Millet model to sell furniture attracted thousands of investment

Last Friday, Xiao Jun Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi Technology, held a large-scale public speech entitled "I Look at the Next 20 Years" in Chengdu Business Daily entitled "Smart Family Life for Xiaomi and the Future." Under the “Lei Jun Hot” in Mancheng, Liwei Home, a Chengdu-based company that has just won custom-made furniture O2O with a turnover of over 10 million yuan, has also become the focus of the home industry.

What caused Lei Jun’s interest in the Livi family? The 10 million yuan investment is Lei Jun’s layout in the smart home industry? Li Wei was hailed by Lei Jun as the "millet" of the cabinet industry. Is its success model a precursor to the home electronics industry? The day before yesterday, as a new student of the Lei Jun Department, Li Weijia CEO Zhou Yuxiang accepted an exclusive interview with the Chengdu Business Daily reporter.

Invested 10 million yuan

Lei Jun is optimistic about people

On September 28th, Li Wei’s family announced a 10 million yuan capital investment led by Lei Jun at the conference of “When Ma Liang met Lu Ban, did you make it?”. At that moment, everyone was speculating that Li Weijia's O2O, a not-so-famous custom furniture, was approved by Lei Jun.

Zhou Yuxiang, in his thirties, looks particularly energetic. Speaking of Lavy’s family, he was full of vigor. Li Wei’s predecessor, Bei Anxin, was founded in 2010 and was Taobao’s first custom furniture seller. After a few years of exploration, in 2012, the model will be positioned as a custom furniture O2O, will be transformed into an Internet carpenter, renamed the Liwei family, from product development to platform operations, from marketing and promotion to brand building, from distribution and installation to after-sales service, with a “Focus on customized cabinets, wardrobes, and sofas, beds and mattresses, through its own online channels, and sales of JD.com and Tmall.com, quickly won the market.

This attracted the attention of the "high-priced medium-sized" millet chairman and "angel investor" Lei Jun. In Lei Jun’s view, such a breakthrough in the model can achieve the subversion of an industry. Zhou Yuxiang’s thinking model has been greatly affirmed.

On the same day of the conference, Li Wei, vice president of investment for Sun Capital, once said that "Lei Jun actually voted for the people, and the project can change, but the nature of the people will not change." This also gave rise to rumours that the capital investment It is Lei Jun’s argument for another layout in the smart home industry”.

Zhou Yuxiang

Founder and CEO of Chengdu Liwei Home Technology Co., Ltd.; served as purchasing manager of B&Q, and marketing manager of Tonghua Southwest in Tsinghua Tongfang. In 2010, the company established the "Ben Anxin" e-commerce platform and in 2012 it was renamed Livi Family.

IT thinking to do home

"Millet" mode guide

Zhou Yuxiang, who has worked in the IT industry for many years, thinks that home is like the IT industry a decade ago. The price is too deep, and it is hard to distinguish between true and false. He regards the custom furniture of Livy as a computer. "Use IT product thinking to do home", high-product CPU, memory, hard drives, motherboards, graphics cards and other accessories integrated high-quality computer, "then my custom cabinets, closet with Kronostone plate, Sakai Kai's quartz Countertops, Kohler's stainless steel faucets and sinks, Hettich's hinges." Zhou Yuxiang seized the first traditional household consumption pain point.

Browsing the pages of Liwei's official website, Jingdong and Tmall flagship store, it is not its own product introduction that occupies most of the space. On the contrary, major assembly parts from around the world have become the protagonists. This idea and Lei Jun in the early millet conference show Qualcomm CPU and Sony camera routines exactly the same, on the one hand by the world's top supplier brands lifted their own brand, on the other hand is also showing that they are genuine, conscience.

Zhou Yuxiang admitted frankly that he was learning the "millet" model, integrating the world's top suppliers, using the Internet to bypass the channels of traditional furniture distributors, and directly cutting the equally configured furniture prices to half or even three points of traditional channels. one.

Zhou Yuxiang positioned the Livi family as a counterattacker and subversive in the traditional furniture industry. Lei Jun’s expression is more simple and crude: “Levi's family, millet industry's millet, low price and high price! Any profitable and channel-dependent industries have the potential to subvert.”

Livi home product core "standardization + customization"

“I’m tired and I don’t feel like I love it anymore.” This is the first reaction that many people have bought furniture. In Hugo’s propaganda film for Livi’s family, the wife asked her husband to buy a set of furniture. Her husband was lame cancer and was bedridden. This is the second consumer pain point that Li Wei’s family wants to seize.

“Standardization + Customization” is a solution provided by Lai Wei’s family to the traditional running of household consumption, physical and mental exhaustion, and this method just catered to the current main force of consumption. For these target groups, they have designed several standard solutions for cabinets and wardrobes with “explosive” potential, and even have only one style for each style in the future. Then they can be modified according to the customized needs of specific consumers during later sales. Consumers can go Physical store experience, online orders, professional designers and carpenter masters will come to the site to measure and install. "Like Xiaomi's mobile phone, it wins the public with a simple style mobile phone, and then uses MIUI system to realize the personalized demand."

Of course, the Livi family's "millet" model looks very good, but it also puts extremely high demands on the internal processes of the Livy family. One-stop service in the furniture industry is far more complicated than designing and selling mobile phones. Custom furniture products are not as standard as mobile phones. Just like many people use the same mobile phones, but the furniture of these people is almost the same. The mobile phones will be delivered to the home as soon as they are delivered. The customized furniture needs to be measured and installed to the customer's home. Just beginning, an error can make the entire user experience negative. It is not known whether the Liwei family can handle this series of problems after the increase in orders in the future.

At the same time, the core of “millet” model is user participation. Any “rice flour” can provide advice and demand to Xiaomi. Reasonable demand can be easily achieved through Xiaomi’s MIUI system. MIUI system is upgraded every week. Version, which allows the whole people to become Xiaomi marketing promotion. The Liwei family has established its own forum and various channels of communication with customers to collect customer opinions, but the long production cycle of such large furniture products, a technical improvement or a detailed improvement takes a long time, very It is difficult for customers to have a higher degree of activity.

Counterattack traditional home

It is too early to see

Levi House currently has physical experience centers in 9 cities across the country. On the Internet, they have imported from both Tmall and Jingdong in addition to their own B2C malls. The growth rate of orders in Jingdong with less competitive pressure is also the fastest in the category. However, Zhou Yuxiang seems that home is not a simple B2C model. This industry determines its Internet reform is extremely difficult due to the characteristics of the product.

A senior person in the traditional cabinet industry also suggested that in the furniture industry, the “millet” model cannot be completely duplicated, and the personalized needs of the decoration are also difficult to satisfy with a single style. The product is difficult to achieve as much as a mobile phone. No factory that has cabinets and wardrobes can be as powerful as the millet foundry Foxconn. The traditional home furnishing industry would like to learn from the Liwei family model to switch to e-commerce. The difficulty is even greater. On the one hand, it is a huge dealer system. One side needs to cut off the intermediate links, and the price must be 1/2 or even 1/3 of the traditional channels. .

According to Miao Na, head of marketing at Lai Weijia, the Lai Wei family’s sales totaled 30 million yuan last year, and this year it is estimated that it will reach 50 million yuan. It seems premature for such data to talk about counterattacks and subversion in the furniture industry. Li Wei family's "millet" model, whether it can make the "very deep water" of the custom furniture industry has become a little closer, still remains to be tested by the market.