Hua Xizi, who was pushed to the forefront of public opinion due to the "79 yuan eyebrow pencil incident", finally chose not to remain silent anymore. On September 19, Hua Xizi posted a letter on Weibo, stating that it had received great attention from the entire Internet in the past week and felt "horrified and at a loss". However, it had recorded netizens' criticisms, opinions and suggestions, and would make corrections and improvements based on relevant opinions to provide better products and services.

This is also the first time Hua Xizi has spoken out since the "79 yuan eyebrow pencil incident", and it has been a full week since the incident took place. Some analysts pointed out that the so-called "apology" in this letter did not focus on any substantive events, and it was silent on users' doubts about its "gold-priced eyebrow pencil" and "lower price".


Not only that, Hua Xizi also used more than half of the page to once again introduce the brand, emphasizing that it is an "authentic Chinese brand", and said that it "hopes to tell the Chinese story with everyone and inherit the beauty of the East", and at the end shouted the slogan "domestic products to strengthen themselves".

Some netizens accused Hua Xizi of having zero information in her apology statement and using too much space to promote the brand. Not only did she fail to see sincerity, but she also used the pretext of "domestic products to strengthen herself" to be self-motivated and take advantage of the opportunity for publicity. She did not know the warmth and warmth of the world at all, and said that "even giving coupons (coupons) to clear inventory is better than this."

Hua Xizi, who is at the center of the whirlpool of public opinion, faces not only the doubts brought about by the "overturn" of the top anchor, but also the survival dilemma of a new brand that relies on traffic anchors to succeed or fail.

1. "Sky-high price" eyebrow pencil, is Huaxizi more expensive than gold?

On September 10, Li Jiaqi faced netizens' doubts about "Hua Xizi's eyebrow pencils are getting more and more expensive" during a live broadcast. He bluntly said, "Look for your own reasons, whether your salary has been increased after so many years, and whether you are working seriously." His arrogant and rude attitude of accusing consumers was quickly denounced by netizens angrily.

Faced with overwhelming doubts, Li Jiaqi issued a public apology on Weibo in the early morning of September 11, and then issued a second apology in the live broadcast room on the evening of September 11. However, Li Jiaqi, who burst into tears, was not forgiven. Many netizens accused "the workers who were ridiculed by Li Jiaqi didn't even cry, how dare he cry?"

"A grain of sand of the times is like a mountain when it falls on everyone." Some netizens said that Li Jiaqi mistakenly attributed the dividends of the times to his own efforts, and was even more mistakenly blinded by the biased perspective of survivors, cursing ordinary people who were powerless under the torrent of the times.

At the same time, the domestic brand Huaxizi, which Li Jiaqi supported by saying, "Where is it so expensive? It has been this price for so many years, don't talk nonsense with your eyes open," was also affected. Is Huaxizi expensive? How expensive is it? This issue has become another hot spot for public opinion questioning and exploration.

According to statistics from some netizens, based on the buy-one-get-two-free price of 79.9 yuan in Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room, the unit price of Huaxizi eyebrow pencil is about 376.09 yuan per gram. If you ignore the gifts and measure the formal price alone, the unit price of Huaxizi eyebrow pencil per gram is 985.71 yuan, which is higher than the unit price of most brands in the table. You can even buy two grams of gold.

According to a survey by Beijing Business Daily, judging from the cost price of the source foundry, the cost of an eyebrow pencil made of the same material as Huaxizi is about 4.8 yuan per stick. If you want to add ingredients such as Polygonum multiflorum essence promoted by Huaxizi, the price will be relatively higher. However, the cost of domestic eyebrow pencils under 100 yuan will not be higher than 10 yuan.

The high prices and low costs have shocked all walks of life. Huaxizi has become the exclusive currency unit for migrant workers. Netizens have ridiculed themselves for "how many Huaxizi they can earn in a day." Behind the jokes and self-deprecation, there is undoubtedly doubts about Huaxizi from all walks of life.


While the public opinion about "fake domestic products" in Huaxizi is raging, old domestic brands represented by Fenghua, Lotus MSG, etc. have taken advantage of the situation and used hot words such as "79 yuan set" and "Huaxi coins" to form group marketing.


Correspondingly, the live broadcast sales and sales of the cleaning and care brand Fenghua have doubled; the skin care brand Yumeijing has been online overnight, and Vigor 28, which was exposed to a business crisis a few months ago, has sold a total of 1.334 million in five days, and all items in the window have been sold out of stock.

Some are happy, some are sad. According to data from Cicada Mama, since the Li Jiaqi incident, the sales of Huaxizi Douyin’s official live broadcast room dropped from 1 million yuan to 2.5 million yuan on September 10 to less than 100,000 yuan on September 11, a drop of more than 90%, which can be described as "gloomy."

Can Hua Xizi really not be able to "live" without Li Jiaqi? Through Li Jiaqi blurting out "They almost gave me their money" when supporting Hua Xizi, we can get a glimpse of the intricate relationship between this new domestic brand and the leading anchors.

2. Deep binding, once created the performance myth together

When talking about Hua Xizi, we have to mention Li Jiaqi. Public information shows that Huaxizi was founded in March 2017 by Hua Mantian (real name Wu Chenglong) who once served as the operations director of the Pechoin Tmall flagship store. As soon as it was launched, it proposed the concept of "Oriental makeup, using flowers to nourish makeup".


Picture: Flowers all over the sky

Because of the founder's sensitivity to online traffic ports, while other brands still rely on offline stores and counters for product promotion, Huaxizi began to focus on online marketing in the year it was founded. According to previous media reports, Huaxizi has invested in more than 300 Internet celebrity anchors, KOLs, and UP hosts within three months.

In 2018, Hua Xizi, who was about to launch a new product "priced at more than 120 yuan and using Chinese micro-engraving technology to present national style lipstick", got involved with Li Jiaqi, the "lipstick brother" who was a little famous at that time and dreamed of "creating a brand belonging to Li Jiaqi". The two demands were coupled with each other and began to seek a win-win situation.

Since Huaxizi Air Powder appeared in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room in March 2019, Huaxizi's sales began to make a qualitative leap. In September of the same year, Huaxizi officially announced Li Jiaqi as the brand's chief recommendation officer. Relying on the "Li Jiaqi Effect", during the 2019 Double Eleven Shopping Festival, Huaxizi ranked seventh in Tmall's beauty category with a GMV of 250 million yuan.


Time comes to the "6·18" Shopping Festival in 2020. Huaxizi topped Tmall's GMV with sales of more than 190 million yuan. From a new beauty product that was barely in the top 20 sales on Tmall in 2019 to successfully reaching the top, the traffic effect from Li Jiaqi behind the “ascension” is self-evident.

It is worth mentioning that unlike other brands’ traditional anchor employment relationship of “slot fee + rebate”, the cooperation between Huaxizi and Li Jiaqi is more like an in-depth binding from product research and development, product selection to marketing. Li Jiaqi once said in "A One-Day Trip to Luyu" that "I helped them check everything without any compensation."

In the program, Li Jiaqi not only personally checked the new products provided by Huaxizi employees, but also bluntly raised issues such as "the mold of the air cushion is too cheap", "the dark-colored powder puff is not beautiful enough" and "the color of the jade beads on the lipstick packaging has no texture" when evaluating. This shows that Li Jiaqi has a say in Huaxizi's products.

Not only that, Li Jiaqi also stated several times that "under the supervision of me, Li Jiaqi, Huaxizi is getting better and better", and his evaluation of Huaxizi during the live broadcast was even more complimentary. According to statistics from some netizens, Huaxizi’s products appeared five times in Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room just one month before Li Jiaqi’s “overturn”.

3. Traffic dependence, it is easy to get rid of dependence but difficult to get rid of it

However, is Li Jiaqi's cooperation with Hua Xizi really as "unpaid" as he himself said? As Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast incident unfolded, industry insiders previously revealed that Hua Xizi used an “80% high commission model” when cooperating with Li Jiaqi, and that “every Hua Xizi product Li Jiaqi sells, the profit goes to him.” News spread like wildfire.

On the evening of September 11, Huaxizi publicly responded to the media that the rebate ratio for the brand’s cooperation with Li Jiaqi was within the industry average, and there was no situation where the rebate ratio was as high as 60%-80%, or even exceeded 100%. In addition, all Huaxizi products are currently manufactured in China and are not Japanese brands.

But the actual situation is that while riding the traffic express and achieving rapid performance growth, Hua Xizi inevitably suffers from "Li Jiaqi dependence syndrome." According to previous media statistics, in February 2020, more than 80% of Huaxizi’s sales came from Tmall, and 40% of its sales on Tmall came from Li Jiaqi.

In addition, every sales peak of Huaxizi's new products occurs in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room. The monthly sales of products listed in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room can exceed 200,000, while those products that have not been listed in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room can only achieve about 1,000 monthly sales, which is very rare.

More data revealed that Huaxizi’s early monthly marketing investment on the live broadcast platform alone was as high as 20 million yuan. Correspondingly, Huaxizi's patents under the banner of "Light of Domestic Products" mostly originate from appearance and packaging. It has not yet formed its own factory, and the production and design links are all provided by OEMs.

The packaging that Huaxizi is proud of has been criticized by netizens for a long time due to excessive marketing and heavy packaging. Many netizens complain on social platforms that "consumers are willing to spend money to buy good products, but are not willing to spend money to buy packaging." Public opinions about its products' serious premiums, flashiness, and poor quality control often occur.


Perhaps because of the realization of the limitations of a single channel for brand development, or perhaps because of the ridicule that "Huaxizi works for Li Jiaqi", Huaxizi, created by Li Jiaqi, also began to try to get rid of the "traffic dependence" from Li Jiaqi and take charge of its own business.

During this period, while Hua Xizi signed Zhou Shen and Bai Lu as brand ambassadors, it also used the traditional culture of ethnic minorities as an entry point to deepen the concept of brand national style. In addition, Huaxizi’s official stores on each platform began to set up self-broadcast accounts, and invited Li Huiliang, “China’s number one cosmetics R&D person”, to serve as chief scientist.

However, the real dilemma of Huaxizi at this stage is that the "anchor" Li Jiaqi does not rely on Huaxizi, but the "brand" Huaxizi is dependent on Li Jiaqi. If this continues, Hua Xizi will become Li Jiaqi's. In the live broadcast of "Turnover", Li Jiaqi also said, "Hua Xizi only has the last name Li!"

For Li Jiaqi himself, the "house collapse" did not significantly affect the popularity of his live broadcast room. Taking the "Mother and Baby's Day" live broadcast on the evening of September 19 as an example, the number of viewers of Li Jiaqi's Taobao live broadcast room remained at 10 million+, and the number of likes exceeded 1.15 million. A number of low-priced "flash sale" products were sold out, and they were all displayed as "removed".

In contrast, Hua Xizi, who issued an apology statement on the same day, chose to suspend the live broadcast. According to Beido Finance’s previous observation, in terms of live broadcast data on the Taobao platform on the evening of September 12, as of 20:45, the number of viewers in Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room was 9.908 million, which was nearly 30 times the number of viewers in Hua Xizi’s self-broadcast live broadcast room, which was 335,900.

As the saying goes, Xiao He is also a success, and Xiao He is a failure. The short-term popularity brought about by Huaxizi's in-depth binding with leading e-commerce anchors was destined to be unable to help the brand gain a foothold in the market, nor was it converted into the brand's own traffic pool, which ultimately led to a backlash from traffic.

4. Conclusion

“Regarding live streaming only as a channel to bring goods, it cannot provide enough room for imagination for the long-term development of the brand.” This was the evaluation of Hua Xizi’s founder Hua Mantian when talking about Hua Xizi’s “1.0 live streaming model” before cooperating with Li Jiaqi. Today, it has become a judgment that Hua Xizi will make the same mistake again.

It is true that the rise of domestic brands is not easy, but domestic brands should not turn the meaning of "self-improvement of domestic products" into a mirage slogan and a gimmick to attract consumption, and instead fall into the vortex of traffic-driven brand development, blindly relying on binding third parties to gain a foothold in the market.

After all, traffic and popularity will always fade away, and the strength of the product is what gives consumers the confidence to pay for price increases. Rather than a flash in the pan, "Hua Xizi" should consider long-term development.

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