Chapter 199 Beauty Salon Special
The concept of cosmeceuticals is also mentioned in the original book. The heroine, Li Yiqi, starts a business developing medical devices. A small, established pharmaceutical company next door acquires the formula of a well-established domestic brand, hoping to capitalize on it. That was one of the earliest attempts at domestic cosmeceuticals.
Going back to 1998, L'Oréal, a major foreign cosmetics brand, positioned its brand "Vichy" as a cosmetic that was "only sold in pharmacies." This is the concept of pharmaceutical cosmetics. They not only introduced this concept to China, but also successfully opened up the domestic market.
At that time, the popular Japanese TV series "Ashin" made the domestic brand Queen's Pian Zai Huang Pearl Cream famous. It became famous only because the heroine Xinzi in the film used it, so Japanese tourists who came to China for tourism had to go to the pharmacy to buy this thing.
The market prospects are promising, and more domestic pharmaceutical companies are developing this type of drug.
Lin Ruoyan started this conversation, and seeing the eyes of several female researchers light up, she added a few more words: "We should develop our own research. Why not develop an established brand and pair it with other medical devices?"
Several male researchers were confused again: "Why would you need equipment to wash your face? Isn't your hands enough? The most a woman can use is a towel and a sponge."
"That's the normal way you wash your face at home." Lin Ruoyan hasn't mentioned the high-end handheld small facial cleansers in the real world yet. Now the concept of beauty salons can give everyone a reasonable benchmark. She said,
"With the development of the domestic economy, many wealthy women are paying special attention to their appearance. Have you ever been to a beauty salon? If not, go there at government expense and try out the services, especially those for facials and skincare."
Lin Ruoyan doesn't do it herself, but many in the Wencheng wives' group do, with many visiting the salon two or three times a week. Their typical routine involves finishing their morning chores, sending their husbands and children to school, and then gathering for tea and conversation until the afternoon. Then, they either play cards or get their beauty treatments. By the time they're done, it's time for the children to get out of school, so they wait for their husbands at home. The day flies by.
They take a nap on the beauty bed, where the attendants give them gentle massages and various treatments. Upon waking, their skin is firm, refreshed, and relaxed. Some people use medical devices at this time, but most are imported, expensive, and prone to problems. Tanning is popular abroad, with UV lamps simulating sunbathing, while whitening is more popular in China. This difference in philosophy means that many devices are inoperable.
There's a huge demand for domestically developed medical aesthetic devices tailored to the aesthetic tastes of Eastern women. However, most of the researchers involved are men, primarily focused on developing serious medical devices to improve hospital efficiency. Medical aesthetic devices, with their low technical requirements, can become unprofitable within two years of sale if they're counterfeited.
Today's scientific research leaders are like this, but people always change. If they see others making money with related products, they want to do the same. After all, the company is seriously developing a device that can truly help people with myopia. They are now generating revenue for the company and feeding back into serious research. Adhering to this concept, they can still support R&D work.
Seeing that everyone was open to research and development related to medical aesthetics, Lin Ruoyan continued to encourage them, "You are all professionals in this field. As an outsider, I only care about the future sales of the product. I suggested selling the cosmetics and equipment together, considering that the future buyers will be major beauty salons. Therefore, I will arrange for the marketing department to first establish sales channels there, and you can focus on serious research and development. Apply for patents whenever possible, including design patents. This way, if others copy us in the future, we will have a trump card to protect ourselves."
Lin Ruoyan returned to the office and called Jiang Fang to assign a new task.
Jiang Fang worked as a cosmetics salesperson back in the day. When it came to drugstore cosmetics and the ins and outs of beauty salons, she knew more than Lin Ruoyan. Generally, reputable beauty salons not only earned money from their customers but also sold a lot of cosmetics on their behalf, earning commissions. The more fashionable and advanced the equipment, the more it enhanced the salon's high-end image.
Think about it, an ordinary low-end shop, with a few girls giving you a massage and washing your face, all done manually, with techniques passed down from generation to generation, all boasting about being superfluous, how many people would believe it? A visit to the shop costs about the same as a haircut.
The decor of a serious high-end beauty salon is so lavish that ordinary people wouldn't dare enter. Each room is private, the beds are said to be custom-made and imported, and the equipment inside is worth millions. High-tech treatments like photorejuvenation are definitely more sophisticated than traditional procedures.
There's no way around it. The era depicted in the book still saw a strong admiration for foreign products. The products and equipment they developed in the future would inevitably have foreign trademarks, global registered trademarks, and intellectual property rights. This would not only open up sales in China, but also create markets overseas where women demanded them.
They also need to integrate Chinese cosmetics and mysterious Traditional Chinese Medicine formulas... They can even design a sales strategy specifically for the West. Western women, whose skin is rough and ages quickly, envy the youthful beauty of Eastern women, who appear younger and more beautiful in their forties than their twenties. Why? Because we have ancient beauty formulas!
Simply buying cosmeceuticals and skincare products isn't enough; they need to be paired with our equipment for optimal results. This equipment isn't cheap. Don't even ask how much it costs; it's likely to cost hundreds of thousands of yuan. Especially when exporting abroad, it can't be cheap, or people won't appreciate it. We have to charge exorbitant prices, more than double the price of domestically produced products, to profit from foreigners.
Lin Ruoyan thought about the fact that she had opened a film and television company and was looking for celebrities to endorse her products. The beauty salons they usually went to were also a distribution channel. She told Jiang Fang all this, and Jiang Fang became more and more excited the more she listened.
The value of the recent project, a villa priced at one million yuan, was quite attractive, but the other prices were a bit low. If she could get the cosmetics and equipment packaged together and sell them to high-end beauty salons for three or five hundred thousand yuan, wouldn't that be more profitable than selling houses? Producing that kind of equipment was much quicker than building a house. She could lay the pipes first, secure an order, and then start production, which would keep costs low in her own factory.
Through her conversation with Jiang Fang, Lin Ruoyan finally understood why the original Jiang Fang's sales performance was so impressive. Jiang Fang herself had sold many types of products and was not limited to a single category. She was also very flexible and open to new things.
Furthermore, Jiang Fang was a woman, and if Lu Gan had told her about this, he would probably have been intimidated by the prospect of visiting a beauty salon. But once Jiang Fang spoke to her, she immediately resonated with her, as if her Ren and Du meridians had been opened up. She no longer needed the guidance of Lin Ruoyan, an amateur, and quickly developed a plan to promote the product.
Lin Ruoyan listened to Jiang Fang's clear and logical thinking and quickly pulled back: "Don't worry, wait until the product prototype is developed before promoting it. I'm afraid that you will sell hundreds of units of the product in the future, and the product has not yet been developed."
At present, the people in the marketing department have mastered the art of selling products with empty words, especially for things like software that cannot be seen or touched and whose benefits cannot be felt for a period of time. They have sold many sets of products with just words without any obstacles, which is quite magical.
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