China’s Top Commerce Live Streamers Viya, Austin Li, and Cherie Launch Their Own Brands
At the beginning of 2021, top Taobao live streamer Viya became the newest Chinese influencer to launch her own brand. She and her husband Dong Haifeng (董海锋) launched their own food company called Hangzhou Fengweipai (杭州锋味派). Though it defines itself as a food company, its business not only includes the wholesale and retail of agricultural products but also apparel and makeup products.
You may not know it, but one of Viya’s top selling product categories is food & beverage. Viya started off as a fashion live streamer but one day during her stream she was snacking on bread and started receiving lots of comments asking her what bread she was eating. As a result, the food brand that manufactured that bread started paying her to promote their products.
Fast forward to the present, on the actual day of Double 11, 2020, Viya’s livestream included over 30 food brands. Among so many categories featured in her livestream, the food category ranked second just behind the beauty category.
With her success in the industry, Viya is now making use of her resources including food supply chains to build her own food brand.
But she is not the only top live streamer to start diversifying monetization streams.
Austin Li and His Dog Never
On December 18, 2020, top live streamer Austin Li’s company Mei One (美腕) launched a subsidiary company called Never’s Family (上海奈娃家族品牌管理有限公司). Never is Austin’s dog, who you will see show up quite often in his live streams. Austin has said Never is the one that accompanies him and has been there for him since the very beginning of his live streaming journey.
As Never became well known among Austin’s fans, she became her own little influencer and started attracting attention from brands.
At the beginning of 2020, Chinese beauty brand Perfect Diary worked with Never and launched an eyeshadow palette featuring the cutie. Over 90k palettes sold out in a few seconds.
In October 2020, after Never had become a granny (she gave birth to more doggies and those doggies had smaller ones), Austin finally had a Never family. The Never family has now worked with skincare brand Fresh and underwear brand Bananain (蕉内). Now that they officially have their own company, we’re sure to see them appearing in even more content in the future.
Cherie and Plus-size Women’s Apparel Plusmall
Late last year, another top live streamer Cherie co-launched apparel store “plusmall” with a famous celebrity agent Yang Tianzhen (杨天真).
Yang is plus-sized and brings the knowledge of how to create plus-sized apparel that Chinese women will like and her image and experiences resonate with consumers. Cherie, on the other hand, has years of experience in the live streaming and apparel industries, and knows how to sell the products as well as how to manufacture them.
From these examples, we can see that many of the top commerce live streamers are beginning to take their expertise and leverage them to create additional revenue channels so they don’t have to rely solely on selling products for other brands.
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