A Slow Marketing Strategy: Fragrance Brand To Summer
Being fast is the most iconic feature of the current China market. You may notice that brands are squeezing into the market and promoting wildly on Douyin, Xiaohongshu and Taobao, frequently launching new products and campaigns, doing whatever they can to reach more consumers. Brands that are slow or not on enough platforms are often accused of not doing enough to cater to the demands of the digitally savvy, always on Chinese consumer.
While this is true in many situations, in this fast-paced world, there is a case to be made for a deliberately “slow” approach. For example, there is a Chinese fragrance brand that is finding success by doing just that: To Summer or Guan Xia 观夏.
To Summer was founded in 2018, and it wasn’t until January 2019 that it launched its first product. The brand only promotes itself through its WeChat Official Account and occasionally works with bloggers that match with its culture and tone. It only sells products through its WeChat mini program, and it only updates product inventory once a week, on Thursday night. If you are slow, then you might miss some of the viral products, for example, its mood crystal aroma diffuser priced at 389 RMB ($60 USD).
In addition to its various scents of beautifully packaged diffusers, To Summer also produces candles, body lotion and shampoo, perfume, and scented wax tablets.
To Summer is hitting the market at the perfect time, as a result of spending so much time indoors during COVID 19, Chinese consumers have started paying attention to improving their quality of living at home, whether that is through home decor, better appliances, or home fragrances.
The brand is delivering a slow pace of living to its consumers. They want to shape every product as a sophisticatedly-designed magazine, to tell readers how to improve their life quality.
What makes To Summer’s products different?
The length of matchsticks
Matchsticks are usually short. When consumers are using them to light a candle, they get burned. So To Summer extended its matchsticks four times the length of other’s, aiming to let consumers light the candle elegantly.
Packaging
The packaging style is what To Summer called “new eastern modern”. They follow the rule of less is more and add eastern elements to the bottle, such as putting the characters “桂” “竹” “莲” (which means osmanthus, bamboo and lotus) boldly on the packaging.
Customization
Not many brands are customizing products for consumers. This is because it requires brands to customize labels and workers to manually label those stickers on bottles, and it costs extra manpower and material resources.
Because of the customizing service, many consumers buy it as a gift for someone else.
Products that are giftable are excellent drivers of organic word of mouth marketing. After receiving this customized gift, people tend to share it on WeChat Moments, which attached warmth to To Summer’s products and lower the brand’s promotion budget.
Why does the brand only sell on Thursday night?
One of the reasons we just mention is the customization, which requires extra time and materials, but the core reason is the production circle.
Skincare or cosmetic products can be quickly produced once you confirm the package and ingredients, they will be manufactured in bulk with a mature supply chain and production chain in China. But China doesn’t have such a production line for high-end fragrance products.
For example, the stones found in To Summer’s mood crystal aroma are shipped from many countries including England, South Africa and U.S. After arriving, they will be processed in To Summer’s own studios, because in China, there is no factory that can handle such production line at the moment.
Even if some of the brand’s ingredients are native to China, to extract, the brand has to send those ingredients to France. The whole process involves many foreign companies and that’s why To Summer is not able to produce products on mass scale and they choose to sell them on Thursday night only.
This appears to be working to the brand’s advantage. In the brands WeChat mini program store, consumers can pay 0.01 RMB to be notified as soon as new inventory is uploaded.
A Deliberate Choice to Stay Slow
Co-founder of the brand Sheng Li (沈黎) believes that customers are very smart to know what a team is like behind a brand. While they have enough demand to grow the brand more quickly, the team wants to stay at this slow pace for now, and in 3-5 years, maybe they will consider expanding their business scale.
To Summer will open their first offline store in Beijing in December. The store will cover 170 square meters but the team will only allocate 20 square meters for shopping and the rest they want to leave it for customers to drink, read and charge their phones. They want to make it feel like a friend’s house and a space for customers to relax.
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