I wrote an article about the new consumption wave last year, and for a long time afterward, many people would say to me, 'Your closing line that every consumer product is worth redoing was spot on.'

After the pandemic started, I became addicted to Animal Crossing, as the saying goes, 'Sitting idly by the window, feeding the chickens late, unaware that spring has passed.' Then I was busy with Alibaba's investment in Helijia, and finally, everything was settled—Alibaba officially became Helijia's 'Alibaba Daddy.'

Then I thought, let me go see what the consumer goods world has become. And what did I find? I, Diaoye, was so shocked that my face turned pale, and my heart was pounding like crazy. Let me share a glimpse of what I discovered:

  • Shu Uemura, the only professional cleansing oil brand I remember, has been the dominant player for at least 10 to 20 years. In the past year on Tmall, it was quietly overtaken by two domestic upstarts, Zuben and LAN.
  • Givenchy's loose powder was once a god-like presence. Who would dare challenge it? Huh? Who? Well, Florasis appeared like a dragon-slaying youth, and with the momentum of its carved lipsticks, it swiftly cut down Givenchy's powder.
  • France's Avène, with 30 years of history in fighting sensitive skin, has always been the top brand. Guess what? Domestic brand Winona, without breaking a sweat, easily left Avène in the dust.
  • Ever since I knew about oatmeal, America's Quaker, a company over a century old, was almost synonymous with oatmeal. Then what? China's Wangbaobao burst onto the scene and beat Quaker so badly it barely recognized its own mother.
  • Bird's nest as an ingredient has a very chaotic distribution channel. The only brand I used to trust was Tong Ren Tang. Then Xiaoxiandun came along with a smile, saying, 'Let me prepare the bird's nest and deliver it cold-chain to you.' Before you knew it, it became the category leader, leaving Tong Ren Tang bewildered, not knowing what hit it.

Including what I mentioned last year: Three Squirrels' coffee greatly surpassed Nestlé, the inventor of instant coffee, and Zhong Xue Gao's expensive ice cream sold even better than Häagen-Dazs... I can't list them all.

In short, in the consumer goods world, every old dominant in every 'ecological niche' is being challenged, or even 'killed'!

Of course, I put 'killed' in quotes. Strictly speaking, these disruptions are mainly happening online; in terms of omni-channel, the old dominants haven't completely collapsed yet. But forgive my pessimism—over time, the old dominants being completely overthrown is as certain as the sun rising, though it may not necessarily be by the new brands I mentioned.

But one thing is certain: the new dominants will come from domestic upstarts. What's the logic? Let me explain.

A couple of days ago, I heard a viewpoint from Tang Binsen, founder of Genki Forest, who beat Coca-Cola on 618 and topped Tmall's beverage chart.

He said: China's dividends over the past 20 years have been reflected in the 'infrastructure dividend', from the world's longest high-speed rail and highways, to 4G and 5G, from the countless Chinese supply chain networks of the 'world factory', to channel players like Taobao, JD, and Pinduoduo, and from efficient content dissemination on Douyin and Kuaishou to Xiaohongshu as a 'super word-of-mouth amplifier'—who can amplify it? You can easily find hundreds or thousands of influencers from IMS to amplify for you...

From the perspective of 'consumer goods', China's infrastructure is incredibly robust! In other words, those who worked on infrastructure in the first 20 years made big money. So what about the next 20 years? With infrastructure complete and the soil fertile, it's time to bear 'fruit'. What's the fruit? New consumption, new brands.

The spring for good products has arrived. That day, Tang Binsen picked up a bottle of 'Ran Tea' and said proudly, 'In all of China—yes, I mean all of China's beverage makers—ours is the only one where the water in the bottle costs more than the bottle.'

'...Look at the tea polyphenol index of our oolong tea; it's more than double that of any other bottled tea in China.'

'...Compare the ingredient list of any beverage with ours; ours is at least half as short. What does that mean? Just like fresher ingredients need less MSG, our raw materials are good enough that we don't need to add a bunch of chemical flavorings.'

He also said something I debated whether to repeat, because it's too crude... 'As long as you're human, after eating roast duck, you can never go back to eating shit.'

Hey... I couldn't help but write it out.

There's more than one methodology for good products. For example, Wangbaobao's rise shares a common technique with Three Squirrels Coffee: ultra-low-temperature freeze-drying. Simply put, why did Master Kong's vegetable packets have no flavor in the past? Because they used high-temperature dehydration, which destroys aroma compounds like lipids and alcohols, leaving you eating vegetable corpses. Now, ultra-low-temperature freeze-drying at minus 40 degrees Celsius with vacuum dehydration fully preserves the soul of the ingredient—its aroma.

What's even cleverer about Wangbaobao is that oatmeal, while nutritious, isn't exactly delicious. So they added freeze-dried yogurt chunks and various fruit and vegetable pieces, making it pretty and fashionable, and encouraged people not to eat it with milk in an old-fashioned way, but to chew it as a snack... It became an instant hit.

This is a classic 'eraser head + pencil' approach. Oatmeal isn't magical, and freeze-dried yogurt chunks aren't remarkable, but together they create a chemical reaction. Then a bunch of KOCs who love to eat and want to be healthy started promoting it for free on Xiaohongshu, and the amplification effect was so rapid that money couldn't buy it. In just over a year, they beat the century-old Quaker Oats so badly it couldn't find its way.

Behind the product dividend is the technology dividend. Don't look down on 'eraser head plus pencil'; their next step is to develop mechanical pencils. In a few years, Chinese brands might even challenge luxury fountain pens like Montblanc... Step by step, the pace picks up. As long as international giants still use email for communication and approval only on 5 workdays, domestic wolves, relying on 'WeChat groups + DingTalk approval' and 996, will inevitably leave them three streets behind in iteration speed.

Many consumer product technologies are not grand technologies like 'controlled nuclear fusion' that change humanity's future. Rather, a small, seemingly insignificant technological innovation can bring about a complete transformation.

Let me give a small example I stumbled upon a few days ago: I bought a few packs of 'Jingcheng Yumian Tang' instant noodles. When I ate them, I was stunned. Wow, the chewiness was no different from eating at a noodle shop. And their 'wet noodles' are almost fully cooked, because you can eat them after soaking in boiling water for one minute (not necessarily boiling for a minute). The meat chunks and sauce in the seasoning packet are also cooked, yet they can stay fresh for up to four months.

Well, I don't understand the technology, but once you eat a pack, you'll know why I'm raving about their deliciousness—

Oh, Lamian Shuo, yes, I'm talking to you. Don't pretend you didn't see this. You need to work harder! Recently, you've had two new flavors that I think are too perfunctory; the product strength isn't great.

(Should I start a live stream to review various foods? Oh, the country just banned eating broadcasts, so forget it.)

Why have new domestic consumer goods sprung up like mushrooms in the past year or two? Logically, infrastructure maturity isn't something that just happened in the last year or two (at most, it's more mature). It wasn't until last month that I suddenly realized—

The last piece of the puzzle is the product manager! Five to eight years ago or earlier, China's consumer goods supply chain was purely OEM. International brands' product managers and R&D were based overseas; Chinese people were only involved in production and channel execution, not in defining products.

In the five to eight years since, international giants began to struggle because domestic competition intensified, iteration speed accelerated, and localization understanding had to be greatly strengthened. At that point, they started localizing product managers.

That is, in the past five to eight years, young Chinese people began to participate in learning and defining consumer product design.

After three to five years of intense training, they achieved great success for international giants, and then... they started to be released! For example, the founder of Perfect Diary came from P&G, mastered all of P&G's skills, and also honed his craft at local heroes like Yumifang. Eventually, he started his own business and quickly created miracles, with a single brand catching up to L'Oréal's 30-year makeup track record in just 2 years.

There's no way around it: Chinese people are incredibly diligent and indeed smart. Like high-speed rail, at first foreigners made money off us, filling their pockets, but in the process, you can't stop Chinese people from learning everything, then starting low-cost replication, and then even continuous innovation... It's the same rhythm as in the 3G era when we knelt to learn, the 4G era when we sat level, and the 5G era when we lead significantly.

My good friend, Wang Ye, founder of Ninebot, spent a long time last month squatting in various OEM factories in the Pearl River Delta. He said he was excited, feeling that the countless small factory owners seemed to have changed. They no longer just buy a Bentley when they have some money; instead, they invest in R&D, and they all talk about 'Huawei as a spiritual totem', even learning IPD, the management core that Huawei relies on.

Wang Ye said that in many factory owners in their 40s and 50s, he began to see a 'youthful spirit'.

I said to Wang Ye, in my personal context, there's no higher praise than 'youthful spirit'. Some people are old at 20, even if they're buried at 80.

And some, like Steve Jobs, even when sick and unconscious, saw an oxygen mask that wasn't aesthetically pleasing and insisted on choosing a pretty one before inhaling. That's a youthful heart, full of vitality (though Jobs did die soon after, he was still a curious youth when he died at 56).

Oh, one more thing: given the splendid scene of new consumption I've witnessed, I couldn't resist coming back to be CEO of Afu. The original CEO swapped with me to become vice chairman of the board. (Putin and Medvedev would be familiar with this move.) Then, the first thing I did as CEO was to reconvene meetings to discuss Afu's mission, vision, and values. Everyone happily agreed to include 'youthful spirit' in it, hahaha.

Wang Ye also felt while squatting in the Pearl River Delta supply chain that it was 'too much like Japan in the 1970s'—everyone was full of vigor, feeling they could create something new through technological improvement and IPD processes, rather than being a dumb 'OEM coolie'. You have to come up with new processes to get higher added value, then go out and fight, knocking the old world and old products off their feet.

And Japan in the 1970s was Japan's youthful era. Later, Taiwan in the 1980s and Hong Kong also had their youthful moments. My other good friend, He Caitou, described it like this: in Hong Kong TV dramas back then, with twenty people, a horse, and three dogs, they dared to film Genghis Khan's massive army rolling in for The Legend of the Condor Heroes, and you just felt the grandeur. What is that? That's youthful spirit, overflowing with vitality, impossible to look at directly. Unfortunately, today Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are all shrouded in gloom.

Now, it's mainland China's youthful era, full of high spirits.

They say the internet has a memory, but our blood also has a memory. We always remember the glory of the Tang Dynasty, which was China's most youthful era. Saying China's GDP once accounted for such-and-such of the world is self-congratulation without practical meaning. What matters is that the Tang Dynasty was extremely open and inclusive, a youthful China where 'Li and Du's writings shine with ten thousand feet of light'. Full of confidence, full of vitality, even with a bit of chuunibyou, like the unrestrained 'Don't you see the Yellow River's waters come from heaven'—a breath of true qi swelling in the chest.

In the Tang Dynasty, we were proud of Li Bai, Du Fu, Li Shangyin, and Meng Haoran. Today, the Tang Dynasty's youthful spirit has returned. We are proud of veterans like Ren Zhengfei, middle-aged leaders like Ma Yun and Ma Huateng, and young talents like Wang Xing and Zhang Yiming. They are today's poets of China, writing romantic poems of the present with code.

These commercial poems, from afar are GDP, up close are spirit! And it's the spirit of a generation.

Once, Wang Yongqing was Taiwan's poet, Li Ka-shing was Hong Kong's poet, and Akio Morita and Konosuke Matsushita were Japan's great poets. Unfortunately, after them, there was a gap; no continuous batch of young people followed.

But mainland China is very special now. Not only are the old, middle-aged, and young masters still fighting on the front lines, but the waves keep coming. The groups of junior and senior students I see at Hupan University are all fresh meat reserves! They're full of life, eager to try, rubbing their hands, all talking about 'mission' and 'changing the world because of me'.

Isn't that youth? Beyond sang in 'The Land': 'Looking back, there's a group of simple youths, walking away lightly.' While writing this, I scrolled through my feed and saw the news of Anker Innovations' IPO. Ah, CEO Yang Meng is a close classmate of mine at Hupan. This Hunan boy, with a global approach, digs up R&D talents of all colors around the world, and through China's supply chain, sells power banks, earphones, and projectors all over the world. Just listed, with a market cap of over 50 billion, and the founder is only in his 30s. Yes, we are all youths!

Ha, I got a bit sentimental, sentimental.

Back to the topic, back to the topic. Let's continue talking about new consumption and new brands. Tang Binsen and I both have a judgment: the next 5 to 10 years are the golden time for new consumer brands. Don't rush; this time the window is quite long. China has too many consumers—1.4 billion! China's supply chain is too powerful—it's the world's factory! China's communication is too agile—Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu! Excellent product managers, your spring isn't just coming; your summer has arrived, and it's a blazing summer lasting 5 to 10 years.

Looking around, opportunities are everywhere. Who will disrupt the nasal rinse saline I use for rhinitis? I don't want to buy that French 'pure sea water' in a small bottle for over a hundred yuan and pay an IQ tax. Nongfu Spring with the right salt ratio would do, mainly in a big bottle! The nozzle should be ergonomic! Laoganma chili sauce has been the dominant player for too long. Today's young people have changing tastes; it's time for new flavors, new packaging, and new scenarios to challenge it properly.

CK underwear is still the high-end dominant, right? I calculate that within 24 months, a new brand will definitely take it down! Is there no Chinese man's underwear brand with a vision to do it properly? Combine comfort and technology, scenario and culture.

The most hateful is tea. Aren't you tea makers ashamed? Three Squirrels has already overturned Nestlé coffee, and you're still letting Britain's Lipton be the father of Chinese tea?!

But I'm not worried at all. Hundreds of consumer product ecological niches will be gradually disrupted. This generation of entrepreneurs is blessed. The waves behind drive the waves ahead; if the front waves don't get moving, don't get youthful, don't open up, they'll be beaten on the beach by the back waves, no matter how awesome or dominant they once were. (I'm not implying the US.)

In my communications with Tang Binsen and Wang Ye, we all agree on a hardcore philosophy: 'The biggest dividend is the dividend of national destiny.' If you believe it, you bet on China's national destiny in the big trend. If you don't, no matter how many cases I list, it won't help...

My mentor, Professor Zeng Ming, said that sometimes when calculations don't add up, you can only judge 'where the big trend lies'. Where is the 'big trend' of this world next? Great as Rome, great as Byzantium, great as the Ottoman Empire, great as the British Empire... All old dominants have their day of being overthrown by new youths. The only constant in the world is change.

So, regarding the 'big trend', I don't know what your answer is. If you ask me... I'm too lazy to list the countless rational evidence above. I'll answer with emotion:

Don't ask, If you ask, it's 'we Chinese' are in our youth. Don't ask, If you ask, 'Youthful China' is the best!

Source: Diaoye (ID: Diaoye38), Author: Diaoye Tips will be paid 400-2000 yuan for any leads adopted.