INSIGHTS
Decode Florasis : Strong Competitor of Perfect Diary
BY Ye ChenFeb 24, 2021
Florasis is an emerging Chinese-grown beauty brand founded in 2017. It has grown strongly, with sales reaching 3 billion yuan in 2020, becoming an arch rival of another rising star, Perfect Diary. This article explores its unique way to success, including its special brand position as an oriental brand focusing on Chinese fashion, nurturing a tight relationship with Austin Li (Top live-streamer in China), choosing celebrities with traditional Chinese style, actively interacting with consumers, etc.

Talking about emerging beauty brands in China, Perfect Diary is undoubtedly the most shining one. Successfully launching an IPO in the New York stock market, Perfect Diary’s parent company became the first Chinese beauty company whose market share exceeds 100 billion yuan. On the contrary, Florasis (花西子), another promising beauty brand in China and often regarded as the strongest Chinese competitor of Perfect Diary, keeps a low profile in the capital market and seems a bit more mysterious. Florasis has not sought financing and has no plans for IPO for now. However, this has not diminished the brand’s excellent market performance, which even eclipsed Perfect Diary.

Florasis, founded in 2017, multiplied in 2019 when its sales reached 1.13 billion yuan, increasing 25 times compared to sales in 2018. In 2020, its sales exceeded 3 billion yuan, rising 165.4% YoY. 1 According to Yipit, an e-commerce monitoring platform, Florasis’s GMV on Tmall started to exceed Perfect Diary from June 2020. 1

For many small brands, Florasis is definitely an excellent example to study. It is a miracle that a new brand grew to a top sales brand in an extremely competitive sector in just three years. 

Road to success

  • Brand Position

Florasis and Perfect Diary, as new Chinese beauty brands, both sell their products at more affordable prices than other big international brands. However, unlike Perfect Diary positioning itself as a brand to use western fashion to produce beauty products for Asians, Florasis directly cuts its connection to western makeup and positions itself as an oriental brand, focusing on using traditional techniques and Chinese herbs to produce traditional-style beauty products. This trait has been rooted in the product name, design, and marketing, and won goodwill with Chinese consumers for traditional elements such as silk (蚕丝), carving flower (雕花), and jade (玉容).image001-4.jpg

Oriental makeup

  • Marketing

Marketing also plays an essential part in Florasis’s success. As many other brands did, Florasis made many efforts in celebrity marketing, social media marketing, and IP marketing. What made Florasis special is its particular connection with Austin Li, the top live-streamer in China. Florasis and Austin Li started cooperation when Austin Li hasn't made a name for himself. In 2018, they occasionally interacted on Weibo (Social media equivalent to Twitter). In 2019, Austin Li went viral, and Florasis ushered in its first explosive sales by joining in his live-streaming for the first time. From then on, Florasis invited Austin Li as its chief brand recommendation officer, and Austin became the biggest growth driver for this brand. During the first seven months of 2020, Florasis launched seven new products in total. Among these new products, products that were recommended by Austin Li all achieved monthly sales of 10000 units while products that Austin Li didn’t recommend only had 1000 units monthly sales. 2

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Austin Li recommended Florasis

Besides a tight relationship with Austin Li, Florasis also showed a unique attitude to choosing its spokespersons. It tends to choose celebrities with classic eastern traits, meaning that it values the fit between the spokesperson and the brand more than spokespersons’ popularity. Its first spokeswoman, Ju Jinyi, has the title of Classical Beauty Rare in Four Thousand Year. Its second spokesman, Du Juan, has a classic Chinese model face, which suits the brand well. Then Florasis invited Zhoushen, a singer, to create a song named Florasis (花西子) for the brand. Like Du Juan who doesn’t have much traffic, Zhou Shen is also not a traffic singer. He only has 5.17 million fans on Weibo. However, Zhou Shen’s voice and previous works have strong oriental characteristics, which undoubtedly matches the brand. This strategy has proven to be successful. On June 29, this song was released officially while Florasis’s Baidu search index and information index exceeded Perfect Diary on that day and reached a record high on June 30. 3

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Du Juan: Florasis’s Spokesperson

Florasis also pays much attention to the brand’s exposure on social media, and it applies multi-pronged strategies based on these social media’s different traits:

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Since 2019, Florasis has increased its collaboration with other well-known IPs, which considerably boosted its fame. These cooperation campaigns rapidly promoted this brand’s exposure. Here is a collection of its IP cooperation in 2019 and 2020:

2019

2020

Guming (Bubble tea brand)

Heaven Gaia (Chinese fashion clothes brand)

Chinese Fashion Week

New York Fashion Week

Miao ethnicity

Lu Zhou Lao Jiao (Baijiu Brand)

People’s Daily & Miao ethnicity

Tmall Beauty Chinese Fashion

Faceu App

Chicecream (Ice cream brand)

Tmall Golden Beauty Prize

  • Consumer

Florasis keeps a close relationship with its customers by inviting them to participate in new products’ research & development. Florasis often invites consumers through Weibo and WeChat to try out their new products as their experience officers and give feedback. Based on their feedback, Florasis will adjust their new products. This strategy contributes to new products’ quality improvement and nurtures the relationship between the brand and consumers. Also, Florasis's official account even responded to every comment on every post, showing its sincerity to consumers.

Potential problems

As a new brand, Florasis also has problems. First, although it often impressed consumers with its excellent product design, its product quality remains a problem for some consumers. There are quite a few complaints about the brand’s product quality online. Second, for most female consumers, Florasis is a popular brand but not a big brand. A social media post about Florasis used to gain much traffic. In this post, a girl felt upset because her boyfriend sent her a gift box from Florasis as her birthday gift, even though the value of this gift box was also high. Many other female consumers agreed with her and said that they would prefer gifts from those big brands, such as Givenchy, YSL, and MAC, because Florasis was only for daily use, not as a gift, and so was Perfect Diary. From this popular post, we could see the brand position of these new emerging makeup brands for consumers, which means that these brands definitely have a long way to go in the future actually to compete with famous international brands.

Ye Chen
ChemLinked Research Analyst
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