From selling along the street, to small shops of various colors, to large department stores, to supermarkets and specialty stores, to e-commerce and new retail. The retail format is constantly changing, and its logic is to provide consumers with a more comfortable and satisfying shopping experience, and all this is supported by the continuous improvement of technology and the continuous improvement of the supply chain system.

　　 As one of the pillar industries of the retail industry, with the explosion of consumption power and the rapid development of the retail industry, the output from 2011 to 2016 has increased from 25.42 billion pieces to 31.452 billion pieces, achieving a "five consecutive increase." In 2017, the e-commerce model completely broke out, which had a huge impact on the traditional business format. Sales in the apparel industry began to decline, and the "closing tide" of physical stores was unstoppable.

According to statistics, Metersbonwe closed more than 1,600 stores in 2016-2019, with a loss of more than 400 million yuan; La Chapelle for women's clothing had more than 9,000 stores during the peak period, and its market value had shrunk by 93% in three years. More than 4391. In 2019, the fast fashion brand FOREVER21 lost to China, and the number of ZARA stores closed to a new high... In 2020, the sudden new crown pneumonia epidemic has made the clothing industry worse, and even Nike, Adidas, and various luxury brands, began to lay off employees and tighten offline business .

　　 Is it really not working offline? According to statistics, the offline retail industry in my country accounts for more than 80% of the offline sales of apparel retail industry, a huge market, it is difficult to disappear out of thin air. In 2016, at the Ali Yunqi Conference, Jack Ma proposed the concept of "new retail", providing new ideas for the offline market. How can the clothing industry, known as the "new retail breakthrough", fight the battle of online and offline integration? What's the problem? What is worth learning from?

　　Open a shop against the trend

　　 The dual impact of e-commerce and the epidemic has placed a serious burden on Uniqlo’s global offline layout, but recently the company has once again proposed a plan to open 100 new stores every year. Crisis is the life and death field of enterprises, but it is also an opportunity for the reshuffle of the industry and the rise of large enterprises. When major brands are tightening their offline business and launching online traffic wars, Uniqlo, which is bucking the trend, continues to increase offline. What is the intention?

　　Uniqlo’s parent company is called Fast Retailing, and Yanai Masaaki’s intention is very simple to "sell quickly." Different from the fashion positioning of many clothing brands, Yanai Zheng knows that Uniqlo is a retail industry, and creating a deep interactive experience between brands, products and consumers is the ultimate goal. He said that one day we will use resources, equipment, talents, and information from all over the world to sell a large number of products that customers need faster and cheaper than anyone else, and to show this concept under the name of fastretailing.

　　 So in 2009, the Internet online era was not yet fully popularized, and when many domestic retail companies were ambiguous about the three words of the Internet, Uniqlo took the lead in opening the Tmall flagship store. The logic of Uniqlo is that whether it is a store channel or an e-commerce retail channel, including other new platforms, it is only a channel to provide product experience services. Therefore, Uniqlo's digitalization process has left European and American fast fashion brands ZARA and H&M far behind.

　　 One step faster, always get results first. Uniqlo's online business is very "powerful". On Double 11 in 2016, sales exceeded 100 million within 3 minutes, the highest sales in all categories. In 2019, it broke the 1 billion sales of Tmall flagship store at the fastest rate in history. From 2015 to 2020, it has ranked first in sales of men's and women's clothing on Tmall Double 11 promotion for 6 consecutive years.

　　 Fighting online traffic wars, many apparel brands are worried: My advantage is offline, if I play online to divert customers, wouldn’t it be worth the loss? The increasingly deserted physical stores offline prove that the concerns of brand owners are by no means unfounded. How does Uniqlo avoid this problem?

　　 On the morning of Double 11 in 2016, Uniqlo announced that the products on the shelves were sold out. Many media think this is a marketing gimmick for Uniqlo. Obviously you can win the sales champion of Tmall Double 11, and there is no problem with the supply capacity. Why not sell? In fact, it was in 2016 that Uniqlo realized the digital mode of online ordering and offline pickup, and introduced artificial intelligence and LED digital display into physical stores, opening up the online and offline integration mode. While embracing the online, Uniqlo's offline expansion has not stopped.

　　 Yanai said that store experience and service are the essence of the retail industry, and every effort must be made to build offline stores. In 2015, 91 new stores were opened in China, and 72 new stores were opened in 2016. The number of stores in China has exceeded 500. At the end of August 2020, the number of Uniqlo stores in China reached 767, surpassing the number of direct-operated stores in Japan 764. Yanai Zheng said that more stores will be opened in China in the future. According to the Chinese population, it is expected to open 3,000 stores.

　　 At the moment when fast fashion brands are transforming to online, Uniqlo's large-scale store opening plan seems unwise, but it is actually the layout of Yanai after careful consideration. Yanai Zheng believes that opening stores in a certain area will stimulate consumption when the number of stores reaches a certain number. He summarized this experience as "dominant advantage." The data also confirmed his judgment: the more Uniqlo stores open, the more online sales will be. Because consumers can experience Uniqlo's product quality and services firsthand when they arrive in the store, they will have a higher degree of brand recognition.

　　 According to Uniqlo’s logic, when big clothing brands embrace online, they should not close stores but open stores. Uniqlo's retail logic, why doesn't other brands work?

　　 Same price: It’s not easy to learn

　　 E-commerce sales do not require high labor and store costs in physical stores, so the price of goods of the same quality will be cheaper than physical retail stores. In addition, in order to cope with the low-price characteristics of e-commerce, many brands will clear their inventory online and launch special e-commerce styles, which further leads to online and offline price differences. This undoubtedly makes offline performance suffer.

　　 But Uniqlo's online operations are completely different.

　　Uniqlo adopts the same model, same price, and same promotion online and offline. Users can place orders online and pick them up offline. Online shopping will also provide store locations that are closer to consumers, and inventory status. The subtext is to lead consumers to the store. Turn offline and online into a retail channel as a whole. Even expand the physical scene and online consumption scene pk, strive to make users feel that the shopping experience of physical stores is better than e-commerce.

　　Uniqlo's new retail logic is not difficult to understand, but for ordinary clothing brands, it is not easy to learn the same price strategy. Although online shopping is very convenient, the disadvantages are obvious. Clothes hanging on a hanger and wearing them on the body are completely different. When there is no direct contact between the body and the clothes, the possibility of buying fashionable and expensive clothes is even smaller. Therefore, the online sales of many big brands will have to go to the path of low-price promotion, reducing the user's trial and error cost and increasing the impulse to buy.

　　Uniqlo's special product positioning provides support for the same price online and offline. Madeforall’s early positioning allows Uniqlo’s clothes to be mainly basic, and the user’s barrier to choice is very low. As a "cash flow" product, the basic product brings high-speed turnover of commodities and a large amount of cash backflow, improves the efficiency of capital operation, and makes low prices possible. In order to reduce prices, Uniqlo chooses its own brand independent marketing model to participate in a series of processes from raw material procurement to product design, production, logistics, sales, inventory management, and store planning. There are no intermediate links between agents and distributors, so as to better control costs and schedules, and enable enterprises to enjoy the dividends of channel integration.

　　Uniqlo's logic is not to provide the best clothes, but to "challenge the improvement of quality through the market", that is, the brand strategy of "parity but not cheap". To maintain the quality of products, certain raw material costs and channel costs are required. This is the foundation for a brand to gain trust and build value. Value = quality ÷ price, so the same important thing as lowering the price is to improve quality. Uniqlo's rules for evaluating defective products are very strict. If there is a 0.5 mm thread on the surface of a t-shirt, it is considered defective. Uniqlo developed more comfortable and durable patented fabrics, which also further enhanced the value of the product.

　　 Therefore, the reason why users choose Uniqlo is not only because of its novel style, but durability, comfort, and high cost performance are more important reasons. When China's copyright protection system is not perfect, and when copycat products are flying all over the sky, users will voluntarily abandon the slightly cheaper imitations on the market, thereby protecting corporate profits. But for many brands, there is a huge gap between the price and the price of piracy, but the quality is almost the same, and some piracy is even better. Fast-fashion brands such as ZARA and H&M in Europe and the United States have been criticized, and their performance is inseparable from their simple style selling points and unsatisfactory product quality.

　　In contrast, the gap between domestic fast fashion brands is even greater. While the flexible supply chain of major international brands has become a standard feature, few major domestic clothing brands have made flexible supply chains decent. The low cost performance caused by the lengthy supply chain links, and the style failure and piracy problems caused by the slow supply chain response time have become increasingly obvious under the impact of e-commerce. Nowadays, new retail poses new challenges to apparel companies. It is no easy task to connect online and offline.

　　 Moreover, Uniqlo has a lot of product SKUs, and physical stores are more like supermarket logic, so it is easier to connect online and offline. However, many brands' stores are personalized stores selected by different buyers, the number of products is limited, and there are huge product differences between stores. Under this circumstance, if a company rushes to make the same money and price online and offline, it will not bring real convenience to users, and it is also possible that under the impact of piracy, both sides will not get profits.

　　 Efficiency: The hard work behind

　　 The essence of retail is to improve efficiency. Uniqlo knew this truth well before entering the Chinese market in 1991. Compared with other brands, Fast Retailing pays special attention to fast sales in offline stores. The discount rate of products in the current season is faster than that of similar products, and the discount is slightly stronger. Uniqlo's average inventory turnover days is 83.72 days, more than half faster than domestic service companies.

　　 Now that e-commerce is blessed, Uniqlo hopes to further improve efficiency and increase the contribution of e-commerce to 30%, so that consumers can purchase more conveniently. Therefore, Uniqlo adopts an omni-channel inventory interoperability model. Customers can not only place orders online through any channel under the technical support of the electronic POP "Uniqcode", go to the store to pick up, try on, and return or exchange goods, but also online Preferential prices on the channels, get accurate and convenient services in physical stores.

　　Uniqlo not only opened up online and offline information, but also opened up all the information between physical stores. To realize "commodity", "service" and "membership", online and offline information needs to be connected. The seemingly simple digital operation involves complicated business processes. The management system of offline brands for decades is difficult to quickly import and switch.

　　 At present, the entire online and offline apparel industry is still generally in a state of fragmentation. As an O2O clothing brand business, they usually adopt two systems of online and offline warehousing and logistics, and two sets of personnel. This is because offline is a large logistics, and online rely more on small logistics. If the warehouse is shared, it involves the allocation of goods, which requires very powerful information system support. Hongxing Erke used to have poor information communication between production and sales links due to chaotic inventory information management, prolonging the transaction cycle, and leading to a large amount of goods hoarding.

　　 Moves the whole body, whether it is an information system or a management system, it requires time and effort. In terms of employee KPI assessment, for example, consumers have a good experience in a store but buy online, or try on a store directly after they are optimistic about it online. Then, how to evaluate the online and offline job functions, how the weight of responsibility of different stores is different, how to do KPI, how to determine performance, these are all management issues, and if they are not handled well, problems will also arise. Metersbonwe failed to coordinate the channel relationship, which triggered vicious online and offline competition, which led to the snipe and clam competition between channels.

　　 During the transformation of "new retail", a large amount of capital is needed, and reasonable financial resource allocation is the key to successful transformation. In order to better solve these problems, since 2015, Uniqlo began to implement cost reduction strategies: neither hiring expensive celebrity endorsements, nor blindly chasing variety show titles. Instead, we can effectively control discretionary expenses, and through the newly built digital marketing team, we can conduct self-media operations on social platforms where young people gather such as WeChat, Weibo, and Xiaohongshu to win more transformation funds for the company. But at the same time, Smith Barney has spent a lot of money on variety shows with completely different naming and apparel concepts. Blindly publicizing may not necessarily bring traffic to the brand, but instead causes the company to fall into financial difficulties.

　　Metersbonwe is not doing nothing in new retail. It opened an O2O experience store of more than 5,000 square meters in Hangzhou, which is very novel. The first and second floors sell men's clothing, the third and fourth floors sell women's clothing, and the fifth floor gathers features such as coffee, book bar, exhibits, and small gardens. The wireless network covers the whole store, and QR codes can be seen everywhere, and the iPad in the store is also available for customers to browse at will. Open the App to check the latest promotions in the store, click to make an appointment, and the salesperson will bring the clothes for you to try on. A touch screen is also set up on the shop site, and consumers can choose to try on clothes for models and check the matching effect. But this new retail is more like a show in a "cocoon room", and it has failed to truly integrate Kungfu into an omni-channel online and offline.

　　 From the analysis of Uniqlo's new retail attempt, it is not difficult to see that what propped up its new retail attempt is a complex overall system such as products, prices, retail environment, supply chain, technology research and development, and user data support. These links are interdependent, interlocking, and indispensable. Any small fluctuations may affect the whole body and make the attempt of new retail fall short.

　　 Transformation does not happen overnight, and Uniqlo is not a smooth journey. The utilization rate of online order placement and offline pickup is actually not high, because China's logistics cost is very low, and it is very convenient and fast, so users do not prefer this method. The growth of the Japanese market was weak, and the European and American markets were blocked. After the epidemic crisis, the Chinese market became a life-saving straw for Uniqlo's three-year decline in performance. On November 14, Uniqlo once again appeared on Weibo's hot search. It turned out that it "quietly" increased its price, and it was criticized by netizens, "It's not that it can't afford it, but it feels worthless."

　　 Uniqlo, which quietly increased its prices by nearly 10% in 2014 and 2015, was once abandoned by the market. Masa Yanai bluntly stated that "it is wrong to adopt a price increase strategy." After 2016, Uniqlo re-prices the product, and the price reduction plan covers the world, and the decline in *** is 30%. Today, the price raised again has touched the nerves of users, and even worried that it will become the next MUJI product abandoned by the public. Moreover, price increases may cause irreparable damage to the newly established retail supply chain.

　　 Conclusion

　　 The apparel industry is undergoing a transitional period due to the impact of e-commerce and the adjustment of its own industry. From the extensional type that wins by output, the development is an important change to win by product quality and creativity, brand reputation and management mode. The competition of enterprises is not only the competition of products, but also the competition of management efficiency.