Classic Case: Paradise Umbrella uses IP to "wind" young people

Paradise Umbrella is a time-honored brand in the umbrella industry. It has been founded for 30 years. Five years ago, Paradise Umbrella opened a Tmall flagship store.

Compared with offline audiences, most online consumers are “young”. If the brand is just focusing on cost-effectiveness as before, it will miss a large number of online users. What can you do to make young people fall in love with their own brand? This is a problem that Asia Culture, which is responsible for the operation of Paradise Umbrella, has been trying to solve.

Use IP to "wind" young people

As early as 3 to 4 years ago, Paradise Umbrella collaborated with "Time Lovers" to try to use this to radiate the audience of the movie. But at that time, the brand owner could only print some copyright elements on the umbrella, and the copyright owner later gave it to the public as a gift as a promotion. The brand owner could not sell it independently, nor could he gain more initiative. The cooperation was just a brief taste.

Paradise Umbrella truly cooperated with IP in depth last year, and the partner was Zhang Xiaohe. The latter is known as "the most famous spokesperson for the animation image of Chinese office workers" and enjoys a high reputation among young people. During cooperation, Paradise Umbrella paid Zhang Xiaobo's copyright fee and obtained the IP use right. The design is negotiated by both parties, and after the product is completed, the sales will be divided. In terms of sales promotion, the two parties are working together. The cooperative styles are not only sold through the online Tmall flagship store, but also through Zhang Xiaohe's offline tour activities.

Developing the "trend" umbrellas that young people like and helping brands gain online young audiences is the original intention of cooperation between Paradise Umbrella and Zhang Xiaohe. Zheng Guohua, deputy general manager of Asia, said: "We hope that the product can expand its fan base through Zhang Xiaohe's influence and make consumers feel that heaven is different."

In addition, by cooperating with well-known IPs, brands can often also increase premiums. It is understood that the price of ordinary paradise umbrellas is concentrated between 20 and 50 yuan, and is at the mid-to-low-end price among their peers. However, after cooperating with Zhang Xiaohe, the price of the cooperation model reached 79 yuan. Zheng Guohua revealed that the brand will continue to maintain cooperation with Zhang Xiaohe in the future.

IP is not omnipotent

In July 2015, Paradise Umbrella made new breakthroughs in IP cooperation. Through cooperation with Tmall and the copyright holders of "The Return of the Great Sage", 20,000 related derivatives were sold in one day. According to Zheng Guohua, this batch of products can actually sell better, but due to supply chain issues, it has to be concluded early.

In fact, the supply chain is the link that many brands need to work together when cooperating with IP. Different designs and different production processes make brand owners often need to allocate supply chain resources in advance, otherwise once sales explode, the original supply system may not be able to keep up immediately.

Judging from the case of cooperation between Paradise Umbrella and "Da Sheng", under the conventional supply model, factory orders are produced according to schedule. The sudden outbreak of sales in e-commerce channels will put great pressure on the supply side. In addition, in this cooperation, Paradise did not simply print the IP image on the umbrella body, but redesigned the product based on the image. In terms of raw materials, not only new umbrella bones are used, but also digital spray painting is used, and the printing ink is replaced with a material that can be discolored when exposed to water.

The risk brought by this is that the original factory does not have enough resources to support the rapid production of this batch of cooperative funds. "The traditional silk-print ink cover color cannot make the cool colors of the Great Saint, so we adopted the transfer printing process. However, the factory only has two machines to meet these requirements, and the output is only 500 in a day, so we have to find out the outsourcing in the end." However, it has also driven and accelerated the upgrade of Paradise's supply chain.

On the other hand, after "The Return of the Great Sage", Zheng Guohua, who participated in the development of IP derivatives such as Van Gogh, "The Dragon-Seeking Art", and "The Little Door God", also mentioned that not all IP elements can be combined with brand products. Taking the umbrella as an example, the product is a circular arc shape. If you simply copy the IP on the umbrella, many images will be deformed. Many IPs are very interesting from the plane, but copying them on the umbrella may be a different scene.

Next, Zheng Guohua plans to subtract IP cooperation and no longer participate in the development of film IP derivatives at high frequency, but focus on some "continuity" IPs. The reason why continuity is emphasized is that the life cycle of the movie is not long, and once it is offline, the popularity will quickly weaken. Therefore, in the later stage, he will pay more attention to several series of movies such as "Kung Fu Panda" that will be released in succession, and he will no longer cooperate with other ordinary movie IPs at will.

Zheng Guohua also has many ideas about product segmentation. In the past, IP cooperation only launched a single cooperative model, but in fact, you can try to classify the cooperative model. For example, they all use the image of "Kung Fu Panda", but they can then subdivide the cooperation models into multiple series such as adults and children based on the audience type to expand the user base.

Lao Gao Crown Club

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