Home furnishing stores are currently facing severe challenges.
Not long ago, the world-renowned furniture brand IKEA announced the closure of its Shanghai Yangpu store in the Chinese market.
Prior to April 1, IKEA China had announced the closure of offline stores in Guiyang.
IKEA, which has been cultivating in China for more than 20 years, has closed 2 stores in a row for 3 months, showing a little fatigue.
In addition to IKEA, many large home furnishing stores across the country have also been exposed to closures one after another.
According to incomplete statistics, since last year, at least 30 large home furnishing stores and building materials markets have been closed across the country.
In the first half of 2022, Red Star Macalline and Easyhome, the leading companies in Chinese home furnishing stores, all closed their stores.
Internet giant Alibaba's homearch Chongqing store has closed on July 15 this year, and it has only been open for half a year.
According to Tianyancha data, as of now, there are more than 4.315 million home building materials enterprises in my country, of which more than 1.176 million newly registered enterprises were registered from January to July this year, with an average monthly growth rate of 43.6%.
However, the phenomenon of the giants closing their stores one after another is an "unfavorable signal" for the home building materials industry. What is the reason for the home store to fall into the current dilemma?
Regarding the reasons for the closure of stores, IKEA China said that in the face of an increasingly complex retail market and changes in consumer behavior brought about by factors such as digitalization and the epidemic, IKEA China will transform, close or add new business units and channels when necessary, and Explore various innovative customer touchpoint models.
From IKEA's explanation, it is not difficult to see that the current home consumption market environment has undergone tremendous changes: the rapid development of Internet home improvement customization, the advent of the era of full decoration, the change in the preferences of young home improvement consumers, the decline of the real estate boom, the repeated impact of the epidemic, etc. The operation of the store has brought great challenges.
In recent years, the trend of online home furnishing products has become more and more obvious, and Internet home improvement customization has ushered in rapid development.
The rapid development of e-commerce sales has brought great changes to the home furnishing sales model while optimizing the industrial chain. From the previous traditional offline channels to online + offline, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, official account, Kuaishou and other lines The platform is diverting traffic, and the whole decoration and customization of the whole house are all grabbing traffic.
The offline traffic of traditional home furnishing stores is facing challenges, the store entry rate is getting lower and lower, the natural passenger flow has declined seriously, and the operating pressure is increasing day by day.
The deteriorating market environment, coupled with the high rents and the serious excess of the disorderly expansion of home furnishing stores in the past few years, various factors have led to higher and higher rent-out rates in many home furnishing stores, and many of them eventually closed down.
The growth rate of the home furnishing industry has also slowed down year by year, from double-digit growth to single-digit growth, and more monks and less porridge has become the new normal.
In today's industry context where consumption tends to be younger and the frequency of mainstream consumer groups entering home stores is getting lower and lower, the traditional sales model of relying on storefronts to attract customer flow and relying on product display to convert customer flow into orders is no longer in line with current consumers. household consumer demand.
Offline home furnishing stores need to actively cover all online channels such as social media, Tmall, JD.com, mini programs, and self-media, make use of the wide range of traffic attracted online, and open up online and offline channels through the experience model of offline brick-and-mortar stores. And deep integration, so that traffic into real orders.
To maximize traffic, we can achieve a win-win situation between traffic and volume.
With the continuous transformation of home furnishing sales channels, as a market that once national brands had to compete for, the current situation of home furnishing stores has become particularly "embarrassing".
The cruel reality forces home furnishing stores to go out, actively capture traffic, realize offline and online integration of goods and scenes through digital tools, and create an immersive shopping experience, which is the future transformation direction of home furnishing stores.
Yang Ranran