Buy furniture, go to Lecong.

Lecong Town, Foshan City, Guangdong Province, is famous for its furniture industry chain. Less than 10 days from the double 11, Liang, who drives a taxi, feels the busy taste in the air. In order to cope with this year's big promotion season, Lecong almost everyone is working overtime. Liang also works part-time in the aluminum business, and he is responsible for processing the handle parts of the wardrobe.

At the same time, in the “New Destiny” e-commerce training center on the fourth floor of Block 11 of the North District of Lecong Furniture International Convention and Exhibition Center, a 6-day e-commerce training course is underway, with a course price of 4,985 yuan. Generation After 90 or even 00, the trainees systematically learn the operation of Taobao store: from how to buy drill shows, through trains, to the skills of creating explosives.

Jackie Ma is their entrepreneurial Bible, and the goal of the new destiny is to Let the world have no hard to do furniture e-commerce. 

“New Destiny” E-commerce Training Center

The popularity of e-commerce training courses has become a scene of pleasure.

The changes that e-commerce has brought to Lecong are enormous, and it has given Lecong's furniture practitioners a chance to change their destiny. But this is not all smooth sailing, especially in the early days, Lecong people experienced the fear and struggle of e-commerce, and then accepted and embraced.

The most representative of the conflict and change between this small county and the e-commerce is the annual 11-time node.

Because furniture e-commerce is a large non-standard product, its development speed is later than mature categories such as clothing. Explosive warehouses, inventory, returns, logistics, early furniture e-commerce entrepreneurs encountered a lot of pits, and even many businesses because of the double 11 orders broke out and finally forced to close the store. In Lecong, people love and hate this festival.

Now, Lecong people are already familiar with the double 11 and the local has developed a perfect supporting system and many quality brands. Of course, new problems are beginning to emerge, such as increased traffic and marketing costs; when promotions become the norm, users are less sensitive to such big holidays as the Double 11, and so on, as the entire e-commerce field encounters.

It can be said that this decade of Lecong is a microcosm of the double 11 years.

Early Lecong: Million square meters of furniture market

Lecong Town, Shunde District, Foshan, Guangdong Province is located in the core hinterland of the Pearl River Delta. The town covers an area of 78 square kilometers, with a resident population of over 90,000 and a floating population of over 100,000. As one of the sources of the ancient Chinese foreign trade to the world-famous “Maritime Silk Road”, Lecong Town’s long-standing business tradition can be traced back to the Qing and Ming Dynasties.

Lecong's furniture manufacturing industry originated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this period, Lecong Town has successively appeared in many workshop-style furniture production workshops. Some savvy Lecong people began to produce and sell simple office furniture, dining tables and other furniture, forming a prototype of the furniture market.

By 1996, Lecong had built a professional furniture market of 1 million square meters. Around 2000, Lecong-Longjiang and other furniture production and sales bases introduced more than 2 billion private capitals, and the original furniture market building was demolished. It took more than half a year. Along with the 325 National Road, the Lecong furniture production and sales belt including the Louvre was established.

Lecong's most famous Louvre furniture market

According to the data provided by Yang Zhihua, secretary general of Lecong Furniture Association, from the perspective of production, Lecong probably has more than 6,000 production plants, accounting for half of Guangdong, and Guangdong accounts for half of the national factories. Various large-scale furniture exhibitions began in Foshan, and the method of displaying furniture was gradually sold from the complete set to the display mode according to the model.

According to the scale of Lecong revealed by Yang Zhihua, Lecong has an exhibition area of 6.5 million, more than 8,000 brands, and 30,000-50,000 merchants. In the peak of exports in 2006, foreign trade and domestic sales accounted for half of each year, and the annual output value of 200 billion yuan.

However, Lecong's local furniture manufacturing industry is still a labor-intensive industry, with scattered layout and low added value. The economic scale, technical level and spatial layout are not in line with the development requirements of modern urban economy.

Coupled with the emergence of large-scale high-end furniture cities across the country, the impact on the furniture market is huge. From the remote areas of Hebei Xianghe, Chengdu Wuhou, Jiangxi Southwest Kang and other production areas, to the nearby Dongguan, Shenzhen, have brought competitive pressure to the Lecong market.

2009-2013: Furniture company that was smashed to death

Linshimuye is a furniture e-commerce company that has risen rapidly during this period.

Lin Shimuye, deputy general manager Ma Canxing came here after graduation, and he has accompanied Linshimuye for ten years. Ma Canxing started from Taobao customer service and has been a partner until today. For the first batch of young people who came into contact with the Internet, the most popular online shopping platform of the era was Amazon and eBay.

In 2009, Taobao was still called “Taobao Mall”. In the first year of double 11, Ma Canxing also participated.

Because of the large size and low frequency of purchase, the exploration of early e-commerce is very difficult. Not to mention that ten years ago, who would buy furniture online?

By 2010 double 11, Alibaba's overall traffic doubled, the total network transaction volume exceeded 936 million, a total of 711 merchants participated: 2 stores over 20 million, 11 stores over 10 million, 20 stores over 5 million A total of 181 stores have over one million and more than one million packages have been shipped.

Huge traffic is disastrous for the furniture industry that is not yet ready. The amount of double 11 is 100 times of the usual time, the production period of furniture category is long, the traditional mode is set by customers, and Lin's wood industry orders the factory. Many startups simply don't keep inventory. The skyrocketing orders are the result of avalanches for the furniture industry that does not have too many plans and does not restock.

In 2011, Linshimuye ushered in a surprise 11: an explosive bed that is expected to sell 500 pieces, which sold more than 4,000 pieces on the same day, which is 8 times more.

GMV of Linshimuye 

2013-2016: E-commerce changes everything

The old Dong of the furniture of Zhongpai achieved a breakthrough in the double 11 in 2015. “95% of the people in the whole market are doing Tmall Taobao. At that time, we chose to work hard in Jingdong, which is to find a place where it is easier to tear the opening. It is only done in Jingdong, this is the contraction of the channel."

In 2015, around the entire double 11, the set of explosive fabric sofas of Zhongpai Furniture sold more than 1,600 sets. The explosions brought more than 4 million sales to the entire store, and the annual sales reached more than 10 million. It’s not just running water, but the whole team’s morale and loss are reversed.

2015 is also the high point of e-commerce outbreaks. In that year, Alibaba's double 11 sales were fixed at 91.2 billion, with more than 5,000 overseas brands from 25 countries and regions participating in the shipment, with 467 million packages. Jingdong double 11 big promotion total orders also exceeded 100 million,more than 32 million orders.

In addition, behind the success of Lao Dong, it is also supported by the improvement of the overall supporting supply chain of e-commerce development.

The emergence of a new logistics company is a sign that Lecong has fully embraced the double eleven.

2016-present: Looking for a breakthrough

At the 2016 Yunqi Conference, Jackie Ma proposed the concept of “new retail”, and the e-commerce ten-year process has developed to a new stage. Online traffic is becoming more expensive, marketing costs are rising, and the concept of online and offline integration appears, which means that the entire e-commerce competition has entered a stage of white-hot.

In Alibaba’s annual report for FY 2018, China’s retail e-commerce accounted for 36.7 billion, accounting for 85% of core e-commerce, with 26.2 billion advertising revenue (65% year-on-year growth) and 8.9 billion commission income (year-on-year growth rate 28%).

From the perspective of Lecong itself, the entire furniture industry has experienced geometric growth for ten years. After the completion of the construction of e-commerce infrastructure, a large number of merchants poured in. Until now, all the manufacturers want to do e-commerce; from most of the factories, they are doing physical store business, and now almost every factory will undertake e-commerce orders, and will take the initiative to develop e-commerce business.

E-commerce has transformed the supply and demand structure of the factory, but it also brings a lot of homogenization competition.

According to the data of Foshan E-Commerce Association, the transaction scale of e-commerce market in Foshan exceeded 600 billion yuan in 2017, reaching 633 billion yuan, up 25.35% year-on-year; the direct business practitioners exceeded 116,000, and the indirect employees exceeded 240,000. Foshan's online retail market accounted for more than one-third of total social retail sales, reaching 34.5%.

Plagiarism, price wars, this is a problem that every e-commerce industry will encounter.

Linshimuye started preparing for this year's double 11

Linshimuye began to work under the line, and at the same time began to build their own warehouses, making the business model heavier. Linshimuye will start building a 400,000-square-mile logistics park this year. The current shipments of the entire company, in the first half of 2018, in and out of the library of 6000 parties, a total of 12,000 square.

In the past few years, the double 11 has doubled every year. In the past two years, the growth rate of Linshimuye has dropped to a moderate 30%-50%, and the explosion has never appeared again.

What did E-commerce and Double 11 bring to Foshan Lecong?

There are more than 30,000 furniture-related business registration businesses in Foshan's furniture industry. For the entire industry belt, the furniture-related upstream and downstream can be found in Lecong – from factory to sales, from production and marketing to wholesale and retail, as well as soft accessories. E-commerce has brought more than one sales channel change to Lecon, but the improvement of the entire supply chain.

The accumulation of wealth created by Lecong in a short period of time has also attracted a large number of young people to come back here and find new opportunities for entrepreneurship. The rise of the e-commerce training center represented by Liu Changgui is a typical case. Because of his focus on the training of furniture, he also attracted a large number of students from Sichuan and Jiangxi.

The development of e-commerce allowed Lecong to overtake the corner, and a number of star companies like Linshimuye were born.

In 2017, Tmall double 11 trading volume was 168.2 billion, and furniture is already the top ten category. In 2018, the Double 11 has been launched, and it is foreseeable that a new transaction record will be created.

The Lecong people are also ready early.

（Source: JJgle.com）