Because the dessert shop is booming. During the New Year's Day holiday, clerk Ajie was busy. His store is located in Zhengjia Plaza, the most prosperous business district in Guangzhou. The nearly 100-square-meter Manji Dessert Shop is overcrowded.
Just after finishing the desserts on that table, another table for two ordered a mango pancake and a poplar nectar. These signature desserts are the most popular and account for more than % of order sales. The unit price of the signature desserts is more than 100 yuan. According to Ajie's estimation, the average consumption of each bill for the two-person table with the most occupied tables can reach 50 to 60 yuan, and the customer's consumption time is about 50 minutes to an hour.
The business of dessert shops has been particularly prosperous in the mainland in recent years. Manji Desserts from Hong Kong have also tasted the benefits. Ajie told our reporter that many of the customers he remembered were women looking for a place to take a nap after being tired from shopping in the mall, or white-collar workers from nearby office buildings after get off work. During holidays, store sales double. In addition to the best-selling signature desserts such as mango pancake, Chinese desserts such as ground sesame paste, walnut juice and almond tea, which promote the concept of health, are also very popular among women.
As of the end of the year, the company had more than 100 branches in total. Excluding 2 branches in Hong Kong and 2 branches in Singapore and Indonesia, most of them are in the mainland. By establishing its brand in first-tier cities, Manji has created a myth of rapid expansion in the mainland. Manji brand manager Huang Jingxian revealed that the company plans to set up two more central kitchens in Xiamen and Hainan Island in 2020 based on the existing central kitchen in the mainland to prepare for further expansion into second-tier cities in the mainland in the future.
% Tips
If you can retain % more customers, your profits will increase by %.
The first store of Manji Desserts opened in Sai Kung District, Hong Kong. It took years to develop from an early family-style sweet shop to a chain of dessert shops in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore and Indonesia.
The first Manji was founded by Fang Zhang Xuefang and several of her close friends from middle school. It was just a traditional family-style sweet shop. However, today's top desserts including mango pancake were already the store's original products when Fang Zhangxuefang and her husband, who is now the group chairman, started their business. Fang Zhangxuefang, the current CEO of Manji, smiled happily when talking about her entrepreneurial ideas. I started my business at the age of 18. When I started my business, I thought that if I went into other industries, the update cycle of the industry would be too short, and I would be afraid that I would not be able to keep up with the changes. For me, making dessert services is as simple as greeting guests at home. I think I can continue doing it even when I am old, so I chose the dessert industry.
In Fang Zhang Xuefang’s opinion, the most important thing about opening a dessert shop is that only when the business is crowded can it be prosperous and prosperous. The faster the food turnover rate, the more delicious the food will be. If a pot of porridge is cooked for ten hours and no one comes to eat it, the taste will change. In the early days of opening the store, what I thought about most was how to get more customers.
Later, Fang Zhangxuefang was greatly inspired by the marketing theory mentioned in a business book. According to research statistics, if a company can retain % more customers, its profits will increase by %. During the first five years of opening the store, I almost never left the store just to build a loyal customer base. Dessert shops are in the non-staple food industry. No matter how delicious the food is, customers will never look back.
How to measure whether your customers are happy and satisfied? Fang Zhang Xuefang has a simple method. If the guests leave Manji with a smile, they must be satisfied. Earlier, the number of customers was about 100,000 customers per day. Fang Zhang Xuefang calculated that she needed to retain at least one customer. So she chatted with a customer every day with a smile on her face to find out whether the customer was satisfied or dissatisfied with the dessert, and then she brought out her signature dessert, Mango Pancake, to make the customer happy until the customer left satisfied. This seemingly simple but difficult-to-achieve method retained customers for the newly born Manji, making Manji's reputation spread wider and wider. Later, it became the smile rule that employees of the Manji Group follow and learn.
In Fang Zhang Xuefang's view, the Hong Kong market is different from the mainland market with fewer people and more stores. It is impossible to open too many stores, so each store must be branded to retain customers. She revealed that there is a secret Manji store in Hong Kong, where she and a few entrepreneurial sisters still greet customers with smiles in person. After more than ten years, some customers have been married and divorced several times, and they still see the smiles on our faces when we walk in. This is how we win back the reputation in the dessert industry one customer at a time.
Just right
Controlling the sweetness is the unique secret of this chain of dessert shops with more than 100 stores.
Both early customers and new fans of Man Kee were confused by the portion size of Man Kee products and felt that they were not as filling as in traditional dessert shops. In this regard, Zhang Xuefang admitted that this weight setting is related to the positioning and needs of target consumers. Most of the dessert eaters are women. So far, 80% of consumers are women. The purpose of contemporary white-collar women eating desserts is definitely not to be full but to eat exquisitely and most importantly, to have fun.
Another feature that distinguishes Manji Dessert from traditional dessert shops is the taste of the food. Consumers in both the south and the north have the impression that Manji Dessert is not too sweet. Fang Zhangxuefang laughed and said that this is exactly the taste she wants consumers to get. It doesn't seem too sweet when you take the first bite, but after finishing a bowl, you will feel that the sweetness is just right. In my mind, Manji desserts should be just right in terms of portion size and sweetness, so that consumers feel they are just right!
Previous page Next page [Alibaba Entrepreneurship]
But exactly It just so happens that these three words are the most difficult to achieve in food production, especially after the sharp increase in the number of stores and the need for standardized production. In order to maintain stable food quality, Fang Zhang Xuefang requires the coding system to be adopted from the purchase of raw materials to product output. Semi-finished products are taste-tested from the factory to the store before they are sold. If the taste changes, you can find out which supplier the raw materials come from through the serial number. The branch service also adopts a coding system. Each bowl of desserts has a number and can be traced if an incorrect order is placed or the waiter delivers the wrong food. The company management adopts a point deduction system for the above-mentioned mistakes or hair on the product. Points will be deducted and bonuses will be deducted as punishment to prevent employees from blaming each other.
Sugar is one of the important materials for making desserts. To grasp the right level of sweetness, Zhang Xuefang feels that choosing sugar raw materials is a science. The quality of products from mainland sugar suppliers varies, and even different batches of products from the same supplier may have different sweetness levels. In order to keep the sweetness of her desserts consistent, she imports high-quality sugar from South Korea. Due to the huge consumption of sugar, in order to control sugar prices and prevent costs from soaring, she will also ensure that a container of sugar is kept in stock in the warehouse.
Fang Zhangxuefang said that fruits and other ingredients used in desserts can easily deteriorate if delayed for a moment, so the group has its own central kitchen, fruit processing warehouse and logistics transportation fleet without the use of dummy hands to ensure quality. Currently, Manji has central kitchens in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu supporting approximately 10 branches in Greater China. At the same time, Manji will also promote different desserts according to the seasons. In summer, fresh fruits such as watermelon and mango are the main products. In winter, when the fruit supply is relatively slow, health-conscious Chinese desserts are the main products.
Expansion and Strength
Manji’s march into the inland is taking the route of cities surrounding rural areas.
After gaining recognition in Hong Kong, Manji opened its first mainland branch in Shanghai in 2016 and officially entered this huge market. Whether it is in Beijing and Shanghai in the north or in southern China, the huge number of stores everywhere shows that it has become the most popular Hong Kong-style dessert shop among mainland consumers after the decline of Hui Liushan.
The rise of the mainland’s middle-class consumer class has provided Manji with the most loyal customer base. Regarding how to enter the mainland market, which is very different from Hong Kong in terms of business environment and scale, Zhang Xuefang believes that first of all, the store must have a clear positioning, either large-scale operations to expand the scope to cover the whole country, or small-scale family operations must not be the middle road. Otherwise the customer base will be very vague. Obviously Manji chose the former.
Based on the fact that desserts belong to the non-staple food market, Fang Zhangxuefang formulated a route for Manji to enter the mainland, with cities surrounding the countryside. Desserts are something people only want to eat after they get rich. I chose to open the market in first-tier cities first and once I build up my reputation, it will be easier to enter second-tier and third-tier cities. Shanghai is the most international city in China and is more receptive to foreign things, so I opened my first mainland store in Shanghai, followed by Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Beijing. However, she emphasized that the strategy of cities surrounding rural areas must have a certain foundation and not all stores can try it. First, your store must be famous, that is, have brand value recognized by others. Secondly, you need to have rich experience. Without experience, you will lose a lot of money.
Since the beginning of this year, Manji has entered a period of rapid development. The year-on-year store growth rate reached %, and most of the newly added stores were opened in the Mainland. The rapid pace of opening stores in Mainland China is related to Fang and Zhang Xuefang's sense of crisis. Fang Zhangxuefang found that it was difficult for many big brands to gain a foothold in the mainland. The main reason was that as soon as the brand became known to mainland consumers, many similar brands with one or two words changed sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. Consumers (especially those in second- and third-tier cities) simply don’t know the difference between genuine brands and imitators. I'm thinking that if I don't open a store soon, there will be a lot of Hengji, Zhuji, Makji, etc., which will make it difficult to open a store later.
Now Manji has slowly begun to learn to choose suitable partners and use their local familiarity and connections to develop store locations. At present, most of Manji's stores in Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian and Hainan Island are operated by self-operated stores, while in places far away from Hong Kong, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Sichuan, they adopt joint operations. After gaining popularity in the mainland, Wanda Plaza and other well-known shopping malls around the world have been inviting invitations, and the confusion about location selection has been alleviated.
Many attentive mainland consumers will find that the design style of all Manji stores is unified with bright yellow as the main color, and includes five dessert monsters and other visual elements that highlight the brand. The store mainly has two-person or four-person tables, with scattered round tables that can seat seven or eight people. Huang Jingxian revealed that the design of Manji was personally designed by Hong Kong brand master Li Yongquan. The placement of tables and chairs is also set according to the dining time of each table of customers, which is roughly from minutes to hours. The slightly narrow placement is mainly for flexible space and also allows people to move faster. Zhang Huang Jingxian did not deny the average daily bill per table disclosed by the Man Kee branch staff. She said that the turnover rate of Manji stores opened in residential areas is higher than that of stores in purely commercial areas because it is relatively more convenient for customers in residential areas to travel to and from the stores.
With the layout in first-tier cities basically completed, Manji will focus on expansion in second- and third-tier cities in the mainland in the future. Rising labor and rent are still the biggest problems hindering the opening of new stores. It is also difficult to reduce the cost of food ingredients. Huang Jingxian said that the publicity of Manji will be through word of mouth instead of TV advertisements like many catering groups in order to save marketing costs.
WhatsApp
