Fashion retailer finds new tactics to survive during epidemic period
After three hours of live streaming on Monday night, Zhao Yan, regional sales manager of a Hong Kong fashion brand, and her team received 5,616 thumbs-ups from more than 4,000 online viewers.
The fifth online broadcast also brought another 300,000 yuan (US$43,041) in sales for their company.
Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus epidemic, brick and mortar businesses such as clothing stores have faced great challenges. Some have begun to think up new ways to do business.
Zhao Yan (with yellow hat) and her colleagues do a live broadcast inside their shop in the Jing'an Temple area.
"I came back to Shanghai on the second day of the Spring Festival, due to the epidemic," Zhao, who has been in the fashion industry for more than nine years, said. She got the idea to try making sales on a live stream from a friend in the same trade.
From idea to action, Zhao and her company took just five days, and she did the first live broadcast by herself at home on February 13.
This is Zhao's first time doing live streaming: "I did the modeling and the customer service at the same time, using my personal account on TikTok. I even asked a family member to be my assistant." Zhao did some online events like flash sales and promotions with discounts, racking up sales of 470,000 yuan. That's twice or triple the income of 29 physical stores during the previous 12 days.
"Since the Spring Festival, our shop here in HKRI TaiKoo Hui has been open the whole period, but with few customers."
By 7pm today, Zhao said they'd only made one sale in their physical store.
It is estimated that Zhao's team reached sales volume of perhaps more than 3 million yuan from their five online broadcasts. Zhao continued: "Even when the epidemic ends, we will certainly continue to sell like this online."
Zhao is not alone.
Better Life, a Guangdong Province-based company that focuses on educational electronic devices, has enlarged its online sales volume from 2 to 3 percent to more than 10 percent during the past month.
The number of online orders of Yonghui Superstores Co reached 300,000 on February 8, the highest compared with the past Spring Festival holiday.
Since February 7, shopping guides of Intime Retail have become livestreamers at home, attracting more than 100,000 viewers.
