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Recently, a screenshot of a conversation between Liu Guangyao's ex-wife An Ji has been widely circulated on social media: An Ji invested 50 million yuan in Liu Guangyao's company, and later borrowed 10 million yuan in the name of her father An Huailue. This seemingly bloody family dispute actually reflects the differences in interests between shareholders and entrepreneurs. Boise, the trendy clothing brand founded by Liu Guangyao, has been facing operational difficulties in the past two years, and investors have been unable to obtain corresponding returns.

An online platform sales data provided by an investor in the consumer sector to Jiupai Finance shows that from 2020 to 2023, Bosie willJD.comThe annual online sales of the three major platforms of TikTok were 236 million yuan, 492 million yuan, 221 million yuan, and 96 million yuan respectively. From 2024 to date, Bosie's online sales were 31 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 50%.

Regarding this data, Jiupai Finance reporter asked Bosie for confirmation, but as of press time, no response has been received. However, co-founder Li Qixian recently revealed in an interview with E-commerce Online that in 2023, Bosie's annual revenue scale has dropped from 1 billion to 300 million yuan.

Offline, Boise is also closing stores in large numbers. Jiupai Finance learned that Bosie's 2,000-square-meter flagship store in downtown Shanghai has suspended operations.

Bosie Huaihai Road flagship store has been closed. Image source: Baidu Map

Regarding Bosie's declining sales and store closures, Zheng Rongsheng, a senior practitioner in fast fashion apparel, told Jiupai Finance reporters, "The main reason is that fashion styles are changing rapidly, Bosie's product design cannot keep up with market changes, and it also has to face the impact of the rise of live streaming e-commerce. In addition, the company itself is not well managed and the cost is too high."

【1】2,000-square-meter flagship store temporarily closed

Bosie's national flagship store, located on Huaihai Road in the center of Shanghai, once became a discount store.

In June 2024, a luxury goods "sale" was being held in the Bosie Space store. The entire store was filled with clothing, shoes and hats from brands such as Gucci and Chanel. Promotional slogans such as "Up to 80% off everywhere" were particularly eye-catching, but Bosie's own clothing was nowhere to be seen.

Luxury goods sale at Bosie Huaihai Road store. Source: provided by the interviewee

Liu Guangyao cut the 2,000-square-meter flagship store in half in 2022, reducing it to nearly 800 square meters. On August 20, the former manager of a Bosie store in Shanghai told Jiupai Finance reporter: "The 2,000-square-meter flagship store has been closed for 2 to 3 months. Due to declining sales, Bosie currently only has one store in Qibao Town in Shanghai. The rest of the stores have been closed, and all the employees in our store have been laid off."

In this regard, the owner of the Maochang Eyewear Store opposite the Bosie Huaihai Store also told reporters: "The Bosie store opposite has been closed, and the signboard and the store have been removed." Baidu Maps shows that the store is "closed" and its opening status is abnormal.

A consumer told reporters that in 2021, the Bosie store on Huaihai Road was a celebrity check-in spot in Shanghai. It focused on sci-fi planet space. In addition to selling clothing, there were also social and snack areas. The photo studio on the first floor required a queue of half an hour to use. There was also a pet space museum on the second floor, which was crowded with people.

Previously, Liu Guangyao said in an interview with Jiupai News, "A few years ago, the company was caught in a blind frenzy of growth, thinking that we would become a Fortune 500 company, the number one in the clothing industry, and go public.IPO, and almost lost his mind." The insistence on expansion even caused co-founder Li Qixian to leave the company and go their separate ways.

From 2020 to 2022, Bosie expanded rapidly with the support of capital. At its peak, it had more than 50 offline stores, many of which were nearly 400 square meters in size, and spent nearly 30 million to build a diversified community space of more than 2,000 square meters. Until 2023, Bosie, which was losing nearly 500,000 yuan a day, closed stores and laid off employees in large numbers, and Liu Guangyao finally resigned as CEO. According to Bosie's current CEO Li Qixian, the brand currently has nearly 30 offline stores left in the country, most of which are around 150 square meters in size.

In this regard, an insider in the clothing industry analyzed to Jiupai Finance reporter that: "Bosie initially became popular with the Little Prince collaboration. In essence, it is a niche brand with a design sense that mainly targets young consumers. It is not a mass-market brand like Uniqlo that targets men, women, old and young consumers. It is not suitable for opening a large store of about 1,000 square meters. Bosie should do a good job of deepening the segmentation of customer groups, rather than blindly expanding into the mass market in order to give investors more room for imagination of prospects."

【2】Online sales halved

Bosie's sales in the online channel, which accounts for 65% of its turnover, are also declining.

A sales data provided by Bosie's investors to Jiupai Finance showed that from 2020 to 2023, Bosie's annual online sales on the three major platforms of Tmall, JD.com and Douyin were 236 million yuan, 492 million yuan, 221 million yuan and 96 million yuan respectively.

From 2024 to date, Bosie's online sales have been only 31 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 50%. Among them, sales on its main channel Tmall fell by 37%, while sales on JD.com and Douyin fell to almost negligible amounts of 200,000 yuan and 1.7 million yuan, respectively, a year-on-year decrease of 84% and 88%.

Data from Daduoduo also shows that Bosie's official Douyin account has broadcast 24 live shows in the past 30 days, but its sales are almost zero. In addition, on Xiaohongshu, a trend-setting platform, there have been very few consumer posts about the Bosie brand in the past year. Currently, Bosie's official Xiaohongshu account has only 8,871 followers, and many of its posts have only single-digit likes.

Liu Guangyao once reflected that Bosie's main problem lies in the supply chain. A consumer in Beijing told Jiupai Financial reporter, "At the end of 2022, I bought a new style down jacket in Bosie's Tmall flagship store. I urged the customer service to ship it many times. The customer service always said that they would arrange it as soon as possible, replenish the stock, or not reply to the message. It was not until the end of winter two months later that the customer service told me that there was a problem with the fabric of the product and the factory had stopped production. I was asked to refund or exchange for a product of the same price."

From 2018 to 2020, Bosie was busy expanding and did not consolidate its supply chain. As a result, a large number of quality and delivery issues occurred, which led to customer complaints and at one point caused the online store to be closed.

From an industry perspective, the entire fashion brand and clothing industry is also facing the challenge of weak consumption. Just in July, Supreme, the originator of fashion brands, was announced to be resold at a "low price" of US$1.5 billion, and Champion's global sales have continued to decline for eight consecutive quarters. An investment person in the consumer field told Jiupai Finance reporters that the performance of new fashion brands has not been very good in the past two years.

【3】Liu Guangyao joins AIGC's new e-commerce project

Behind this "farce" of investment and marriage is the difference in interests between investors and entrepreneurs.

On August 16, after stepping down as CEO of Bosie, Liu Guangyao, who became famous as a "post-95 Tsinghua and Peking University scholar entrepreneur", issued a long divorce statement, which attracted widespread attention. In the letter, Liu Guangyao mentioned his ex-wife many times.Xinbang PharmaceuticalChairman Anji’s investment and loan to BOSIE, saying, “You have repeatedly stated and emphasized that investment is investment and marriage is marriage. Why do you keep holding me and the Bosie brand company hostage by withdrawing investment after one year of marriage?”

Liu Guangyao, who is only 29 years old this year, was admitted to the Guanghua School of Management of Peking University with the second place in liberal arts in Shandong Province. He is a genius young man in the eyes of the public, but he is also an inexperienced entrepreneur. This makes him easily high-spirited when things are going well, ignore unknown risks, and expand aggressively after getting the money. In early 2022, Liu Guangyao rented a 5,000-square-meter office and wanted to do a big thing.

Liu Guangyao. Image source: Bill Liu Guangyao's TikTok account

Bosie's rapid rise benefited from market dividends and capital boost, but if a brand wants to survive the cycle, it still needs to rely on more solid operational capabilities, including product quality control, supply chain management and team organization capabilities.

In 2018, when the oversized style just started to become popular in the fashion circle, Bosie, which had nothing, received nearly 3 million in seed round investment almost solely based on the concept of "non-sexism". With the support of Tmall's support for domestic designer brands, Bosie became the fastest new brand to break 100 million in the history of Tmall men's clothing. Since its establishment, Bosie has raised 8 rounds of financing with a total of 500 million yuan. Investors includeBilibili, ZhenFund, and Qingshan Capital.

Since then, in order to support the large-store model and bring hope to investors, Bosie's product categories have been continuously expanded to children's clothing, home furnishings, women's clothing and even pet clothing, with as many as three to four thousand styles, resulting in a large amount of inventory and waste; and it has spent millions of yuan in headhunting fees to recruit industry executives.

Under the dilemma of losses, capital is also receding. According to relevant monitoring data from Heshi Consulting Group, in 2023, the completion amount of fixed asset investment in my country's clothing industry will drop by 2.2% year-on-year, down 27.5 percentage points from 2022. Bosie, which has lost the financing heat, is no longer pursuing scale under the leadership of its new CEO Li Qixian. It is shifting from "expanding" to "refining" and returning to a small and beautiful designer brand.

Liu Guangyao, who resigned as CEO, set his sights on the live streaming trend and founded an MCN company to sell knowledge courses. However, the window of Douyin Bill Liu Guangyao shows that the store has sold 10,000 items, most of which are books priced at around 20 yuan, while courses such as "Liu Guangyao's Expression Course, 36 Strategies for Academic Masters, and Efficient Execution" show sales of only 0-1.

After encountering resistance in selling online celebrity IP courses, Liu Guangyao once again invested in the AI ​​track.36KrDuring the interview, he revealed that his new entrepreneurial project is in preparation, targeting overseas markets, and will be a customized e-commerce brand driven by AIGC. The start-up capital is expected to be around several hundred million yuan.

The situation of Liu Guangyao and Bosie is a reflection of the plight of the younger generation of entrepreneurs. The tide of the times will eventually recede, but entrepreneurship is a practice that cannot be stopped.

Jiupai Financial Reporter Xia Wenqi

Edited by Wan Pei

[Source: Jiupai News]