Douyin Launches Flagship Stores Feature, Looking to Expand Fashion Business

Back in November we shared that Bytedance had indicated it was building out its e-commerce business. Well wouldn’t you know it, Douyin has launched a new function: a flagship store. It aims to be similar to a Tmall flagship store. At the moment, there are over 220 brands running a Douyin flagship store. While brands across many categories are able to launch stores, it appears that Douyin is most eager to get fashion brands on board.

Proving its Ability to Drive Attention and Sales

Selling Through Live Streams

Over the past year, Douyin was involved in many fashion events. It worked with Shenzhen Fashion Week and supported brands with their livestreams. 

For example, domestic designer brand LYNEE, which has 365k followers on Douyin, held a livestream during the fashion week. It made over 1.28 million RMB from the stream. What’s incredible is that the brand was founded in 2019 and its team only has around 10 people. When I wanted to search for the brand on Taobao to see what type of brand it was, I found it doesn’t have a Taobao or Tmall store, but it has a Douyin store.

Another domestic apparel brand Disimanling (迪丝嫚苓) also benefited a lot from Douyin’s support during Shenzhen Fashion Week. The brand did over 9.4 million RMB in sales on Douyin during the course of the week and 5.21 million of that came from one live stream session. 

Driving Attention

Douyin also worked with China Fashion Week to launch a ranking report about Chinese apparel brands’ performance on Douyin. It included brands such as Peacebird Women, LYNEE, TRACY CHU and others.

Douyin has also been giving traffic support for fashion related topics, such as #看秀时穿什么 (What do I wear when watching fashion shows). So far, the hashtag topic has 167 billion views on Douyin and people were actively participating in it, showing different outfits they would wear when watching those luxury shows. Many fashion KOLs were joining the trend, such as FuPeng (top live streamer Austin Li’s previous assistant) and Fil小白.

Douyin Flagship Store Feature Still in Early Stages

The flagship store feature is still very new and as of yet, few large international brands are treating Douyin Flagship Stores as an important sales channel. Peacebird Women is one of the few large brands that treats its Douyin flagship store seriously with similar inventory and as its Tmall store. With 1.43M followers on its Douyin account, it is very likely that Peacebird will become a trend setter and a case study for fashion brands considering the platform.

Last year, Douyin made huge progress building its e-commerce system. In the first 11 months of 2020, Douyin’s total e-commerce GMV grew 11 times and its Douyin Store (抖音小店) revenue grew 44.9 times. To clarify, when Douyin first launched e-commerce, it offered the ability to link out to other platforms such as Tmall, Taobao, and JD.com. Then, last year it started restricting outbound commerce links, encouraging brands and KOLs to open up Douyin Stores. Now the difference between Douyin Stores and a flagship store is that anyone can apply for a Douyin Store while a flagship store requires a brand’s trademark to apply, thereby is more trustworthy for consumers.

For those familiar with the Alibaba ecosystem, this is like comparing a Taobao store with a Tmall flagship store – same concept.

Compared with Taobao and WeChat, Douyin is like a teenager who has unlimited vitality and the most important fact is that, until now, there is no winners on the platform since it is still in an early age.

Ultimate Goal of Douyin Flagship Store: Convincing Luxury Fashion Brands to Join

If you read our previous article on Louis Vuitton’s 26,700 RMB inflatable vest you’ll know that an important reason why the vest went so viral and it was out of stock in many LV stores was because it went viral on Douyin. Many users were DIY-ing their own vests or testing out the LV vest as a life vest. The related topic #LV空气马甲 (LV’s inflatable vest) reached 280 million views.

Luxury brands already have confidence in Douyin. In March 2018, Dior became one of the first luxury brands to open a Douyin account. Since then many luxury brands have followed suit, opening their own accounts on the platform, including Gucci, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Prada, Fendi and Burberry.

Behind those brands’ entering is their intention to reach young consumers. With the traffic bottleneck on Weibo and WeChat, luxury brands are urgently experimenting with Douyin, Bilibili and Xiaohongshu. 

Changing Their Mindset About Douyin

At the moment, luxury brands use Douyin as a platform to build their brand images and to tell brand stories. Douyin needs to convince them that it’s platform can also have commercial value and produce high conversion rates. 

Maybe the Douyin flagship store will open up a new world for those luxury brands, and it is very likely that in the future it will become the norm for luxury brands to have not only a Tmall flagship store and a WeChat mini program store, but now also a Douyin flagship store as well.

Read more: 深度｜时尚品牌在抖音上的机会终于来了吗？