Jon StojanWanmei Jiazu (Hangzhou Culture Media Co., Ltd.) has quickly established itself as an industry leader in China’s highly competitive live-stream e-commerce space. The company has achieved incredible sales numbers and established input partnerships with global brands such as Disney, L’Oréal, and JD.com.
Wanmei Jiazu reported more than 5 billion RMB GMV on TikTok/Douyin, while Cotten Xi Home Textiles achieved 600 million GMV and 640% audience growth during the Double Eleven festival (China’s Singles’ Day) last year.
But record-breaking numbers and partnerships aren’t the whole story. Wanmei Jiazu attributes much of its success to an innovative approach that weaves together live-stream entertainment featuring celebrities with innovative product development and superior supply chain and distribution management.
In other words, Wanmei Jiazu represents what many other companies in e-commerce and entertainment hope to achieve: using creativity, operational know-how, and strategic partnerships to engage consumers, inspire confidence, and increase sales.
As with the best livestreams, we’ll be getting into the details on how Wanmei Jiazu has been able to achieve such impressive results, but here, we can share the headline: the company’s approach, as confirmed by interviews with company executives, represents a model of the future of e-commerce where creativity, operational excellence, and foresight are balanced and addressed in tandem.
Before we get into the details, here’s a quick overview of the company:
Company overview
Wanmei Jiazu was first founded in 2020 and it has established one of its headquarters in Hangzhou, China, since 2021. The company focuses on live e-commerce, content marketing, and celebrity IP development. Wanmei Jiazu has pioneered a unique “Content + E-commerce” MCN (multi-channel network) model that sets it apart from the competition.
As mentioned, the company has generated exceptional revenues, achieving multiple single-session GMV records exceeding 1 billion RMB, led by well-known celebrities and livestream stars such as Venus, Wang Yan, and more.
Since 2020, Wanmei Jiazu has been named to Douyin’s hot list of the top 10 brands in the livestreaming e-commerce category.
Public Relations Manager, Zhiting Xie, outlined the company’s core values and unique business model:
“With a focus on IP and product innovation, supply chain integration, and private domain operations, we create tailored celebrity campaigns for brands looking to drive sales and elevate their product offerings.”
It’s true that Wanmei Jiazu’s competitors have also been experiencing positive growth, but the company’s holistic approach has set it on a path of rapid growth, with company revenue increasing by 300% during the past year, specifically citing an influx of brands eager to collaborate and leverage the company’s integrated supply chain.
Let’s take a look at how Wanmei Jiazu’s model works, starting with content.
An innovative ‘content + e-commerce’ model
Compared to the more traditional model of attempting to direct customer attention towards pre-recorded advertising video footage or paying social media endorsements to social media influencers (a trend that has admittedly grown up very quickly), live-stream content that musically jumps between different topics and segments can be much more dynamic, retaining viewer attention and encouraging repeat viewership.
This isn’t to say that live-stream e-commerce is superior to recorded content-based advertising in every case, but for Wanmei Jiazu’s target demographic, live-streams featuring celebrities or popular streamers can be an incredibly effective means of marketing products.
“Content creation and sales are tied with celebrity exposure, and celebrity exposure is one of the key reasons that our content and e-commerce model could be sustained. Further, even though this model can be duplicated by our competitors, it requires resources and celebrity support to thrive in this industry.”
The quality and reputability of the source are also extremely important. Certain celebrities may be able to engender trust and loyalty based on their own history of positive interactions with viewers and customers.
These celebrities have also proven success as livestream hosts, encouraging viewers to stick around and engage with the material.
For example, Wang Yan has garnered over 50 million fans across multiple platforms, while Venus has secured over 40 million fans on Taobao Live, with millions more on TikTok.
Let’s take a look at how Wanmei Jiazu’s livestreams featuring various celebrities have led to successful campaigns.
Celebrity IP development
Examining Wanmei Jiazu’s impressive sales performance, it’s clear that the company knows how to select certain high-profile individuals with clout to feature during live streams.
But beyond selection, there’s also the important process of development and alignment. Wanmei Jiazu helps to support, maintain, and develop a distinct IP (intellectual property) for each celebrity beyond their already-established brand or public image.
The related company IP can then be leveraged for future campaigns, keeping the attention of audiences and customers high.
“In addition to Venus and Wang Yan, we have plenty of other celebrities who could help with our ongoing audience engagement and revenue. We are able to consistently find ways to connect with our audience.”
This is yet another way in which livestream-based advertising can outpace traditional e-commerce advertising formats. A close connection with stream hosts can help viewers develop a heightened sense of loyalty, not just to the brands featured in a livestream but also to the livestream hosts themselves.
Consistency across livestreams featuring the same celebrities can help maintain interest.
But it’s also crucial to maintain consistency in terms of brand messaging and customer engagement across multiple platforms.
Cross-platform engagement
Compared to live-streaming in the West, where similar platforms like Twitch prioritize a small number of concurrent viewers, livestream e-commerce in China benefits from multiple well-established platforms, including Taobao, Tmall, Douyin, and Taobao Live.
Having multiple platforms means that Wanmei Jiazu can provide diversified marketing approaches that aren’t limited to a single platform. This maximizes potential earnings, since each platform can attract its own unique audience.
At the same time, managing multiple platforms also creates additional complexity. In order for campaigns to be truly successful, brand messaging has to be consistent across all platforms, and customer engagement needs to be consistently high on each platform as well.
But as Xie explained, Wanmei Jiazu is well-prepared to deal with all these different platforms.
“In the future, we would like to build our own branding messaging platform to fully collaborate with other platforms in order to sustain exposure.”
This will be an advanced and highly integrated approach to cross-platform engagement that isn’t currently being attempted by competitors, further strengthening Wanmei Jiazu’s position as an industry leader.
The importance of supply chain
Moving on to the supply side of the business, it’s well known that e-commerce giants such as Alibaba’s Taobao have become massive successes by directly connecting consumers with manufacturers and sellers, thereby eliminating the need for third-party sellers while also drastically reducing shipping times.
But live e-commerce doesn’t need to seek fulfillment from massive e-commerce platforms in order to create smooth, efficient shopping experiences. Wanmei Jiazu’s integrated supply chain also helps the company deliver excellent customer experiences.
As Xie explained, the company largely relies on third-party logistics companies to handle supply chain operations, but they always provide management input to ensure consistency and customer trust.
Luckily, Wanmei Jiazu has established a record of reliable, high-quality products, and product traceability is a strong selling point.
For example, Wanmei Jiazu currently collaborates with the brand Cotton Xi Home Textiles. During the most recent Double Eleven festival, Cotton Xi surpassed a whopping 700 million GMV (gross merchandise value), making it Xianghe City’s top-performing brand.
The success of Cotton Xi Home Textiles is a prime illustration of Wanmei Jiazu’s supply chain management prowess. Wanmei Jiazu’s excellent sales performance can inspire confidence in customers that any product they order will be high quality and will arrive quickly, as speed is critical to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Sustainability and legal protection
As mentioned above, Wanmei Jiazu has built a successful and sustainable business by considering all areas of operations, from marketing to supply chain to distribution. This has rooted the company in their domestic marketplace, where they have established value and success.
However, another component of their growth and success so far has been Komarova’s efforts, in collaboration with other company executives, to ensure that the influencers at the core of their business efforts are being treated fairly and provided with opportunities for meaningful, long-term partnerships.
As Komarova detailed for us, making sure that these celebrity anchors are treated fairly has important marketing benefits in addition to the ethical reasons for providing excellent working conditions. Streamers and influencers are able to repay the company’s support by consistently conducting well and capitalizing on their well-established fan bases.
“Having a lineup of celebrity anchors that are actively collaborating with brands improves the company image and provides us with opportunities to attract new brands to collaborate with us.”
In other words, it benefits everyone involved to treat celebrity partners well and give them opportunities to develop new IPs. It helps secure outstanding results for brands collaborating with Wanmei Jiazu, creating a win-win scenario for celebrities and streamers as well who are afforded the chance to continue doing what they love while developing their public image along the way.
As noted earlier, Wanmei Jiazu mainly works with well-known companies themselves while also representing their companies’ interests; at the same time, Wanmei Jiazu has also established its own company brand, drawing power from expert management and creativity- attributes that will become increasingly important in the context of e-commerce becoming more and more crowded.
Maintaining this balance and setting an industry-wide standard is impressive work from Wanmei Jiazu executives.
Unfortunately, it will be difficult to maintain this balance as the e-commerce live-streaming market continues its rapid growth.
Future trends and challenges
Given the incredible success of livestreaming e-commerce, it’s no surprise that competition is becoming increasingly fierce, both among livestreaming events and also between different platforms.
As Xie pointed out, the success of live streaming e-commerce is likely to attract the attention of government regulators, and there’s also the very real threat that competing companies could try to replicate the livestreaming e-commerce model without considering the risks of a government crackdown or without having the necessary resources to achieve similar.
“There will be more government regulation and restrictions and similar competition emerging, so it is important to plan ahead and continue to retain our market share in the live e-commerce industry.”
Preparation and planning are important when it comes to mitigating these risks while working to continue growth. Wanmei Jiazu has proven that they’re more than capable of engaging in long-term planning with an awareness of both near-future and long-term external threats.
International expansion
So far, we’ve been focusing primarily on Wanmei Jiazu’s successful operations in the domestic marketplace, but the company is also looking to overseas markets where livestream e-commerce is still relatively underserved.
Xie elaborated: “We will continue to expand into various parts of the US, including but not limited to California, Texas, and other areas. We will become the world’s top 500 fortune related to content media and e-commerce.”
Expect to see Wanmei Jiazu expanding into various parts of the United States soon.
But more than geography, the company’s growth so far has been a result of the company’s desire to be part of and to support the growth of this emerging business sector.
Creativity, planning, private labels
In the near future, global e-commerce is going to rely more on creativity than ever, and creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It needs to be supported by planning, management, and, above all, support for the people helping to make all these great ideas a reality.
It remains to be seen whether other companies will be able to replicate this success, both in terms of e-commerce growth and brand trust, but for the time being, Wanmei Jiazu have proven themselves masters of the craft.
E-commerce live streaming has already proven to be a watershed moment for online commerce and marketing, and in the hands of experienced companies like Wanmei Jiazu, it has also become a link between entertainment and commerce that facilitates opportunities for innovation.
Whether you’re looking to the near-term future of global e-commerce or the longer-term future of global entertainment, it’s hard not to be optimistic about what livestreams of e-commerce could lead to.
National best director award nomination for short video and films
Recently, Wanmei Jiazu’s executive film and video production director, Qiancheng Ying, has been nominated for the National Best Director Awards for a short video “Hi” that he has been submitted through the assisted production of Wanmei Jiazu. It is set to announce the winner of this award by the end of this month.