Perfect Diary:How to Emerge as A Beauty Brand with“Chip”?

Cao Rui,Zhang Xiaojun

Beijing Dalangtaosha Information Technology Company,China

The past years witnessed the popping up of new brands,which drew a lot of attention.As the “first car running on expressway” in the eyes of investors,Perfect Diary has become the synonym for the light of domestic goods thanks to its astounding growth.Also,it has been one of the brands mentioned and discussed most by people over the past two years.

It is worth knowing that Perfect Diary has become the first national brand listed into the Tmall cosmetics during the Double Eleven after two years since its establishment.Moreover,the parent e-commerce company Yat-Sen increased by four folds within one year and went public in American stock market as the first Chinese beauty group.Such growth model is also held up as a benchmark by countless people in the industry.

As new group and traffic emegre nowadays,there always exist variables in terms of people,goods and place.These factors turn out to be “the historical opportunity for national brands seen once in a hundred year”.But with the industrial nature like rapid change of cosmetics and short period of product’s life circle,it is predestined that the majority of brands would “focus on marketing while pay little attention to products”.This is also the foundamental reason behind the serious homogenization of cosmetic products.No future lies there for new national products unless we improve the power of products.

So,how did Perfect Diary embark on its own path? You may find the answer beyond public cognition when you review the growth over the past four years.

1 The core brand philosophy of Perfect Diary supporting its exponential growth over the past four years

1.1 Perfect Diary delivered outstanding report

On April 11,2021,Perfect Diary embraced another Tmall Super Brand Day.In 2020,Perfect Diary firstly appeared on the Tmall Super Brand Day among national cosmetic brands and broke the cosmetics sales record on that day.On the fourth anniversary of the brand,again,Perfect Diary showed the wonderful transcript.According to data,over 670,000 lip gloss products,the “namecard” of Perfect Diary,have been sold,with more than 32 million yuan of GMV of SKU,setting a new record of the category of lip gloss during the “Tmall Super Brand Day”.Among them,young people living in towns and Z-generation group have contributed to over half of the turnover.Besides,more than 100,000 lipsticks named as “little thin stick”,star SKU of Perfect Diary have been sold;and over 60,000 eye shadows called“animal” have also been sold.

Those familiar with Perfect Diary would feel it commonplace.Since April,2017 when Perfect Diary was born,it kept creating similar surprising stories:Perfect Diary reached the sales worth of 100 million within 90 minutes during Tmall Double Eleven event in 2018 for the first time;by January 2019,its sales at Tmall platform outperformed the international brands such as YSL and Armani,winning the champions of cosmetics shown at Tmall platform through the year of 2019.Thus,Perfect Diary became the first national brand which was listed in the Tmall cosmetics during Double Eleven and won Top 1 cosmetic brand at Tmall platform for two consecutive years.Starting from the first product of loose powder in 2017,Perfect Diary enabled to reap 2000 SKU today.Thanks to its acute market sense,Perfect Diary has never lost in creating hot products.Take eyeshadow compact series as example,the first type of milky way eyeshadow compact with nine colors released in July,2018 was awarded as the Best Eyeshadow of the Year in “Bazaar Beauty Award”;and the animalthemed eyeshadow series launched later won the first place of sales in different e-commerce platforms typified by Tmall,JD and Vipshop.

According to data,over 6.5 million animalthemed eyeshadow compacts produced by Perfect Diary were sold in 2020,with an annual sales value exceeding 500 million yuan.Besides,matte lip gloss,pressed power,“little thin stick” lipstick and other star products achieved the over 100 million yuan as the sales revenue.

In terms of channel,apart from online development,Perfect Diary also sought growth oラine since January 2019 for the sake of users who may try products with various colors in person.It has opened up 240 oラine flagship stores nationwide till now within two years.As of the end of 2020,a registered number of over 2.8 million consumers have consumed in oラine stores of Perfect Diary.

1.2 Upgraded brand awareness behind the scaled growth

As a matter of fact,the explosive growth of Perfect Diary is largely a microcosm of the development of the entire beauty industry:for one thing,it is the result of the rise of content platforms such as Kuaishou and Tik Tok.In such new generation,cosmetics industry,which naturally fits the forms of presentaion with pictures and texts,video and live broadcast,turns out to be the greatest beneficiary.Also,the efficiency of brand influence and consumer education is largely improved.For another,cosmetics consumer groups continue to expand and include younger generation.In recent years,the popularity and penetration rate of cosmetics products among female consumers have been rising at a rapid pace.Meanwhile,Z-generation and Millennials prioritized by Perfect Diary have also become the core group consuming cosmetics products today.

According to data,the sales revenue created by Z-generation and Millennials overtook 58.5% among the total sales of beauty products in 2019.Besides,online consumption accounted for more than 70% of the total sales.

Nowadays,the majority of new national brands are expanding their influence in content platforms while intending to attract youngsters.Why does Perfect Diary take the lead in succeeding? You may find some clues from users.

Differing from most other beauty brands which define beauty from the perspective of God to guide users,“we should form a relationship of company with our users.” As mentioned by Huang Jinfeng,founder of Perfect Diary,it remains the core philosophy of the brand to accompany and understand users by heart so as to explore “beauty” with users in an equal relation.For Perfect Diary,not only have the scale and market share of Perfect Diary grown,but the brand awareness rooted in users mind upgraded.

Based on the changes of word cloud explaining Perfect Diary at its fourth anniversary:the share of product words declines year by year while the words of single items such as “little thin stick” become more influential than category words like eyeshadow and lipstick;other words like “the light of national brands” enjoy a higher percentage in the word cloud,doubling in 2021 comparing with that one year before,which reflects the process of the gradual establishment of brand image.

Apart from that,brand impression words such as elegant,fashionable,premium,shining,creative appeared for the first time in 2021,which replaced most product words,an indication that consumers pay higher attention to brand words.

Undoubtedly,with four years of indepth company and joint establishment,Perfect Diary is not a brand only belonging to Yat-Sen e-commerce,but the one which belonging to users.

2 How to emerge as the beauty group owning“chips”?

The first sale depends on marketing while repurchasing rests with products.The private realm and marketing that most people in the industry have studied and discussed are just the shell of the Perfect Diary,as verified by high repurchase.Rather,products serve as the core of the brand.

The nature of cosmetics industry lies in “beauty”.So,the first step to create beauty in success(make quality products)is how we treat the appeal for beauty by users.As noticed in the open letter by Perfect Diary in celebrating its fourth anniversary:beauty couldn’t be defined by people.Instead,it costs more time to observe and should be acquired by more tangible investment and sincere advice.With the D2C model,Perfect Diary was able to discern the true physical world and spiritual world in a profound manner due to its indepth interaction with users for a long time with right attitude and its middle-stage data system which offered real-time insights into the changing needs of consumers.This also remains the foundation for Perfect Diary which could always capture the hottest form and color in the market at the rapid speed and has owned over 2,000 SKU to date.

Take the hot product of lipstick,“little thin stick”,as example,it was inspired by high-heeled shoes.On the basis of the consumption insights,female of the new generation shifted their needs from“pleasing others” to “pleasing themselves”.Highheeled shoes had no longer the synonym of sexy and alluring taste,but the product carrying the mission of building confidence.Perfect Diary,drawning upon the concept of “thin high-heel”,was intent on delivering self-confidence and power to users.

It was found in the interaction with users that although matte lip makeup appeared better-looking,it proved difficult to smear.To solve the problem,Perfect Diary proofed 76 versions,selected colors for over 100 times and invited users to try its products for 3,000 times.Therefore,it managed to work out the solution based on elastic gel technology and multidimensional spherical powder technology before building up the smooth matte lipstick(namely “little thin stick” lipstick).

In addition,it designed the explorer eyeshadow compact with twelve colors and eyeshadow compact with sixteen colors themed at national geography visionists……A similar story can be seen in almost every product of Perfect Diary.

In the TVC of brands celebrating the fourth anniversary released by Perfect Diary,Zhou Xun the spokesperson,and other 6 KOLs told the following story “promoting individuality”:girls could be valiant and boys could be delicate;it was not early for those aged 23 to get married;it was also not late for those in their 60s to find beauty……Such stories fully present the emotional insights into consumers in new generation by brands.

3 A beauty group owning“chips”

How do we transform insights into products in an effective way? Apart from cooperating with top makeup material producers and cosmetics OEMs in the world,Yat-Sen e-commerce spared no efforts in investing research and development(R&D).In March,2020,Yat-Sen e-commerce engaged in cooperation with COSMAX China Cosmetics INC,an OEM company and invested almost 700 million yuan to build the R&D and production base of beauty products.It was expected that the base would become one of the largest cosmetics production bases in Asia after its official production in 2022.In June 2020,Yat-Sen e-commerce founded the R&D center in technology park in Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou.

At the same time,Yat-Sen e-commerce aligned with Sensient Technologies Corporation,a producer of FDA in America,and co-built the united laboratory on color,focusing on the applied research on cosmetics color innovation,raw material innovation and quality management.Over the past 120 years,Sensient Technologies Corporation accumulated much experience in terms of synthetic and natural dyes,greatly contributing to improving the product capability of Perfect Diary.

According to data,the R&D input by Yat-Sen e-commerce in 2020 was nearly three times as much as that in 2019.In future,it would continue to increase the R&D investment and plan to establish over three platforms on global technology and product development in Europe and Asia in order to achieve the integration of global R&D and development capability.

Today,Yat-Sen e-commerce is growing into a beauty group owning “chips” thanks to the positive cycle which is data-driven,consumer-centric and infrastructure-based.

4 New fashional beauty brand truly belonging to China

Cosmetics is worth of hundreds of billions of yuan.It is the major front where new brands emerge over the past two years.Calculated by the growth of both population size due to urbanization and per capita income,it is estimated that the Chinese cosmetics market size would outnumber 700 billion yuan by 2030.

Taking into account the mature markets such as America,Japan and South Korea,the consumption of cosmetics contribute over 30% in the entire make-up market.In China,the percentage of cosmetics is 11.5%at present,which indicates the large room for uplift.In fact,the sub-divided cosmetics have been leading the cosmetics industry these years with the annual compound growth rate as 24.7% on average.On the other hand,as Z-generation emerges as the major consumption force,they are no longer obsessed with international brands owing to their cultural self-confidence.Rather,they are more likely to choose national brands.

Fueled by our society and media today,differed aspirations on personality,self-expression and subdivided occasions are also reshaping the consumption views and aesthetic appreciation amnong young consumers in new generation.With such changes,national brands would enjoy greater advantages comparing with international brands since they are closer to users.

In this wave,fashional beauty brands which truly belonging to China will certainly be born equal to international brands.Viewed from the barriers of user,R&D and channel,it is no doubt that Perfect Diary stands in the frontline of the cosmetics industry,and it is the most possible leader in this area years to come.

The brand of Perfect Diary champions young people should break the aesthetic shackle free from the labels outside while actively exploring more possibilities in their life.It coincides with the mainstream concept held by new generation consumers today.

On the way of helping users achieve selfbreakthrough,we may find Perfect Diary is slowly pinpointing itself:neither is it in a hurry because time turns out to be the friend of brands nor it is slow in that we need to seize the opportunity of the era and trully make “every step shine”.

As mentioned in the open letter,the fourth anniversary is only the starting point and there is a long way ahead featuring “the travel of creating beauty”.“We should review our exploration,reshape and expression of beauty by means of higher standards and more powerful technologies”.Perfect Diary,in this process,is getting closer to become the Chinese Beauty Icon with international say.