Welcome to the WeChat subscription number of “Sina Technology”: techsina
The huge profits of the US contact lenses, the flying value economy.
Author|Yan Ye Editor|Wei Xiao
Source: AI Blue Media Collection
“The color contact lenses I wear are linked on the 23rd. This color is very photogenic and is the choice of many anchors. If you like your baby, hurry up and take pictures. Today, you will get 2 additional eye masks for 2 boxes.”
Having said that, the female anchor brought her eyes close to the camera and tried her best to show all the details of the blue contact lenses she was wearing to the user on the other side of the phone.
When a buyer expressed their desire to see the effect of another color contact lens in the comment area, the female anchor immediately brought a try-on picture of another anchor, and continued to introduce the selling point of this color contact lens with skilled words. .
This is the daily live broadcast of the beauty contact brand Ke Lala in the Tmall flagship store. Even on a weekday afternoon, even if it is different from beauty makeup and clothing categories and cannot be tried on the spot, there are still more than 10,000 online viewers in the live broadcast room. According to Tmall, the monthly sales of a certain color contact lens in the live broadcast room of Ke Lala exceeded 100,000+. According to the price of 79.9 yuan per pair, the monthly sales of this color contact lens reached about 8 million yuan.
This is just a microcosm of the beauty contact track.
According to a research report released by Sinolink Securities, US contact lenses have both consumer attributes and medical attributes, and the market is developing rapidly. From 2016 to 2021, the market size of the US contact lens industry will increase from 4.2 billion yuan to 28.2 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 46%. The main consumer groups will continue to expand, and the general trend of the industry’s upward development will remain unchanged. It is estimated that by 2025, the overall size of the US contact lens market will reach 47 billion yuan.
Such an attractive piece of cake naturally attracted the attention of the capital market.
In the past three years, beauty contact brands such as Moody, Ke Lala, Ketang, and 4inlook have emerged in the market, which are highly sought after by capital. Among them, the highest financing amount has exceeded 1 billion yuan in a single financing, including Xiaohongshu, Tencent, Sequoia Capital and others are the lead investors in the US contact lens track.
With the blessing of capital hot money, many people have defined US contact lenses as “Lipstick Classic Myth 2.0”, giving them high enough expectations and market value.
Needless to say about the lipstick myth. At that time, every girl was educated by the brands that “lipsticks should have at least one of each color, and different colors are suitable for different occasions”. Under the influence of this concept, lipstick became the best-selling beauty item at that time. According to data, the scale of China’s lip gloss market was only 1.66 billion yuan in 2015, and it grew to 4.79 billion yuan in 2019, with a growth rate of 188.6%.
In this regard, beauty contact lenses have a similar role to lipsticks: neither of them are necessities of life, but the price is not high. They can not only satisfy people’s consumption desires, but also have a decorative effect, which can provide consumers with a sense of satisfaction.
However, in addition to looking forward to it, there are still many problems with the beauty contact lens itself. As a third type of medical equipment, US contact lenses are still facing huge challenges in terms of design and development, OEM, health and safety, marketing methods, etc., and can a US contact lens less than one square centimeter hold up? A market worth tens of billions of dollars is still an unknown.
Comparing with the “lipstick myth”
After talking with friends about Amway, Lin Yang, who was 475 degrees, finally decided to replace the frame glasses that he had worn for more than ten years with color contact lenses.
First, taking off your glasses and putting on color lenses can indeed improve your appearance. Second, the current price of a single pair of daily disposable color lenses is about 10 yuan. At around 100 yuan, compared with frame glasses, the cost-effectiveness of beauty contact lenses has been improved.
Following his friend’s Amway and his own planting of various beauty bloggers on Xiaohongshu and Douyin, Lin Yang finally placed an order for one annual disposable color contact lens and two boxes of daily disposable color contact lenses for daily and daily use. Wear on two occasions.
Just as lipstick occupied the minds of young people by leaps and bounds a few years ago, today’s beauty contact brand has quietly improved its status in the beauty industry by directly poking consumers’ pain points and placing advertisements on major social platforms.
Now, open any makeup instruction video on Xiaohongshu, and 95% of beauty bloggers will wear a pair of contact lenses before they officially start makeup. This seems to have become a “conventional” makeup step, and even beauty bloggers will not regard this step as “advertising” unless it is introduced alone.
In these grass-growing videos, the US contact lens brand closely fits the needs of young consumer groups: beauty, comfort, and fashion, among which “fashion” is the main selling point.
Everyone knows that as long as new consumption is fashionable, it is a profitable business.
In order to break the circle and gain customers, some beauty bloggers will definitely bring keywords such as “comfortable and safe” and “eye-friendly” when using Amway contact lenses; if they want to recommend the daily travel style to the office worker and student party, they use “Everyday” and “moderate water content” are the key points; if you want to recommend it to beauty veterans who want to show their personality, they will mention “clear color” and “exclusive style on the whole network”.
This is no different from the lipstick marketing of the year.
On the other hand, on short video platforms such as Douyin, the beauty contact brand has attracted the attention of consumers with face-swiping placement. In interviews and surveys, many users said that their initial impression of domestic beauty contact brands such as Moody and Ke Lala was the large number of advertisements they put on Douyin, and basically every three or four videos would be recommended for these beauty contact lenses. Brand advertising.
Some users reflected: “Although I felt disgusted when I first watched it, but after watching it for a long time, I didn’t consciously want to buy it and try it out.”
On the other hand, in order to make consumers understand the brand faster, some beauty contact brands such as Moody, Miomi, and Eyeque chose to be on the live broadcast room of big anchors such as Li Jiaqi, directly facing tens of millions of potential consumers. More attention.
At the same time, beauty contact lenses also have similar problems with lipsticks. The most obvious one is the OEM model.
There are public reports that more than 90% of the beauty contact brands on the market are not self-produced, but adopt the mode of OEM production. The brand independently develops the pattern style, and the production is completed by the foundry. The mainstream manufacturers of color contact lenses are mainly from Taiwan and South Korea.
During the interview, AI BlueMedia found that, including brands such as Candy and Moody, the production and processing of many US contact lens brands all rely on foundries, and they are only responsible for drawing samples. “We think that it is the R&D line rather than the production line that needs to be invested more at present.” In response to this question, the person in charge of Ketang replied to AI Lan Mediahui.
Regarding the same problem, the person in charge of Moody said that in the future, he will build his own supply chain and production line.
In the OEM mode, the cost of a single daily-disposal US contact lens is basically around 5 yuan, but the selling price is around 15 yuan, and the price of a piece with a longer disposal period such as annual and monthly lenses is around 100 yuan.
If the premium is too high, more costs must be allocated to marketing and other aspects, and the hidden bubble can be seen after calculating it. This is also one of the key points for the outside world to question the US contact lens track.
The beauty contact economy standing at the bifurcation
Of course, in order to replicate the “lipstick myth”, US contact lenses not only need to face the various problems faced by the lipstick track, but also the challenges brought about by their own consumption attributes.
First of all, it needs to be clear that, as a third type of medical equipment, US contact lenses cannot have spokespersons, and US contact lens brands can only turn their attention to “co-branded” marketing.
“We will try our best to match the IP image with the concept of beauty contact lenses when we select the co-branding object. For example, in this joint name with Sanrio, the cool girl’s Kuromi is linked with a cool leopard-print model, which represents sweetness. The Melody is a cute brown model.” The person in charge of Ketang told AI Blue Media Exchange.
Among the many co-branded models of Ketang, the Sanrio and King Glory IP co-branded models have the highest sales volume. At present, its Tmall flagship store shows that the cumulative monthly sales of three different types of beauty contact lenses exceeds 24,000. “When we were looking for co-branded IPs, we investigated that Sanrio’s IP value ranks among the top three in the world’s authorized IPs, which is bound to bring us natural sales,” said the person in charge of Ketang.
Of course, in addition to IP co-branding, it also includes the linkage between the beauty contact brand and various concepts.
Moody, which has raised more than 6 rounds of financing so far, launched a “metaverse concept beauty contact lens” in the first half of this year. The cyberpunk-style lens pattern, the “exclusive digital collection” as a gift, and the joint name with the virtual idol Ayayi, this color contact lens has successfully become the first product in the color contact brand to cover the concept of the metaverse.
At the same time, the person in charge of Moody also told AI Blue Media that Moody is still creating new concepts of color contact lenses, and many concepts of beauty products may also be introduced into the field of color lenses.
This is also becoming the consensus of the US contact lens track. An insider of a certain brand of beauty contact lenses told AI Blue Media that, just as different liquid foundations are suitable for dry skin and oily skin, and different eye creams are suitable for people of different ages, there may be similar differences between beauty contact lenses. They are also in discussions with ophthalmologists about this.
Similar to this, there are sugars that have received three rounds of financing.
There is a very interesting phenomenon. Many consumers of Ketang believe that Ketang spends more attention on gifts than selling US lenses, and even the quality control level of US lenses is not as good as gifts. As a result, there is a saying among users: “Ketang, a brand that buys gifts and sends beauty contact lenses.”
In this regard, the relevant person in charge of Ketang told AI Blue Media: “We know this statement, but Ketang believes that beauty contact lenses need something to communicate with users, and these things, that is, gifts, are still a part of scene-based marketing. , every new update is the creation of a new story, so the gift itself is actually an indispensable part of our story.”
Selling concepts and telling stories to the capital market and user market is a marketing nirvana that every new consumer brand cannot escape or let go.
Secondly, consumers’ awareness and popularity of US contact lenses are still an important factor hindering the development of the US contact lenses track.
In fact, there are endless negative news about beauty contact lenses. On the hot search on Weibo, topics such as #wearingmeitong will split the tear film into two#, #represents that young people are not recommended to wear beauty contact lenses#, #girls wear beauty contact lenses for 10 hours and corneal perforation# and other topics frequently reach the top , causing more netizens to question the beauty contact product itself.
In order to cope with this layer of pressure, beauty contact brands have also launched “self-rescue actions”.
In August this year, Moody and China Eye Valley Contact Lens Technology Innovation Research Institute released the White Paper on Standard Fitting of Color Contact Lenses, hoping to establish a standard for the color contact lens industry; Ketang cooperated with Tao Yong, a famous ophthalmologist. , to promote scientific knowledge of eye use.
This may also be a last resort for the US contact lens brand when the new consumption track is sluggish as a whole.
Under the entanglement of opportunities and challenges, the US contact lens economy has come to a fork in the road.
Whether it can overcome the challenges including supervision, foundry, technology, etc., re-enact the “lipstick myth”, or continue to grow savagely in the chaos of huge profits, it is still necessary for the US contact lens brands to use practical actions to give the market an answer.
(Disclaimer: This article only represents the author’s point of view and does not represent the position of Sina.com.)
This article is reproduced from: https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/csj/2022-10-18/doc-imqqsmrp2992552.shtml
This site is for inclusion only, and the copyright belongs to the original author.