“National Fitness” has spawned a new trend, and a novice seller has seen a surge in orders after only one year of hard work on Shopee!

“National Fitness” has spawned a new trend, and a novice seller has seen a surge in orders after only one year of hard work on Shopee!

“The possibilities of niche markets are endless. Even if you are a novice, as long as you find the right direction, anyone can achieve such results on Shopee.”

In recent years, with the explosion of "national fitness" and the awakening of consumers' fitness awareness, sports-related products have been selling well and the popularity has remained high. "Fitness peripherals" have become an eye-catching emerging field. More and more cross-border sellers are targeting this direction. Clothing has become their main track without exception. However, facing the red ocean category, many people will think: Is there still a chance for the clothing category?

The answer is yes. Yiwu Xiaohui E-Commerce Co., Ltd. focuses on the yoga clothing category, a sub-category of the apparel track. Starting from scratch, it has achieved explosive sales on Shopee in less than a year.

The rise of "national fitness" has led to a surge in apparel sales in Southeast Asia

Fitness has become a trend in contemporary society. Even in the hot summer, people are still enthusiastic about it. The frequent appearance of Gu Ailing, Wu Dajing and other celebrities has also inspired more consumers to join the fitness movement. In their view, fitness is not just for losing weight and sweating, but also a part of quality life. Beautiful buttocks, legs and muscle lines have become their new pursuits, and fitness appointments have become a new way of socializing in contemporary society.

Compared with men, women have a higher body fat percentage and lower baseline muscle mass. Faster recovery and slower fatigue make women prefer aerobic exercise. Yoga, with its graceful movements and gentle practice content, ranks first among women's fitness exercises.

The increase in women's investment in yoga and other fitness activities has also driven the continuous increase in the sales of yoga clothes. At present, among the fitness crowd, yoga clothes have become one of the must-have items for female fitness enthusiasts in their daily exercise. On average, each fitness woman has at least 2 sets of yoga clothes, or even more.

However, compared with big-name yoga clothes with higher brand premiums, consumers prefer comfortable, moderately priced and highly functional yoga clothes. This is closely related to their higher frequency of changing yoga clothes and their "self-pleasing consciousness".

Realizing the potential of yoga apparel, sports brands including Fila and Adidas are trying to squeeze into the market and find new growth points. The yoga apparel market has become a battleground for many brands. In the Southeast Asian market, there is a seller who, with his understanding of yoga and accurate insight into the preferences of yoga enthusiasts, has cultivated the yoga apparel category from scratch and has achieved explosive sales on the Shopee platform many times.

After cutting off other categories, the seller focused on the yoga clothing category and saw a huge increase in sales in just one year.

"More and more women like to practice yoga. My partner also practices yoga. I find that it is becoming more and more popular. I also realize that it will have a larger market space in the future," said seller Xiao Hui.

However, as a newcomer to cross-border entrepreneurship, Xiao Hui was still operating multiple categories of stores, including men's clothing, women's clothing, and beauty products, with good profits. He was reluctant to cut off other categories and focus only on yoga clothing. However, considering that operating too many categories would bring problems such as inventory backlogs to the company, and knowing that the future trend is product-oriented, Xiao Hui finally made a decision with the idea of ​​focusing on one product and making it bigger and stronger.

In 2021, Xiao Hui closed the company's men's clothing, beauty and other category stores on Shopee, and focused only on the yoga clothing category that she loved.

"It was really difficult at the beginning. We didn't have much advantage in terms of products or operations," Xiao Hui said. Making yoga wear is like starting from scratch. We can only keep exploring and learning, visiting supply chain manufacturers in Yiwu, Shenzhen and other regions to gain in-depth understanding and find the more popular content and products for yoga wear.

At the same time, Xiao Hui's partners take yoga classes every week. In order to understand people's preferences, they often ask yoga teachers: What factors do you consider when buying yoga clothes? What colors and materials do enthusiasts prefer? What are the pain points of ordinary yoga clothes? In this way, they can understand the real needs of consumers.

Facts have proved that Xiao Hui's choice was not wrong, and hard work will eventually pay off. In the first half of 2022, the sales of yoga clothes in their store showed a significant increase, and in the later period, orders exploded all the way , and the repurchase rate of products was high . "The average order value of our products is relatively high, but some yoga enthusiasts buy several at a time, and sometimes we are also surprised," Xiao Hui said frankly. So much so that a customer service asked, "Are you the seller?" Only then did we find that consumers were using them for themselves, and many were recommended by friends.

Xiao Hui talked about her experience in creating hit products: "We will study the trends of various brands in the market and refer to the products on the market. For example, our latest bra has a cross-designed back that is very beautiful. This is the same type of product we started to make after referring to the current hot items and redesigning them."

Back-beautifying products are very popular this year. With the help of the upstream supply chain with deep cooperation and relying on the Shopee platform, Xiao Hui quickly sold this product to Southeast Asia, which received a good response. In fact, looking at the market, we can find that China's supply chain is very strong. The same high-end fabrics used by big brands such as Lululemon can also be found in the domestic supply chain. Almost the same, even better quality and lower price, this may be an important reason why Xiao Hui's products are loved by users in the Southeast Asian market.

Xiao Hui found a supply chain that understood yoga clothes and had in-depth cooperation with her, and then conquered Southeast Asia through the appropriate e-commerce platform Shopee. With such a strong backing, Xiao Hui received a lot of orders and saw more possibilities in the Southeast Asian market.

The Southeast Asian market has great potential. How can we go overseas to seek gold with greater peace of mind?

"Southeast Asia celebrates the Spring Festival just like China. In the summer, women want to dress more beautifully, which will stimulate the yoga clothing industry chain to a certain extent," said Xiao Hui. Most Southeast Asian consumers have similar preferences to those in China, Latin American people are more open-minded, and Singaporean users have strong spending power. Xiao Hui is well aware of the preferences of consumers in different markets.

As for the trend of yoga clothing in Southeast Asian markets, Xiao Hui expressed greater confidence.

Xiao Hui said frankly: "There is still a lot of room for further development in the Southeast Asian market, because most people who practice yoga have relatively high incomes." Especially after experiencing the epidemic, people's ideas have changed and they pay more attention to physical health. Although yoga clothing is only a small branch, it is undeniable that there is still a lot of room for development. In the future, the company also plans to explore the yoga clothing market in Southeast Asia and Latin America.

However, Xiao Hui also said that it has not been a smooth journey since entering the Southeast Asian market.

In terms of logistics, the company encountered great obstacles due to the epidemic. It tried overseas warehouses, but the entire transportation cycle was relatively too long. Finally, it followed the advice of the Shopee customer manager and shipped from China. Generally, the products can be delivered to customers in three to five days, or at most a week.

"You must do platform advertising and participate in activities," Xiao Hui revealed her business experience. The platform's centralized promotion channel is the most valuable and effective channel for sellers to obtain traffic. However, you must judge what kind of promotion method and activities are suitable for you based on your own products and customer unit price. For advertising promotion, sellers need more patience, because vertical subcategories such as yoga clothing are difficult to produce immediate results.

After more than a year of intensive cultivation in the yoga category, Xiao Hui has quickly opened up the Southeast Asian market. Summarizing his successful experience, it can be found that in addition to rich supply chain resources, knowledge of yoga, and vigorous promotion based on product features, Shopee also gave Xiao Hui great help, which can be said to be closely linked.

In the future, more high-quality sellers like Xiao Hui will enter the Southeast Asian market and bring fresher fashion trends and lifestyles to the people of Southeast Asia. We also look forward to more "new waves" emerging in various subcategories of Shopee, which has firmly ranked first among Southeast Asian e-commerce platforms!

To help sellers reach new peaks in performance and win the big promotion in the second half of 2023, Shopee will hold its most ambitious annual seller incentive conference on the afternoon of July 27, focusing on topics such as new cross-border trends, new platform benefits, refined category operations, and major promotion incentives. The conference will also open the full hosting project for the first time, and there will be multiple gifts for you to win during the peak season.

Sellers who want to join Shopee in the second half of the year and win the big promotion , please scan the QR code below or click the link at the end to sign up !

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