Hi everyone and welcome back to Happy Hour.

Today we have a special guest in our studio. He is the APEC managing partner for consumer and retail sector for one of the world's largest consulting firms. And he is also a global expert in the field of retail innovation and new retail. Most importantly, he's an old friend of Happy Hour, and some of you may recognize his voice.Mr. Yuan.

And in today's episode, we're going to continue to talk to him about new retail and a new 酒館 store.

Having talked about all these trends, I would like to also share with our audience that we have a酒館鋪子and many of you have bought things from our 鋪子.

But now we are very happy to let you know that we are officially upgrading it to酒館鋪子2.0. As the host, I'm going to ask Mr. Yuan, why are you interested in helping to upgrade the小酒館store？

Well. It's absolutely an interesting thing because first of all, personally, I am doing consumer and retail for many many years, and seeing the trends in this new retail innovations, I can see, as I said, one of the most important trends is the social content commerce.

Uh.

So that overall new retail business model is something that's right in front of us, we are on the trend. So I think this model has a particular attraction in the sense that there is a trust that you have already developed between the influencer and the products and the brands that are selling the product. There's also a convenience factor. You listen to a certain thing and you may have the program that would have introduced a particular lifestyle that has inspired someone, and then you could easily, conveniently place an order and have the product in your hands.

So essentially what Happy Hour is doing is part of the new trends, the social content commerce.

Exactly. Absolutely. This is on the right trend.

Okay, I guess as someone who is an expert in new retail, that is what attracts you to be able to really get into this.

Absolutely. So this is both a pilot as well as an in depth steady and standing of the whole social content commerce business model. So to me, this is absolutely very, very interesting.

I'm asking on behalf of all of our followers and audience. I'm asking Mr. Yuan, who basically spare headed the hole upgrade, what is the new upgraded小酒館生活？

Let me start with what I have seen from the other side of the world.

Uh.

So I've been traveling around the world, as I said, I was like spending 9 months in London last year and before I been traveling to Australia and traveling to Japan, Canada, other places. Everywhere I go, there are always some brands. There are always some niche brands so these are not mass brands you see every day in China.

Niche brand.

Correct. So there are many of those brands. They are very, very popular in their local market and they have history, it could be like hundreds years of history.

Wow.

And this brand is very interesting, they are high quality and they are well known in their own local market. They have a brand story and products are very, very good. But they probably have not the size of it that would allow them to enter the China market well. Because people don't know them.

I suppose you need a lot of investment, like a lot of money, a large budget to get into China.

Correct. They're typically in themselves about 1 to 10 billion U.S. dollars company, but they are… with that size, they would not have enough budget to come into China to do a mass marketing to…

I see.

So people don't know them well. But if you are actually traveling into these countries, you would see them. You will see these are popular local brands. Right, so bringing these brands to China and bringing these brands to those people that are interested in these high quality products and with a good story, is uh something I find this would be very interesting and very valuable.

And it's what we've been doing sort of… already.

Exactly.

But one thing I think a lot of our audience will ask because many people are on e-commerce platforms all of these, JD, Taobao and Tmall, all how is it different? How can we make it different? We are obviously not as big as that. But how can we make that different?

So instead of focusing on you know just selling a product, all those platforms that you mentioned, that’s what we called a transaction platforms, so this is where…

Exactly. So you are going there only to talk about a product, you buy and sell a product. Whereas in this小酒館生活, what I would love this to be, is a place where you could learn about a lifestyle in different parts of the world.

Uh.

So you have a slogan there, you say. 來小酒館you are able to see a bigger world, right？

Yeah.

But then what we want to do with this小酒館生活is to, literally …

Bring the world to you.

Exactly so that world can be brought to you and then you can see it, you can feel it and you can enjoy it.

With the show, as obviously the content producer from this side, I'm trying very hard to make sure the content is about bringing the world to our audience. Even if they never had any chance to go abroad themselves. And a lot of them are actually saying that, saying that 酒館 helps them see a bigger world. I think with the newly upgraded小酒館store, we're bringing the world to our audience.

Absolutely. So this is really something I think is valuable and it's interesting. I saw you do an episode with the Iberian ham.

The family owner, right?

Yes, that was a very interesting experience for me as well. I've learned so much about Iberian ham.

Exactly, this is absolutely different from you just go to Tmall and Taobao and look at so many different hams. You don't even know what the histories are, what the differences are. So in小酒館生活, I would love our consumers, our 酒粉 to be able to really understand what you are actually buying and to really also understand the type of lifestyle these products carries.

Yeah, I think this is also over the years we found out about our own audience. Many of our audience, they have so much interest in life, not just in, for example, different countries and not just in different languages, but also in the life styles.

Exactly.

All right, we've certainly talked about a lot of these and new retail and also the new 酒館 store. One last question, I'm asking on behalf of our audience. What can we expect from the new upgraded小酒館store 2.0 now and in the future?

Right. So we have a team that are working on a brand-new facial identity in the store. If you're going into the store tomorrow…

It's brand-new.

In the next week. It's going to look quite differently. So that's number one.

Uh.

Number two, you would see a broader coverage of the product range. We started with food and beverage, liquor. So this is小酒館, so you would expect this…

Exactly, but then we're expanding to other products and including the skin care and including the products even for the kids because we have quite a number of…

Like moms.

Exactly. So the products for kids, study-related products and so on. So it's got a broad range of product that would suit your needs.

Sounds fantastic. I haven't seen it. So I'm as excited as all of you.

Yeah, absolutely. So for those who are first to join to go to our store, there's going to be also promotional activities. So if you join the open bar community through...

Deals. Deals.

Yeah, so there's going to be, you know, promotional activities that you're going to get some red envelopes.

So this is what you can expect today. Right. But then for the future, I'm certainly committed to work with 小酒館 and to leverage all my retail friends circle. So my global network of lots of different retailers and lots of different brands.

Bring those friends home.

Absolutely. So there's many interesting brands that I could think of bringing to the China market and particularly bring to our 酒館fans. Right. Like the skin care product is made of the remainder of the coffee beans like they could create active components and it's a very trendy kind of product.

It's interesting. So coffee infused skin care product. Certainly sounds niche .

It activates your skin just like the coffee wakes you up. This is very popular already in Australia and in the global markets.

Wow.

So but I haven't seen it in China. So the products of that nature and also other products from like Spain and from various different parts of Europe. Certainly things like ice wine from from Canada. All those different products that are quite niche, but they are quite popular in different positive world.

Can't wait. Definitely can't wait.

So you could expect us to continuously bringing the world's most interesting products into the store.

And I can't wait to see our new store and also I can't wait to get into all of these brand stories in the future as a content producer.

Oh. Exactly. I'm sure that each and every of the future products that we bring, there's going to be some forms of story that you can tell.

Fantastic. OK. Thank you so much Mr. Yuan for coming to the studio and introduce all of these expert points of views and also your thoughts about the小酒館, the new evolved小酒館store. Thank you so much.

I'm so happy that you are giving the opportunity to pilot and to actually put a lot of the sources and experience and into a real thing. So I'm hoping that your fans, your followers are going to enjoy.

Yeah, I'm sure both our audience and I will be super interested in seeing how this new evolved, upgraded 酒館 store looks like. On that note, we're going to wrap up here. If you have any question about new retail for Mr. Yuan or if you have anything to ask about the new 酒館 store, leave us a comment in a common section. We'll see you next time.

See you.

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