The co-branded products of fashion brand Supreme sold by Wei Ya in the live broadcast room were revealed to be fake. Later, Wei Ya responded with a “refund without return” approach and formally apologized.
Even so, this “fire” still made Wei Ya questionable. An e-commerce industry analyst said bluntly: “The Supreme incident has exposed the weaknesses in product selection and supply chain links of the team of Wei Ya, a leading national anchor.”
More media asked: “Super anchors are ‘not good’ anymore?”
Coincidentally, in 2018, Samsung announced a cooperation with Supreme at a press conference, but Soon, netizens discovered that Samsung was looking for a copycat brand. The “rightful owner” in the United States immediately issued a statement, saying straight to the point that “Supreme does not cooperate with Samsung.”
Officially “sealed”, Samsung was ridiculed by the crowd, and the media called it a “dramatic plot” and “Samsung was slapped in the face.”
It seems that after the incident, those who were “injured” were copycat Supreme and its partners, but in fact, the unscrupulous attacks of copycat brands have also deeply affected Supreme. If If you experience it carefully, the whole process has the meaning of “copycat teaching Supreme how to be a good person”.
This is the cruel story of the business world.
Conflict between supply and demand
Copycats flock to Supreme, first of all because of its Unparalleled business value.
In November last year, apparel and footwear giant VF Corporation acquired Supreme for US$2.1 billion. This acquisition made Supreme “the most expensive trademark in history.”
The reason why it is called the “most expensive trademark” is because to an outsider, Supreme’s business model “seems to be just printing its familiar red and white logo on On limited-production T-shirts and sweatshirts, it creates a sense of exclusivity.”
But obviously, it is not just a trademark that carries Supreme’s commercial value.
In 1994, Supreme was born in Manhattan, New York, USA, and was founded by James Jebbia from the United Kingdom. At first, influenced by HipHop and skateboarding at the time, he decided to open a trendy clothing store focusing on skateboarding style.
The biggest feature of this store is that it is not only a simple shopping place, but also a local skateboard culture “stronghold” where people can chat, play and have parties together.
Thanks to the high frequency of offline gatherings, Supreme has brought together young skateboarders to “integrate with each other and ferment each other to form a unique skateboard culture ‘community’.” Gradually, Supreme became the brand identity of New York street culture, especially skateboard culture.
It is not difficult to see that at the beginning of the rise of the Supreme brand, focusing on niche groups dominated by skateboarders and street culture groups played a crucial role.
In this process, opinion leaders among skateboard enthusiasts such as Jason Dill emerged, pushing this trend to break out of the circle and move toward forward development.
After that, Supreme left the United States and was brought to London by the British fashion group GIMME5; it was promoted by Japanese fashion godfather Hiroshi Fujiwara and other people, broke into the Japanese market, and even acquired the popular Japanese idol Kubotsuka Yosuke highly recommends it. Subsequently, a large number of popular domestic idols wore Supreme publicly, with Edison Chen, Shawn Yue and others turning into “walking billboards”.
With the support of popular idols and the increasingly developed Internet, its influence has further expanded. Supreme has successfully escaped from the domestic US market and upgraded to a global first-tier street brand.
On one side is the rapidly expanding brand influence, on the other side is the unruly market behavior.
Many Supreme store clerks are street skateboard enthusiasts. “Buy if you like or not” is their service tenet. They are not allowed to touch, try on, choose, take pictures, or Hustle, limit one per person per style and color.
Furthermore, all Supreme products are on sale for a limited time and can only be booked through the official website or purchased in line at a physical store. There are no dealer channels at all.
On the other hand, Supreme has extremely strict requirements for offline stores and will not just open stores in cities where the fashion culture is not yet mature. It is understood that there are only 13 branches in the world, located in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Tokyo and Milan.
In recent years, luxury brands have been vying for territory in China. As of now, Supreme does not have a physical store in China, not even an official online brand store.
The more you want to buy, the less you can buy it, and the less you can buy it, the more you want to buy it. The market space caused by this contradiction between supply and demand is filled by the “joint efforts” of buyers and copycat brands.
In 2019, a set of data released by market analysis company SEMrush showed that among counterfeit brands on the Internet, the most searched for is “Fake Supreme”. In the past two years, Fake Supreme was the number one.
In other words, many buyers are actively buying copycat brands. A SEMrush spokesperson admitted that “from shoes to accessories, whether it is a casual brand or a luxury brand, the desire for fakes is huge.”
The key is that data shows that 69% of people who have purchased counterfeit products (whether they intend to buy them or not) have given feedback that they are very satisfied with the products.
Because of this, the strong market demand arising from the contradiction between Supreme’s supply and demand has been replaced by counterfeit products.There’s a lot of work involved in understanding the business model and how to leverage our expertise in the region, particularly the Chinese market. “
These tasks require a lot of time. Therefore, he simply said: “You won’t see anything this year. This work will be completed next year or the year after. ”
Don’t think that the Asia-Pacific market is not important to VF Corporation. On the contrary, VF Corporation’s 2020/21 fiscal year report shows that the Asia-Pacific region is the only region in the group to achieve annual growth. In the sexual market, annual revenue increased by 13% year-on-year, and the Greater China region increased by as high as 24% year-on-year, making it the regional market with the largest annual growth for VF Corporation.
Greater China Although the regional performance is so eye-catching, Supreme still maintains its consistent cautious attitude towards entering the Chinese market.
There is no doubt that this slow market pace will still be fully exploited by copycat brands. .
New Retail Business Review Search Amap and found that there are Supreme copycat stores only in Zhejiang, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Shaoxing, Jinhua and other cities.
Copycat stores are popping up everywhere in China, devouring Supreme’s brand image and brand value. The power of the Internet, which Supreme used to open up the international market, has also undergone unexpected changes in China.
In many short videos, Supreme is no longer “trendy”. Videos such as aunts dancing, homeless people giggling, etc. are branded with Supreme’s logo and accompanied by energetic songs, which are full of earthy flavor. Actor Wang Yuan celebrated his birthday The use of “Liu Neng Supreme” mobile phone cases at the meeting aroused heated discussions among netizens… All of this may not be what Supreme would like to see.
Supreme’s own changes cannot be ignored either.
In recent years, in the eyes of people who love trend culture, Supreme’s “supreme” status has begun to waver.
The media is in According to a Supreme community app called “Sup comm”, more than 80% of consumers dislike some recent Supreme products.
Fashion culture enthusiast Xiao Li told Media: “I used to feel that Supreme was a god, and it would not go out of business no matter what I bought. All clothes and accessories would be sold out within one minute of online sales, but now the secondary market price of some Supreme styles has even begun to be lower than the original price. . ”
With the superposition of internal and external factors, an undercurrent is surging.
Even so, many people are still optimistic about Supreme.
Zhang Peiying, an expert in the fashion field, believes: “Generally speaking, Supreme has a lot of room for development in China, because the brand’s new generation consumption base still exists. However, it still needs to make adjustments in terms of product innovation and research and development. For the development of the Chinese market, it needs to take into account multi-dimensional consumer groups. ”
When to open a store in China, whether it can meet the challenges of the Chinese market, and then set a benchmark against copycats, are the biggest suspense for Supreme’s development in the next few years.
Reference materials:
1. “The copycat Supreme sold by Wei Ya, why is it so Crazy?”, Vista Hydrogen Business
2. “Selling himself to Vans for a sky-high price of US$2.1 billion, the choice of Supreme, the trendy brand”, TopMarketing
3. “The Sorrow of “Legal Copycats””, Attack Wave Finance
4. “Supreme may still face competition when opening a store in China to enter the domestic market”, Beijing Business Daily
5. “The new owner is betting on the Asian market, will Supreme open a store in China?”, LADYMAX
6 .”Genuine Supreme is finally coming to China? Don’t worry, it won’t be until 2022 at the earliest”, Jiemian News</p
