Since entering the Chinese market in 2014, Ulike has achieved the top sales ranking in its category on Tmall for six consecutive years. During this year's 618 shopping festival, it became the only beauty and body care device brand to enter the top 5 of Tmall's beauty brand rankings, and during Double 11, its sales surpassed the combined total of the second to fifth place competitors in its category, covering over 2 million users.
Benefiting from the booming medical aesthetics industry in recent years, the beauty device category has entered the fast lane. Ulike, riding the wave, must not only deliver excellent products to meet consumer needs but also face intense competition from numerous brands entering the market.
How to continue leading on this path and quickly establish a leadership position is a question Ulike constantly contemplates. I believe today's Ulike can deliver a satisfactory answer. As we move forward on the fast track, I have many insights to share.
Lucky to catch the traffic dividend, but also constrained by traffic
In the past, many people's impression of beauty devices was that they were expensive "big machines" used in beauty salons, often costing hundreds of thousands or even millions. Ordinary people would spend tens of thousands on membership cards and need to set aside time to drive to the salon. Seizing this pain point, home-use beauty devices that are easy to operate and affordable came into being.
The hair removal device is a precise vertical category within the beauty device industry, very niche, and we saw the huge opportunity early on. In South Korea, consumers have a relatively high acceptance of hair removal, but in China, it is still a relatively private product.
How to better educate the market and turn Ulike, which is suitable for Asian skin, into a beauty fashion item is a problem Ulike must solve after entering the Chinese market.
In summary, Ulike's first-mover advantage in this emerging track can be attributed to two main reasons: first, the product is excellent, and second, we were lucky to catch the traffic dividend.
Ulike is the first brand to bring medical-grade sapphire technology to home-use hair removal devices. The current best-selling Air sapphire ice-point hair removal device has undergone four iterations in five years.
Ordinary concave hair removal devices reach skin temperatures of 70°C-100°C, while Ulike's sapphire flat ice-point head can cool the skin surface temperature to 10°C-40°C, turning hot light into cold light and avoiding high-temperature thermal damage. This technological advantage ensures Ulike leads far ahead in its category.
In addition to core technology, Ulike hair removal devices have also undergone multiple iterations in size.
Initially, to achieve the ice-cooling effect, we had to make the device larger, but for user convenience, Ulike worked hard to overcome technical bottlenecks. After iterations, the product now weighs about the same as a smartphone and can be held in one hand, making it easy to use without tiring the hand. These are the results of our repeated refinement.
The convenience, speed, and effectiveness of Ulike hair removal devices helped us quickly open up the market. In terms of marketing, we were also a relatively lucky brand.
When we first entered the Chinese market in 2014, Ulike happened to ride the wave of online "internet planting" marketing. We invested in online platform ads such as Alimama, Xiaohongshu, and WeChat.
Initially, consumers were somewhat distrustful of new products like Ulike. We showcased our technical strength through online content and invited a large number of KOLs to try the product and share real results, successfully alleviating many consumers' concerns about the new brand and technology, gradually opening up the market.
At that time, the industry was small, with few competitors, making it relatively easy to operate.
However, with the rapid increase in medical aesthetics consumption demand in recent years, the industry scale has expanded, and competitors have emerged in large numbers. The disappearance of the traffic dividend has also led to rising costs for internet bidding traffic ads.
More critically, internet traffic ads kept Ulike stuck in the primitive "goods find people" stage—sales only occurred when we invested, and no investment meant no sales. The brand fell into a growth bottleneck.
Establishing a brand strategy to successfully break through competition
After feeling the constraints of internet traffic ads, we realized that Ulike needed to quickly build brand awareness so that more people would know the brand and actively seek it out, transitioning from "goods find people" to "people find goods." But building a brand through internet traffic ads or PR is actually difficult to achieve.
First, the competitive environment for traffic ads is very harsh. Various competitors continuously target the same group of users with ads, and the noisy environment drowns out Ulike. Once we try to expand the ad reach, the ROI becomes very poor. The cost of building a brand through traffic ads is extremely high, far exceeding direct hard ads.
Second, the audience reached by Ulike's traffic ads is actually very narrow compared to the general public, and the outside world has not yet formed a broad awareness of Ulike. At this time, if Ulike does PR, most users will not pay much attention, and the possibility of igniting topics is very low.
Later, we discovered that elevator ads have good audience reach and effectiveness. Many new consumer brands have successfully ignited through Focus Media. Moreover, the audience covered by elevator ads in first- and second-tier cities is exactly our target group—young urban women. The proactive reach of elevator ads can also help customers remember Ulike more clearly, completing the construction of mindshare.
After testing, we established a strategic cooperation with Focus Media, using this essential media for mainstream urban populations to precisely reach our consumers in major cities, efficiently conveying the brand message that we are the leader in the hair removal device category.
To our surprise, Ulike started advertising with Focus Media in early January, and by this year's March 8th Women's Day, it had successfully broken through and gone viral. Tmall sales alone exceeded 300 million yuan, doubling compared to last year's March 8th festival. Since then, brand awareness and sales have continued to grow at a high rate—a transformative change.
1) Leveraging hard ads to quickly solidify leadership, consumers begin to actively seek the product
After the Focus Media elevator ad campaign, Ulike experienced visible growth. Not only did sales double, but Ulike's Baidu search index and WeChat search index continued to rise. Most intuitively, the Tmall backend search index showed a dramatic change in brand-related keywords such as Ulike hair removal device, ice-point hair removal, and Ulike ice-point hair removal device.
The brand successfully entered the "people find goods" stage, all thanks to the "free" traffic generated by brand ignition.
More importantly, within less than half a year of advertising on Focus Media, almost everyone, regardless of gender or age, remembered Ulike. Even if you don't buy now, when you need a hair removal device in the future, you will think of Ulike.
The successful pre-sale of mindshare and exponential growth in brand power freed Ulike from traffic constraints, successfully "breaking the circle" to become a mass-market brand.
2) Online content is revitalized, achieving brand-effect synergy
Not only that, but we also discovered another "magical effect" after brand ignition. Online internet content began to receive more attention from consumers, and click-through and conversion rates continued to rise.
This is because when customers see brand ads on elevator media, they not only gain familiarity with the brand but also subtly stimulate demand and interest, planting seeds for consumer behavior. When they receive online push ads, their level of interest also greatly increases.
But after all, beauty products are still high-involvement decisions. Consumers need to fully understand the product online before deciding whether to purchase. Thanks to Ulike's rich online content layout in the early stage, it helped consumers improve their purchase decision rate.
Recently, we also collaborated with Dingxiang Doctor and third-party authoritative testing agency SGS to conduct an online "28-day hair removal effect test with ordinary people," hoping to educate the market from a more professional perspective and help consumers understand the product more deeply.
Now all brands are pursuing brand-effect synergy, but most are still playing the traffic ad game. To truly break through, you must connect with customers at the brand level.
I strongly agree with the popular saying in the marketing circle: "Two WeChats, One Douyin, One Focus Media." Two WeChats and One Douyin are for traffic ads, and Focus Media is for brand ads. In the current media environment, this is the most effective combination.
Ulike's current achievements are just the first step. Our vision is to usher in a new era from beauty salons to home beauty, making Ulike the consumer's home beauty salon.
How to bring the products currently in large medical aesthetics institutions and beauty salons to users' dressing tables is the higher challenge goal for Ulike in the next stage. We will strive to make this day come soon!
Are you "watching" me?