opportunity. There are a lot of people who want to eat this cake, but it seems that the idea of directly copying the little red book, like Zhihu Chao community, doesn't seem to work. How do you do it? In order to capture these "generation Z" users, it is not enough to cover popular categories blindly. The key is to deeply understand the cultural core they pursue and create the identity of "players" with appropriate playing methods.

A particular example I would like to mention here is "custom shoes" - generally speaking, it means DIY shoes by changing color and material, even painting and carving. In the field of sneakers, the concept of customization may be traced back to the "co branding" works of early brand officials and artists. For example, Nike invited graffiti and tattoo artist Mark Machado to revamp the classic Air Force 1 more than a decade ago to launch the "Mr. cartoon" series. Later, Nike launched the Nike ID, and all users can "Customize" classic shoes such as air max and blazer. They can match the colors of shoes on the official website and place orders. The shoes are made and sent out by the official.

However, the players are not satisfied with this simple DIY. The folk custom-made team of sneakers came into being and created highly personalized shoes for the players, which made the custom culture develop rapidly in foreign shoe circles. With the popularity of stars, singers and other celebrities, foreign shoe customization has bred a more mature business model. Nowadays, in North America and Europe, there are numerous shoe customization teams. The shoe surge, a high-end customization team in Los Angeles, can sell dozens of times the price of the original shoes.

In the final analysis, customization meets the player's pursuit of "uniqueness". Wearing aj1 barbs is very NB, but when you go out, you encounter several people wearing barbs. To transform a pair of mass-produced shoes into only this pair is probably out of the same original impulse as painting on school uniforms in middle school. The domestic custom-made shoes are in its infancy, and the service is basically provided by several customer-made teams with high original level and a group of amateur customization engineers who can produce finished products according to the ready-made design draft. With the increase of the number of fans and the evolution of domestic shoe culture, customization is bound to become one of the mainstream playing methods in the shoe circle. Connecting the good customization with the users who will need it, and becoming the platform of providing customized service and the promoter of customized culture may be one of the ideas to grasp the core group and generalize the trend community.

The second opportunity is the primary market for sneakers. The trading platforms such as poison and nice belong to the secondary market, while the official original price of brands is the primary market, such as the official online mall and offline stores of Nike, and the official website of Levi's at the beginning of this article. Nowadays, the secondary market platform is constantly emerging, but the primary market is ignored to a certain extent. However, there are more core users and more direct pain points in the primary market: official sales are the channel to guarantee the lowest price and genuine products, but it is difficult to grab. Not only is the volume of goods limited, but also there are various ways to sell them. There are more than ten different sales modes of Nike's shoe app. There are a lot of unmet user needs, and these needs will be continuous.

Now there is a platform to serve the primary market users of sneakers, and the functions in the app are very hard core for shoe lovers: selling reminder, commonly known as "monitoring", crawls through various shoe selling websites, and pushes messages to users when new products are put on sale, so as to deal with "sudden sale" without advance notice; Intelligent agent snatch, automatically help users participate in official online lottery, support multiple accounts to register at the same time, so as to improve the probability of shoes.

There is still a lot of imagination about the demand and playing method of the primary market of sneakers. What's more, those who will continue to be active in the primary market are the core fans (compared with those who don't struggle to grab shoes, but only see the ad in the circle of friends and then go to the dealer to buy a few pairs of sneakers). Their pursuit and enthusiasm for the trend culture will become the spiritual core of this group and this generation. In these fans, we can see the possibility of converging into a younger and more fashionable "little red book" community.

Many people think that the foam of fried shoes will burst soon. Maybe the upsurge of speculation will not continue to rise, but the influence of culture is long-term. Shoe fanaticism is an epitome of the special context of the post-95's and Post-00's. The trend culture reflected by it is still in the enlightenment stage in China, and there is a very wide space for enlightenment. From skateboarding and surfing to hip-hop and electronic audio, to sneakers and blind boxes, no one knows what the next explosive point is.

But this is no longer important. What is really important is the commonness of the bottom of this generation reflected by these explosion points - the pursuit of uniqueness and independence. The collective memory precipitated by each explosion point will constantly flow among this group and will not disappear easily. Only when we understand and hit this common ground, can we make this group of young people stop.