When you celebrate your birthday, use your mobile phone or smart speaker to control the lights in the house to enter the "party mode", and the colorful lights will quickly turn on; at 10 o'clock in the evening, the lights at home will automatically become warmer and dim, creating a good bedtime for your family Atmosphere: When you are on a business trip, the pet feeder automatically releases cat food and dog food according to the set time, so there is no need to worry about pets starving at home... These are smart home scenarios that can be achieved in real life.
With the continuous improvement of people's requirements for the quality of life, more and more consumers choose smart home products. Household appliances, lamps, pet supplies...all traditional household items are undergoing a redefinition in this era of Internet of Everything.
Since 2012, with the development of Wi-Fi and IoT (Internet of Things) technologies, the smart home market has entered a period of rapid development. From 2016 to 2017, companies such as Amazon and Baidu launched smart speaker products, opening new traffic portals for smart products. Smart home products have entered an explosive period, and the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence industries have become more and more mature. According to data from Yiou think tank, in 2020, the scale of China's smart home market is about 435.4 billion yuan, and it is expected to exceed 800 billion yuan in 2025.
Attracted by the huge market scale, more and more traditional enterprises in the home furnishing field have begun to transform to intelligent, and there are also new enterprises that are constantly targeting the smart home market. This article tells the case of three different types of companies entering the field of smart home. Through cooperation with IoT development platforms, some of them successfully passed the painful period of transformation, and some completed the transition from 0 to 1.
Embrace change and target new markets
Established in 2009, Future Lighting is a product and solution provider focusing on the field of smart home IoT. Its business covers more than 20 countries in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region. Its products mainly involve consumer-level LED lighting products, smart home lighting, and professional Class-level whole-house intelligent lighting design services and commercial lighting. Customers are mainly large-scale supermarkets in overseas regions, and they also do OEMs for some international lighting brands.
At the beginning of its establishment, Qiancheng Lighting was mainly engaged in LED general lighting. Until 2016, Chen Jiangtao, CEO of Future Lighting, realized that traditional lighting has already entered the Red Sea era, and smart homes are the trend of the times. If they do not transform, they will inevitably fall behind. He believes that smart lighting can change the way people live and work. It can not only realize remote control, but also save energy, making it more convenient, safe and reliable to use. In 2016, he began to lead the company into the field of smart lighting.
According to the prediction of the China Commercial Industry Research Institute, the market size of China's smart lighting industry will exceed 35 billion yuan in 2021. Among them, the industrial and commercial fields are the largest application fields in the smart lighting industry, accounting for 57.21%. Data from the Prospective Industry Research Institute also predicts that by 2025, the scale of the smart lighting market is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan, reaching 108 billion yuan. Chen Jiangtao told the author that the domestic smart home lighting market penetration rate is not high, and the competition is fierce. In contrast, the market penetration rate of home smart lighting equipment in the European and American markets is higher. Data from research organization Omdia shows that global sales of smart lighting and networked control systems are expected to grow from US$10 billion in 2018 to US$21 billion in 2023.
The year of the transformation of Future Lighting, that is, in 2016, Master Yi was just established. Master Yi is a cross-border trading company that develops and designs products on its own, produces them in OEMs, and then sells them to overseas markets such as Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan through the Amazon platform and independent stations. The products sold by Master Yi include smart home and sports health products, among which smart home products are mainly smart light bulbs. Before founding Master Yi, Shi Qing, CEO of Master Yi, worked in a cross-border e-commerce company.
Unlike Qiancheng Lighting, Master Yi aimed at the smart lighting market from the very beginning. The reason is simple. Most cross-border trading companies on the market are doing traditional lighting products. As a newly established company, Master Yi has no advantages at all. Smart lighting products were still in their infancy at the time and the technology was immature. , It is often complained by consumers because of instability. Many companies that do cross-border trade of traditional lighting products look down on this market. In this field, Master Yi and other companies stand on the same starting line, and if they can do well, they will be able to escape from many competitors.
A similar story also happened in the field of pet supplies.
Established in 2018, Paikewei is a pet products company integrating design, research and development, and production. In 2019, it established its own factory in Taizhou, Jiangsu. In addition to its self-operated pet products brand "PAKEWAY" (PAKEWAY) , And also provide ODM services for some well-known brands.
In recent years, under the social background where the number of people living alone and empty nests is increasing, more and more people choose to keep a pet to accompany them. They are also willing to pay high prices to provide better conditions for pets in all aspects of food, clothing, housing and transportation. According to iiMedia Consulting's data, it is estimated that by 2023, China's pet economic market will be close to 600 billion yuan.
Behind such a huge market, both pet owners and pets still have many unmet needs. For example, young people's busy work and frequent outing demands make them need more intelligent pet supplies to protect their pets' lives when they are out. However, compared with other smart home products, the intelligence of pet products is still at a relatively early stage.
In 2020, Paikewei Chairman Chen Qiao saw the rapid growth of the smart pet products market and decisively led the company to transform from traditional pet products to smart pet products.
Continuous breakthrough
The first product that Paikewei aims at is an automatic pet feeder. When the owner is not at home, you can set the feeding time of the feeder through the App, which can not only keep the pet's daily habits of eating on time, but also avoid the cat food and dog food from being exposed to the outside world for a long time, which greatly improves the convenience of feeding. .
After finding the first direction, Paikewei soon encountered a problem: the lack of professional talents made the factory not equipped with the development capabilities of related products. Making smart products involves knowledge related to electronic circuits, which is a completely unfamiliar field to Chen Qiao and his team. They are learning and developing at the same time, and the progress is very slow. At this time, Chen Qiaojing's friends introduced and learned about Tuya Smart. As a global IoT development platform, the scientific research capabilities, development capabilities, product iteration capabilities, and sales development capabilities that Tuya Smart can provide are all shortcomings that Paikewei needs to make up for when transforming to intelligence. The two parties hit it off and started cooperation.
For the automatic feeder that Paikewei wanted to make, Tuya Smart provided a Wi-Fi module for Paikewei to allow the feeder to connect to the Internet, helping Paikewei to break through the technical bottleneck, and tailor-made for Paikewei. Customized an App, which is convenient for users to use. In addition to automatic feeders, Paikewei and Tuya have two new products, smart pet food storage buckets and smart pet water dispensers, which are being developed in cooperation.
"Whether it is the production speed or the quality, we have encountered relatively big problems in the early stage of transformation." Chen Qiao said, "If we did not cooperate with Tuya Smart, the time span of our transformation would be very long. The cost will also be Higher." Tuya, as an IoT development platform, provides software and hardware integration solutions. Compared with suppliers that focus on a single field, Tuya can provide more mature and stable technology. Tuya also helped Paikewei develop some overseas customers and help Paikewei go overseas. In addition, Tuya's layout in the entire field of smart pet supplies allows them to have more industry big data. They will share these data with every customer, provide customers with suggestions and inspire inspiration.
Transition is not easy for a traditional lighting company. On the one hand, combining traditional lamps with the Internet requires exposure to many unfamiliar technologies. On the other hand, it is not a business that can be accomplished overnight to convince consumers to allow the market to accept smart lighting products.
In 2017, after a year of exploration on the road of transformation, Qiancheng Lighting began to cooperate with Tuya. Tuya provides a full range of services including software and hardware for future lighting, including providing chips, building smart platforms, customizing apps to meet the personalized needs of future lighting, as well as cloud services and marketing services. Chen Jiangtao told the author that many IoT development platforms on the market can only provide partners with standard versions of apps, and Tuya can customize development in accordance with the different needs of each company. For example, they hope that their App can not only control the light switch, but also adjust the color and brightness of the light. Graffiti helps them realize this function quickly and efficiently. “Tuya helps us cross-border and builds an intelligent platform for us. Compared with other platforms, Tuya is more open. It has invested a lot of resources in overseas markets and has outlets to expand the market. This is also important for us to choose to cooperate with Tuya. Reason." Chen Jiangtao said.
As a cross-border trading company, Master Yi will directly face overseas consumers. The first problem they encounter when entering the field of smart lighting is that because of the more complex functions of smart products, they will receive more complaints from consumers than non- There are more smart products, such as failure to connect to the network, Bluetooth module problems, and so on. This makes the staff of Master Yi feel very stressed.
But Shi Qing persisted. He told the author that although the profit margin of selling smart bulbs is similar to that of traditional bulbs, the smart lighting market is in a stage of rapid expansion, with considerable growth and greater opportunities. Smart light bulbs are an industry with low barriers to entry. In the past ten years, overseas markets have been almost blank, and many foreign trade companies and cross-border e-commerce companies have made a lot of money in the middle. Now this stage of "picking money anywhere" has passed, and the competition is fierce. To stand out from the fierce competition, the supply chain must be integrated, product-oriented, and insight into the needs of overseas consumers.
When the company started, Shi Qing chose to cooperate with Tuya. Tuya provided Master Yi with the core control module. Shi Qing told the author that the graffiti scheme is relatively mature. If the control module is independently developed from scratch, it can of course be realized, but it will cost expensive. In addition to hardware, Master Yi and Tuya are also cooperating in software development such as App development. Tuya will also provide Master Yi with industry-related data to help Master Yi better improve its products.
reward
The development of smart homes has brought real benefits to all three companies.
Today, Master Yi's annual revenue is close to 200 million yuan, and it is growing at a rate of 100% every year. On the Amazon European platform, it has achieved the number one sales. After the development of smart lighting, the revenue of Future Lighting has increased by more than 30% every year, of which more than half are contributed by smart lighting products. Smart lighting products have won a good reputation for future lighting, and many new customers have come here. Paikewei’s annual sales are growing at a rate of more than 100%, half of which is contributed by intelligent products. After making smart products, Paikewei was able to meet more needs of existing customers and also attracted more new customers. "Another advantage is that consumers of smart products interact with us more in the process of using products, and consumers can remember our products and brands better." Chen Qiao said.
The smart home market continues to change.
Chen Jiangtao told the author that starting from making smart lighting products, the user’s needs were relatively simple at first. They only wanted to be able to control the light switch with a remote control or mobile phone App. Later, they slowly put forward more requirements, hoping that the light can follow Automatically recognize the changes of people and the environment, and realize intercommunication with home appliances without human intervention, such as dimming the light when the TV is turned on, and brightening the light when the smart curtain is closed.
In the cooperation with Tuya, Future Lighting has been improving its products. Light can affect people's mood and state, which can make people feel sleepy and refreshing. Based on this research, Future Lighting has developed a smart light bulb that can change the spectrum. By setting the time period in the App, these smart light bulbs can be adjusted to a relaxing mode when entering the sleep preparation phase, and to an exciting mode when they need to enter the working state. This type of product is currently available in the European and American markets, but most of the domestic smart lighting still stays at the level of using App or smart speakers to control the switch, and the technology is relatively more conservative.
Smart pet supplies are also being upgraded. At this stage, the degree of intelligence of pet supplies is still at a relatively basic stage compared with other smart home products. Paike is the current way to obtain user information, mainly from the registration information of App users and the information that consumers feedback to the online store customer service. The product itself cannot return any data to help the company make improvements. Chen Qiao envisions that there will be more ways for consumers to feed back information to manufacturers in the future, and product updates and iterations will be faster.
For the future, Chen Qiao believes that smart pet products will have more autonomous analysis capabilities. For example, the current pet water dispenser can remind the pet owner to replace the filter element regularly, and the use time of each filter element is set at a fixed time. In fact, the frequency and secretions of each pet are different, and the number of pets in each household is also different. In this case, the loss rate of the pet water dispenser filter is not static. Future pet water dispensers may be able to automatically detect this data and actively change the use time of the filter element, which is more convenient and more scientific for pet owners.
In addition to cooperating with Tuya, Paikewei has also found colleges and universities for project cooperation to jointly develop smart pet products. This move has also attracted more talents for the company. "Talents are the driving force of the company's transformation, and the strength of development capabilities is the basis for the rapid implementation of intelligence." Chen Qiao said. In the company's organizational structure, he set up an innovation project department, and regularly held innovation meetings to allow employees to brainstorm.
Intelligence is an unstoppable trend in the home furnishing industry. The cases of the three companies successfully entering the smart home in this article can provide some references for traditional home furnishing companies. As long as you focus on the smart home direction, invest decisively, and choose high-quality partners, you can push the company's development to a new stage.
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