---
title: "Can a Newly Launched Chicken Feet Brand Beat Youyou Online? Look at Innovative Brand Wang Xiaolu's 3000% Growth Rate"
description: "The 100-billion-yuan leisure braised food track welcomes a new startup? Within one year on Tmall, it defeated many traditional chicken feet giants to become the No.1 in the chicken snack category. How did it do it? According to China Industry Information data, the retail market size of China's leisure braised food industry reached 106.5 billion yuan in 2019, expected to grow to 123.5 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of 18.0% from 2016 to 2020. Braised products are a unique industry in China, with a history of over a thousand years, but truly rose after the reform and opening up, and are now in a period of rapid growth."
author: "何年"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2020-07-12"
language: "en"
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# Can a Newly Launched Chicken Feet Brand Beat Youyou Online? Look at Innovative Brand Wang Xiaolu's 3000% Growth Rate

> The 100-billion-yuan leisure braised food track welcomes a new startup? Within one year on Tmall, it defeated many traditional chicken feet giants to become the No.1 in the chicken snack category. How did it do it? According to China Industry Information data, the retail market size of China's leisure braised food industry reached 106.5 billion yuan in 2019, expected to grow to 123.5 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of 18.0% from 2016 to 2020. Braised products are a unique industry in China, with a history of over a thousand years, but truly rose after the reform and opening up, and are now in a period of rapid growth.

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**Introduction: Is the 100-billion-yuan leisure braised food track welcoming a new startup? Within one year on Tmall, it defeated many traditional chicken feet giants to become the No.1 in the chicken snack category. How did it do it?**
According to China Industry Information data, the retail market size of China's leisure braised food industry reached 106.5 billion yuan in 2019, expected to grow to 123.5 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of 18.0% from 2016 to 2020.
Braised products are a unique industry in China, with a history of over a thousand years, but truly rose after the reform and opening up. With the development of the breeding industry, the leisure braised food industry started, then entered a period of rapid development, and is now in a stage of high-speed growth.
Typically, **from 2012 to 2018, four leisure braised food giants—Huang Shang Huang, Zhou Hei Ya, Jue Wei Duck Neck, and Youyou—were listed successively. Another major category in leisure braised products, chicken feet, has similar attributes to duck neck: a sense of operation, non-satiety, and addictiveness. Giants like Youyou in pickled pepper chicken feet have always been "popular" from first-tier cities to eighth-tier cities.**
 △ Wang Xiaolu founder Wang Xiong
During the just-passed Tmall 618 shopping festival, a dark horse successfully emerged in the chicken feet category. According to official website data, **the startup brand Wang Xiaolu's sales exceeded 10 million yuan during 618, with a growth rate of up to 3000%, even defeating traditional chicken feet giants like Youyou to become the No.1 in the chicken snack category.**
In fact, Wang Xiaolu's Tiger Skin Chicken Feet only entered the Tmall flagship store in April last year. Before that, it was sold as a WeChat business, making braised pig trotters a hit among friends' circles. Later, they found this category was not suitable for large-scale sales, so Wang Xiaolu re-studied the category and, after screening and testing with internet celebrities and core users, selected the Tiger Skin Chicken Feet category.
Recently, New Distribution interviewed Wang Xiaolu's founder and had an in-depth exchange with Mr. Wang Xiong. In just over a year, **as an innovative consumer brand, how did Wang Xiaolu "redo" the traditional chicken feet category and turn it into a hit?**
**-01-**
**Missed the dividends, so focus on product**
Wang Xiong told New Distribution that because Wang Xiaolu started late in chicken feet, they perfectly missed the dividends brought by the rise of WeChat business, comprehensive e-commerce, and social media.
As an internet brand in an era of a hundred schools of thought, missing the dividend undoubtedly makes the starting springboard much lower. But this also forces a brand to move forward step by step and put great effort into the product. Wang Xiaolu has always believed that a good product is the core of a startup brand, striving to make chicken feet to the extreme.
**1. Continuous innovation and improvement in product R&D**
**Because the factory is also a shareholder of Wang Xiaolu, this provides Wang Xiaolu with opportunities to continuously explore and innovate in product R&D.**
For example, in response to the common problem that vacuum-packed food on the market often uses secondary heating, resulting in a big taste difference from freshly braised products, **Wang Xiaolu innovated the previous method after repeated research.** First, the chicken feet are fried to completely lock in the moisture of the meat, then the flavor is penetrated through soaking in the braising liquid, and finally, the chicken feet are heated once under high pressure, resulting in a taste very close to freshly made.
In addition, **Wang Xiaolu also made some creative explorations in chicken feet flavors,** such as braised flavor, spicy pepper flavor, crab roe flavor, and hot pot flavor. They even tried Japanese miso sauce, Thai Tom Yum, and some Southeast Asian spices, not limited to traditional Chinese braised flavors.
But it's not enough to just explore and innovate in the factory; it's more important to let users test whether the improvement direction is correct.
**2. Mobilize core users to participate in product R&D**
The advantage of e-commerce is that it breaks the traditional state of complete separation of people, goods, and scenes at sales terminals, and buyers' feedback can be received by sellers in a timely manner. So far, **Wang Xiaolu has built a private domain traffic pool of tens of thousands of users and lets users participate in the product R&D process.**
Using private domain traffic for membership and deep community operation has two benefits: first, these people are very loyal to the brand; second, these people will become picky, maintaining a high sensitivity to product quality.
When Wang Xiaolu launches a new product, they interact with users for a long time, such as sending questionnaires to target users. If a new product or new flavor scores below 80 points, it is basically eliminated.
**In other words, the launch of new products first depends on user recognition, while for existing products, heavy users are used to push Wang Xiaolu to iterate and improve.**
Quantifying the concept of "delicious," products made this way are not production-driven but sales-driven, inherently user-centric, capturing users' pain points and itch points, rather than just making a product that makes oneself "happy." **According to Mr. Wang Xiong, Wang Xiaolu's repurchase rate has reached as high as 38% at its peak.**
**-02-**
**Big category, "big" investment**
Making a good product is the first priority, and the second is how to sell it well. Because for startup brands, without big brand endorsement or large budgets, the biggest fear is that good products sink into the sea.
**Wang Xiaolu's current marketing model uses Tmall as its official website, as the main platform for brand promotion and also as the sales carrier, importing traffic from outside the platform to inside.**
Because in the new traffic environment, Tmall is like a big thoroughfare, not just limited to Tmall within Taobao, but Tmall across the entire internet. With the rise of various new media, it is entirely possible to plant seeds and attract traffic outside the platform, then complete the purchase by searching for the brand on Tmall.
Wang Xiong understands that for innovative brands that start later, the online dividend has basically disappeared. Online traffic is becoming more expensive, and conversion rates are becoming lower. In fact, **the gameplay of today's innovative consumer brands is increasingly converging.**
In this context, **what Wang Xiaolu has to do is only: refined operation.** For example, Wang Xiaolu surveys users who place orders to find out what the first selling point is that drives them to buy Wang Xiaolu. Is it the slogan "big size, more meat," or the packaging, or the taste? Or from which channel did they learn about Wang Xiaolu?
With this feedback, they can easily know what the communication platform is, what content to use to acquire customers, and continuously optimize and iterate. The real-time feedback online itself has a compound interest effect, and in this way, customer acquisition costs will be greatly reduced.
Compared with other innovative consumer brands, Wang Xiaolu's chosen category also has advantages. Chicken feet are a national snack, so no additional user education is needed. They only need to **break down the "big investment" of offline brands from the past decade into visualized, segmented digital investment,** monitor ROI in real time, adjust in real time, and invest precisely to achieve continuous brand exposure.
**When your product is a universal standard product and the user group is not particularly vertical or segmented, you only need to find platforms with as much traffic as possible.** Wang Xiaolu's layout is to do graphic and text planting on Weibo, and on Douyin, internet celebrity KOLs do live streaming to bring goods, to reach product content and brand content, and to attract traffic to Tmall. Because these two platforms have hundreds of millions of daily active users, when the platform's traffic is large enough, your user group is more likely to be there.
**-03-**
**Second startup, business returns offline**
At present, Wang Xiaolu's online business still has a lot of room for growth, far from seeing the ceiling. But Wang Xiong told New Distribution, **"Now we have started to plan to enter offline, but it is not yet a strategic focus. In the last six months, we have begun to fully enter offline."**
Like most innovative consumer brands, Wang Xiaolu started by entering online, after all, online is asset-light operation, more suitable for the development of innovative brands, while offline is heavy-asset operation and slow to lay out. But from the impulsive consumption attributes of leisure braised products themselves, and the layout of traditional braised product giants, it can be seen that the key battlefield for braised products is to return offline.
Moreover, Wang Xiaolu has successfully verified the attention of the Tiger Skin Chicken Feet category online. **If they don't enter offline, and wait for others to imitate and preemptively lay out offline, then face interception by traditional pickled pepper chicken feet giants like Youyou, they will be in a dilemma of being attacked from both front and back.**
For Wang Xiaolu, which has no offline experience, entering offline is more like a second startup. It is understood that Wang Xiaolu plans to set a management radius centered on Beijing for now, first distributing goods to convenience stores in first-tier cities. After all, compared with other channels, convenience stores can still catch the tail of the "dividend." **And for convenience stores, stores where some internet-famous snacks have entered will be key coverage targets.**
However, because costs in such super first-tier cities are relatively high, they are not suitable for startup brands to pilot. They can occupy a position first, but that doesn't mean they should focus a lot of resources and energy at the beginning. Wang Xiaolu, through research, will select medium-sized cities for saturated investment. After figuring out specific product specifications, tasting, and other sales promotion methods offline, they will form a complete methodology and then quickly replicate it to other cities.
**-04-**
**Summary**
**In fact, it is not difficult to see that Wang Xiaolu, whether in marketing tactics or channel layout, is taking the conventional route of innovative consumer brands.**
**Moreover, chicken feet is a traditional category in itself, not like self-heating hot pot or internet-famous cookies that segment the market, with strong internet-famous attributes.**
But Wang Xiaolu redid the traditional chicken feet and, in the online space where dividends have disappeared, became the Tmall No.1. The reason behind this is thought-provoking.
For innovative brands: in the internet era, information is open and transparent, excellent marketing models can be replicated, and traffic can be bought, but the product is the most basic and core at any time. It must not only follow the trend of consumption upgrading but also be consumption-oriented. **No matter how amazing the gameplay of an internet-famous brand is, it must be built on the product, otherwise it will only be a flash in the pan.**
For traditional enterprises: in the big category of chicken feet, **the first pack of pickled pepper chicken feet appeared in 1997, but in 2020 today, how much has the "content" of pickled pepper chicken feet changed?**
In the past era of short supply, product defects could be accepted by consumers, but in today's overcapacity, if there is still no innovation, what awaits is continuous disruption by innovative brands!


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