news

Interface News Reporter | Zhu Yongling

Interface News Editor | Lou Qiqin

"Successful, high-end men all like to wear my white jeans", "If a man wants to be rich, he should wear chaebol pants"... Several beautiful women with exquisite makeup, wearing short skirts and high heels walked towards the camera, holding a few pairs of business-style men's trousers in their hands, and kept saying such slightly exaggerated advertising slogans.

Recently, this short video style, known as "high-end sister", has become popular on social platforms.

The videos of "high-end sisters" are often shot in luxury house model rooms, high-end shopping malls, in front of luxury car 4S stores, etc. The content of the videos is quite varied, such as pouring red wine, soy sauce, and "Moutai" on pants, putting pants on fishing rods to fish them out, taking pants out of a closet filled with dry ice smoke, and taking out scissors to cut the pants at any time... All the videos are taken to emphasize the major selling points of the products: high-end quality, dirt-resistant, wrinkle-resistant, breathable, and with a variety of lengths to choose from, and they are also friendly to men under 170cm.

The "high-end sisters" have indeed grasped the pain points of users, but these pants are not as high-end as they advertise. These pants, named "Fifth Generation of Chaebols" and "Seventh Generation of Presidents", are mainly made of polyester fiber and are priced between 138 yuan and 168 yuan.

But the marketing power of "High-end Sister" should not be underestimated. So far, the cumulative sales of the top three best-selling products of KLB brand men's trousers promoted by "High-end Sister" in the Douyin flagship store have reached 360,000, and the cumulative sales are estimated to exceed 50 million yuan based on the selling price.

KLB (full name "KaLanFort") is a typical white-label men's clothing brand, that is, a brand produced by small and medium-sized businesses and not well known by the public. According to platform information, the operators of KLB's stores on Douyin and Xiaohongshu are individual businesses registered in recent years. Tianyancha APP shows that the brand trademark application was only submitted for registration in March 2024 and is still in the process.

Obviously, KLB adopted the popular strategy commonly used by e-commerce merchants. In the video, the "high-end ladies" never mentioned the brand name, and repeatedly promoted the same men's pants products. In fact, there were no other categories on the shelves in the store except men's pants. The advantage of this strategy is that after increasing the sales of large single products, it can reduce costs and reduce inventory risks through scale, and it also helps to improve the conversion of marketing investment. It is an efficient way to open up the market.

But it is difficult to do long-term business with this strategy alone. After all, when the brand system and product matrix are not perfect, it is difficult to expect consumers to remember the brand after a transaction. This is clearly reflected in the example of "High-end Sister". Compared with the KLB brand, what is remembered and spread is actually the video style of "High-end Sister", which has been imitated by self-media creators and e-commerce merchants.

Behind the entertainment-oriented communication phenomenon, it actually reflects the anxiety of white-label merchants.

Compared with women's clothing, it is difficult to come up with new styles for men's clothing, so the products are more homogeneous. In addition, male consumers usually pay more attention to brands and attach importance to using brand value to show their status - the marketing tactics of "high-end sister" actually capture this mentality. In the mass market, affordable brands such as Heilan Home, which rely on procurement scale to gain cost-effectiveness, can already meet the demand.

This makes it difficult for white-label menswear to break through with differentiated designs, and it is also difficult to erode the market share already occupied by well-known brands. Moreover, the market size of menswear in China is much smaller than that of womenswear.

According to Euromonitor data cited by Huaan Securities and Kaiyuan Securities, the scale of China's men's clothing market will be 566.1 billion yuan in 2023, while the scale of China's women's clothing market will reach 984.2 billion yuan in 2022 and is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan in 2023. In addition, the top five companies in China's men's clothing market in 2022 (CR5) accounted for 15.8%, while the figure for women's clothing was 6.2%.

In addition, the men's clothing market is now showing a trend of stock competition. On the one hand, consumers are becoming more rational, and on the other hand, the popularity of sports and outdoor styles has also, to a certain extent, diverted the audience of men's clothing that is mainly business casual.

Even big brands have felt the pressure of growth to some extent. In 2023, the revenue of listed menswear companies such as Heilan Home, Hongdou Group, Moschino Group, China Lilang, and Septwolves has not recovered to the level of 2019. Among several A-share listed companies that have disclosed quarterly financial reports, the revenue growth of Heilan Home, Septwolves, Hongdou Group, and Baoxiniao in the first quarter of 2024 was lower than that in the same period of 2023.

According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, from January to July 2024, the total retail sales of consumer goods increased by 3.5% year-on-year, among which the growth rate of clothing, shoes and hats, and needlework textiles was only 0.5%, while these two figures in 2019 were 8.3% and 3.0% respectively.

When the pie does not get bigger, and white-label men's clothing brands are not able to stand out solely by relying on products or price-performance ratio, it is not surprising that they rely on unconventional marketing such as "high-end sister" to attract traffic.