In 2017, when Bawang Tea Ji was born, the stars of the tea industry are still high-end tea drinks who open big stores in shopping malls. At that time, Heytea became an instant hit at Raffles City in Shanghai, and milk tea has since become a new favorite in shopping malls from street shops, snatching the share of afternoon tea from thousands of white-collar workers from Starbucks. In November 2017, Bawang Chaji opened its first store on Wuyi Road in Kunming. In the same year, a little bit of marketing with free ingredients and hidden menus created sales comparable to Starbucks; Tea Baidao found the positioning of "fresh fruit and Chinese tea" and began to expand its stores on a large scale; The number of stores exceeded 3,500, and the Shanghai R&D center was added, officially opening the road of selling raw materials. The competition of milk tea is no longer a pieceBlue OceanFrom user experience, taste upgrade to cost performance, every track is full of big players. And Bawang Chaji is just an obscure Yunnan shop at this time. But in just six years, the newcomers in the milk tea track replaced the old, and when Bawang Chaji opened the store in Chaoyang Heshenghui in Beijing, it was greeted with the treatment of Heytea in the past: the first day of the store was lined up for 5 hours, the number of cups exceeded 3,000, and the popularity even spread for more than a month [1]. At a time when the growth rate of its peers is slowing down, the speed of opening stores of Bawang Chaji can be called a magnetic levitation: it has 3,785 stores, of which more than 2,000 were opened in the last year, and the number of its stores has soared by 881 in the past 90 days alone[2]. 
It's 2024, and there is no new story to tell about the new tea drink, except for the inexplicability of the overlord tea Jihuo. How did this "latecomer" fight his way out of this Red Sea? The myth of the counterattack of the overlord Chaji can be summed up in one sentence:Bypass the involution and find another way to make a living. In November last year, Bawang Chaji's star product "Boya Juexian" sold a total of 100 million cups. In the tea industry, the last one to create the myth of "100 million cups" was the succulent grapes launched by Heytea. In 2018, succulent grapes were born, and at its peak, "for every 2 cups of Hey Tea sold, there was 1 cup of succulent grapes" [3]; Nai Xue's tea followed step by step, launching a domineering cheese grape; That year, almost every three passers-by who drank milk tea held grapes. But similar to the fate of most Internet celebrity products, the succulent grapes exploded, and then the Replicator Alliance appeared, and then the ** war. In order to hold the lifeblood of the product tightly in hand, Heytea took the lead in rolling up the upstream of the ** chain. It has successively built its own orchard, developed tea formulas, and launched a special milk for tea drinks. For example, just to obtain high-quality Sunshine Rose Green Grape, Heytea needs to be purchased in different production areas in rotation to ensure a stable taste. The upstream spends money on tea planting, warehousing and logistics, and the downstream is desperately involved in product development and innovation. In 2021, a total of 1,388 new tea drinks were launched, including 1,568 fruit elements. From January to September this year, the new tea products are not much different from the previous two years, and the new structure is still dominated by fruits. With the iteration of new tea drinks getting faster and faster, the entire industry is caught in the torrent of having to roll. Even Peng Xin, the CEO of Nai Xue's tea, couldn't help but sigh: tea innovation has reached the extreme. There is more than one new product in a week, what else can be innovated? [4]
Seeing that his peers were red-eyed in the extreme involution, Overlord Cha Ji won effortlessly on another battlefield. At the beginning of the establishment of Bawang Tea Queen, it did not plan to compete with these new tea big brothers for fruit tea, but chose to find another way - only make milk tea and make it a large item. Its CEO Zhang Junjie once said: "Everyone knows that the fruit tea track is good, but in this track, I can't beat it and can't afford it." [5] And the way Bawang Chaji makes a big single item can be called unpretentious:Choose a conservative category (light milk tea), but apply the popular way to create it. To a certain extent, this is similar to Uniqlo making ordinary tailoring UT, but every season with the light of top designers and IP, a slight change of design can be sold out, which is similar to the reason. Specifically, Bawang Tea Ji chose the best-selling jasmine green tea as the base in terms of taste, and created a popular product, Boyajuxian; Its base formula featuring zero creamer and zero non-dairy fat is more in line with the current health consumption needs; In the **setting, Bawang Chaji chose the **range** of 15-20 yuan. On the one hand, this interval can accommodate more brands with a scale of more than 1,000 stores, leaving enough living space for Bawang Chaji; On the other hand, this ** also means that franchisees have greater profit margins. There are more franchisees who are willing to come to get a piece of the pie, and the territory of the store will naturally expand. 
Also choose to make efforts in this **, and therefore highly sought after by franchisees, there are also tea Baidao and ancient tea. According to the prospectus, as of August this year, there were 7,117 stores in Chabaidao, and only 6 were directly operated stores. Relying on the blessing of franchisees, the number of new stores in Chabaidao has soared by 5,000 in the past three years; Gu Ming is not far behind, and the number of its franchisees has soared by nearly 3,000 in two years, surpassing Tea Baidao to become the new runner-up. Higher pricing leads to higher margin margins, which is a great way to attract franchisees. Compared with the "low-key wealth" of Mixue Bingcheng, Tea Baidao is obviously more able to make money: you don't need to grow lemons yourself, you just need to be a good middleman, and if you mention the pricing a little, there will be 344% gross profit up. But the problem is that the melee in the mid-range ** belt can be called hellish difficulty, and in 2017, when Overlord Chaji was established, Gu Ming has run to the scale of 1,000 stores. To sell the mediocre light milk tea to more than ten yuan of **, and attract a large number of franchisees to expand the territory, what is the secret of Bawang Chaji? Why did Bawang Tea choose to bet on milk tea when fruit tea was in full swing? The other side of this problem is that milk tea is more suitable for standardization. Similar to coffee (milk + coffee), the product structure of milk tea is extremely simple, you don't need to spell Dandong strawberries, sunshine roses or seasonal persimmons, you only need milk + tea. Because it only makes milk + tea, the ** chain of Bawang Tea Ji can be minimal, and you only need to control the tea, and the fresh milk and packaging materials are purchased. According to Zhang, the intermediate processing and blending of tea can be standardized, and at least more than 90% stability can be achieved [5]. For example, the ingredient list of Boya Juexian only has tea, milk and syrup, and this minimalist formula can minimize the difficulty of the ** chain. Even compared with the tea face and pleasantness of the same milk tea, the overlord tea queen has taken advantage of it. A cup of tea requires imported Ceylon black tea, crushed walnuts from the United States, and Anchor whipping cream from New Zealand. Such a diverse range of raw materials requires stricter quality control and logistics. Chayan Yuese also adheres to the weekly distribution system, and ships goods from the Changsha general warehouse every week according to the store plan. This method can reduce management costs and logistics costs in Changsha, but it also creates the embarrassment that Chayan Yuese can only be forced to entrench in the two lakes area. The founder of Chayan Yuese once bluntly said, "The reason for not being able to leave Changsha for a long time is because of insufficient management ability" [6]. Specifically, tea and beauty are highly concentrated in Changsha, and the management costs, logistics costs and raw material losses of stores can be minimized, but if they are opened in farther cities, it is somewhat beyond the reach of its current first-class chain capacity. At present, Bawang Tea Ji operates 2,700 acres of tea gardens in Yunnan and Anxi, and has tea processing factories in Chaoshan Lihu Town and Jiangmen City, which are enough to support Bawang Tea Ji to open more than 3,000 stores across the country. In addition, it can also be made simpler on the store operation side. In the early stage, Bawang Tea Ji introduced intelligent tea-making equipment, which can automatically identify the demand for ordering, make tea, add sugar and other operations - similar to a fool-type coffee machine, and zero-based employees can also quickly get started. The simple product structure saves Bawang Chaji a lot of troubles in the first chain and store operation, which also lays the foundation for its store expansion. 
Today, Bawang Chaji's stores have completed the coverage of all provinces in the country (except Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan). In contrast, Gu Ming, which makes fruit tea, has to build a warehouse before it can transport fruit to the store, so 92% of its stores are distributed within 150 kilometers of the warehouse, and the northern region has not been able to break through so far. In terms of product structure, there are only a dozen SKUs of Bawang Chaji, and the frequency of new products is not high. In terms of brand operation, Bawang Chaji also pursues the same principle. For example, the same advertised "national style tea", Chayan Yuese wants to start from the drink to make a lifestyle brand, non-stop oral advertising, the need to queue up three times, and the emphasis on the need to make on demand in order to ensure the taste, and other measures are the natural enemies of efficiency. This idea of creating a lifestyle, although it can raise the ceiling by extending the product line in the later stage of development, has also been repeatedly complained about "penalty station ordering" due to the low efficiency of the store. Compared with the pleasant tea face of the human service, the practice of the overlord tea queen is actually quite a chicken thief. It does not bother with store services, but uses a series of fancy marketing such as the most simple and straightforward IP co-branding, celebrity endorsements, and packaging changes to tell consumers: We are a fashionable national style tea brand. 
Black-red, but effective. Those who couldn't drink the tea looked pleasant, turned around and drank the overlord tea. Bawang Chaji, which started in Yunnan-Guichuan, currently accounts for more than 35% of its stores in first-tier and new first-tier cities, and it accounts for 73% of its stores in shopping malls and office buildings. Every time she enters a new city, Bawang Chaji's strategy is to first open a large store of 200 square meters or more in the local shopping mall as a model room, and then open a small street store while it is hot, so as to further occupy the market with scale. Bawang tea can bloom all over the country, and it is inseparable from the strong support of franchisees. But as we all know, powerful franchisees have always been the object of brand competition. Brands with heads and faces prefer those "big brothers" who not only have financial strength, but also social connections. For example, latepost once disclosed such a detail, Mixue Bingcheng wants to open a "** in a certain county to expand the brand effect, and whoever can win a ** shop of more than 90 square meters can be the boss [7]. Compared with more senior peers, Bawang Chaji has no less requirements for franchisees, and its franchise method has undergone two rounds of changes, but it has always been known for its strict and high threshold. The total cost of opening a store can easily be in the millions. 
In the initial stage, the condition for Bawang Chaji to select franchisees is whether they can get the store locations they designate. The franchisee is only responsible for investing and participating in dividends, and the follow-up operation is fully entrusted to Bawang Chaji. At this time, the role of the franchisee is equivalent to the "investor" of the store [8]. With the expansion of the franchise scale, Bawang Chaji has also begun to join in a similar way to other brands, and the role of franchisees has begun to change from investors to managers, and they need to participate in daily operations. It seems to be a collection of bugs with high investment and high threshold, but it can't stop a large number of people who want to join Overlord Chaji. On social networking, Bawang Chaji has joined as a new traffic password. Whether it is a candidate who is stuck in the franchise interview stage, a novice boss who has just obtained the franchise qualification, or a veteran who holds a number of stores, as long as you are willing to write a small essay about the joining process of Bawang Chaji, it will be a popular article at hand. 
As for why Bawang Chaji can become a topic of interest even when he joins, the reason is very simple - in the eyes of everyone, Bawang Chaji is the wealth password, and it is really profitable. In the first batch of franchisees in 2018, someone spent 600,000 yuan in franchise fees to invest in 4 stores, each store is about 30 square meters, and can sell 300-400 cups of milk tea every day, coupled with a high profit margin of 65%, the payback period of a single store with a good location can even be shortened to 6 months [9]. Even today, when the franchise fee has already doubled, in the topic of "Overlord Tea Ji Joining", which has set off huge waves in social networking, there are also cases of stores in second-tier cities in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai with an average daily sales of 1,000 cups and a year's return on investment. In the hand-to-hand combat with peers, positioning differentiation (mainly light milk tea) and black and red marketing routines with its own traffic are the secrets of Bawang Chaji's ability to gain a firm foothold. But to ensure that each store can catch this monstrous traffic, it still has to rely on its "ultimate single product" strategy. Compared with its peers, Bawang Chaji's large-scale single product strategy can be called "far ahead", and it can contribute 30% of its revenue only by relying on this product; 3-4 main products can support 70% of sales. Another known "big item" is Cha Baidao, which has 60% of its SKUs that are classic products, and these classic models contribute to a total of 30% of sales. The streamlined menu and large item strategy bring more efficient cup dispensing speed. The average cup output efficiency of Bawang Tea Ji is less than 20 seconds for a cup, and Boya Juexian can even achieve a cup in 10 seconds. For example, during the Spring Festival, the Bawang Tea Ji Poyang store made a record of more than 2,400 cups in one day. When it was questioned by netizens about the speed of cup dispensing, it responded that the store had launched an automated tea-making equipment, and the average cup of tea time was less than 10 seconds. As a result, more than 2,300 and 2,500 cups were produced in the next two days [10]. When the operation of the bubble tea shop is simplified to make a few tea + milk drinks, it is not difficult to imagine why the franchisees have to join the Bawang tea queen. After completing the surprise attack with a differentiated style of play, Overlord Chaji, who has more than 3,000 stores, is ushering in the moment of "having to bow her head". Its founder Zhang Junjie once said, "Bawang Chaji never builds a factory, only focuses on brands and users"; He also said that "I don't make fruit tea because I can't afford it". This "start and finish" strategy may seem perfect, but in an increasingly competitive environment, it will inevitably require compromises to keep up with the pace at which consumers like the new and hate the old. In November last year, Bawang Chaji and Tea Baidao partnered to build a ** chain. Bawang Chaji, who says that she does not make fruit tea, quietly launches a new "Vitality Light Fruit Tea" series in its menus in Yunnan, Guangdong and other places, and lemon tea, grape fruit tea and other products are impressively listed. 
1] Overlord Tea Ji has become the new "Overlord" of tea drinks! Unicorn mall
2] Changes in Bawang Chaji stores, Jihai brand monitoring.
3] From the popularity path of succulent grapes, look at the product IP strategy of Heytea, Chief Brand Officer.
4] Year-end inventory of large consumption: the research and development of new tea products is "unrollable", and the strength of the chain is a decisive victory, CBN.
5] The national style tea drink ran out of a dark horse, but it was not a pleasant tea, and 36 krypton will be consumed in the future.
6] The dilemma of tea and joy, being overtaken by the overlord tea girl, a new consumption think tank.
7] In the county seat, from the nobody to the milk tea tycoon, late latepost
8] Bawang Tea Ji Zhang Junjie: Explosive models create a minimalist ** chain, and there are more opportunities to upgrade new tea drinks, and the company is bright.
9] The post-90s guy sells milk tea, and raises 300 million yuan in two months, and your circle is going to be a "bully" again? The world's online merchants.
10] The Spring Festival homecoming tide + tourism fever are superimposed, and the tea and hot pot brands of the sinking and expanding stores meet the peak, Caijing.com.
Author: Hu Xiaoqi.
Research Supported by: Xin Wang
Drafting: Jia Ying, Shu Rui.
Design: Shu Rui.
Editor in charge: Hu Xiaoqi