Brands Go Global Beyond Platform Boundaries

In 2010, amidst the U.S. eyewear market dominated by offline sales, an online brand named Warby Parker was born. At that time, it had no physical stores, yet it managed to carve out a path of growth in a market primarily focused on luxury goods by offering fashionable and affordable options, quickly gaining consumer favor. Later, Warby Parker would also be hailed as the pioneer and epitome of DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands.

The business could be conducted in such a way. In the eyes of industry insiders, at that time, Warby Parker inspired a multitude of companies to start similar businesses, including cross-border e-commerce enterprises from China.

Six years after the establishment of Warby Parker, a Chinese company followed in its footsteps and founded TIJN, a vertical export brand focused on eyewear. From the very beginning, it established an independent website to build its brand and targeted North America as its core market. Such a move was rare among the export teams that were primarily focused on e-commerce platforms like Amazon at the time.

Fast forward to 2024, against the backdrop of stricter platform rules, fierce industry competition, and the trend towards branded development, independent websites have become the new darling of cross-border e-commerce enterprises. As an important carrier for brand export, their numbers have been growing globally year by year, with data showing that the number of independent websites established by Chinese companies overseas has reached 200,000.

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"Over the past decade, the main sales were on platforms, but platforms are relatively easy to compare prices, and in the end, everyone just competes to see who can sell cheaper," said Roy Wan, CEO and founder of Return Helper. "On platforms, no matter which brand, it is very difficult to fully showcase the brand to overseas buyers. The flexibility and elasticity of independent websites can help shape a good brand image."

Building brand value and focusing on customer needs are indeed genes that many first and second-generation cross-border e-commerce people do not possess. When this becomes an inevitable step, how should companies proceed?

Brands Born Online

The novelist Jack Kerouac once said, "Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends, fashion, and the mass opinion." This is especially true for entrepreneurs. Like most entrepreneurs or inventors, Kerouac himself was a rebel, known for writing about the "Beat Generation," and it was this rebellious spirit that inspired the birth of Warby Parker.

The brand name "Warby Parker" is derived from the names of two characters created by Kerouac, Warby Pepper and Zagg Parker. The founders admired this rebellious spirit and integrated it into their culture. Warby Parker itself, in the eyewear industry dominated by offline markets, was indeed an anomaly.

Every idea begins with a question. One day, after losing a pair of $700 Prada glasses, one of the founders of Warby Parker, David Gilboa, became curious about why glasses, with no technical content, could be as expensive as an iPhone.At that time in the European and American eyewear market, the industry was monopolized by a few large companies, among which the Luxottica Group controlled the entire chain from design, production to retail, leading to the inflated prices of glasses.

This discovery inspired him and a few friends to start a business, and Warby Parker was born. Compared with traditional offline brand glasses, Warby Parker specializes in selling high cost-performance glasses, eliminating the middle link, adopting the DTC model that directly faces consumers, and finding Chinese factories to manufacture, using the same materials as Luxottica to make glasses.

At that time, the price of each pair of glasses from Warby Parker was $95, while the most ordinary pair of glasses in traditional large eyewear chain stores was $300. Coupled with its simple and exquisite, fashionable website and products, Warby Parker quickly led a wave of eyewear fashion trend.

Since its launch in 2009, Warby Parker has been called "the Netflix of the eyewear industry" by GQ, and the brand achieved its first-year goal in less than a month. Soon after, Warby Parker was also at the forefront of Fast Company's list of the world's most innovative companies in 2015.

Its innovation is not only in the eyewear market. Under the promotion of the Internet wave, e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay have flourished, causing a transformation in the traditional retail industry, basically forming the main body of online sales. Vertical websites like Warby Parker cleverly bypassed direct competition with portal e-commerce giants and grew rapidly in the segmented track, which can be considered the biggest innovation in the e-commerce industry in those years.

In September 2021, Warby Parker went public on the New York Stock Exchange with a market value of more than $6 billion. With it in front, many similar DTC brands grew during that period, such as online razor brand Harry's, sportswear brand Allbirds, etc. Coupled with the explosion of social media bringing huge traffic support, the emerging DTC brands have become the current trend.

From the perspective of industry insiders, the rise and innovation of the DTC model can be seen from the birth of these brands. While directly establishing contact with consumers, it also promotes the entire industry to develop in a more digital and consumer-centric direction.

A more "right" path

This trend has also affected China's cross-border export companies.

In 2016, a Chinese export brand called TIJN was established. Focusing on the eyewear category and aiming at the North American market, TIJN's path is consistent with Warby Parker's rise to prominence."For eyewear products, over 90% of the global production is in China, especially in Xiamen. At that time, I believed that Americans could import such products from China and create such a brand from scratch, and we also had a chance, after all, the supply chain was in place," said Huang Mimi, founder and CEO of TIJN, to the reporter.

Innovatively, facing the unfamiliar North American market, TIJN directly chose the more challenging independent station model instead of the mainstream platform-based overseas expansion at the time.

A decade ago, Amazon's entry led to a surge in cross-border e-commerce. During this phase, there was an explosive influx of sellers, and platforms like Wish and AliExpress also grew stronger. The entire change accelerated, with significant growth in the number of people covered, product lines, and transaction volumes. However, DTC (Direct-to-Consumer) was still a barren land, with very few merchants venturing into independent station overseas expansion.

Huang Mimi frankly admitted that when he entered the market, the Amazon platform already existed, and many sellers had achieved great success on that platform. To become a big seller in such an environment, the chances might not be many. However, he also acknowledged that his thoughts at that time might have been somewhat naive, not foreseeing the rapid growth of cross-border e-commerce later on.

Nevertheless, this "naive" idea led him to choose a path that now seems more "right." At that time, he noticed that there were more sellers focusing on cost-effectiveness and simply selling goods, while those focusing on building their own brands were relatively fewer, which might be an opportunity. Thus, the DTC brand independent station established in the United States started at this time, and it was several months later that Amazon was also laid out.

"At that time, I just had an entrepreneurial impulse and didn't have many other thoughts," Huang Mimi believes that his decision at that time was brave, and he was relatively lucky at all stages.

Compared to third-party platforms, independent station merchants can control the sales process autonomously, without the risk of product delisting and other platform rules, and can independently design and freely display the company's brand image, enhancing brand power. It is reported that cross-border e-commerce with its own brands and intellectual property rights can achieve a profit margin of 19% to 28%, far exceeding traditional stock-type cross-border e-commerce or general factory transformation cross-border e-commerce.

These points are particularly important in today's cross-border e-commerce environment. In 2024, the number of third-party platform sellers is saturated, facing increasingly fierce competition and gradually declining profits, independent stations have become an additional consideration for sellers, and the rapid rise in the importance of brands, as well as the impact of the Amazon black swan event, have accelerated this process.

"For overseas sellers, creating brand independent stations or independent station overseas expansion can bring some important value to cross-border enterprises, including the enhancement of profit margins. 'Brand', especially 'brands that can resonate with consumers', is the core value of going overseas and also the competitiveness," said Google's Digital Marketing Solutions Vice President for China, Liang Cuiping, to the 21st Century Economic Report reporter.

"The most important value is diversification. Independent stations can complement third-party platforms, build more diverse marketing channels, reduce the risks brought by a single platform, and increase stability," Liang Cuiping added. Data shows that China's cross-border e-commerce entities have exceeded 100,000, and more than 200,000 independent stations have been built.There is still room for growth.

At present, operating an independent website is no longer an exception in cross-border e-commerce, but has become a trend.

Encouraging foreign trade companies to build their own independent websites and supporting professional website building platforms to optimize and improve service capabilities; the opinions issued by the Ministry of Commerce and other nine departments also mentioned improving the ability to serve cross-border e-commerce companies, and supporting cross-border e-commerce companies with conditions to build independent websites, overseas brand operation centers, etc.

However, the business logic of operating an independent website is completely different from that of third-party platforms. Companies usually cannot directly transfer their platform experience to the independent website, which is the core difficulty of operating an independent website.

On e-commerce platforms, sales are the core model, and it is often difficult to display products according to the brand's own wishes. For example, in terms of return services, some merchants hope to provide great benefits or convenience in returns, but the platform only needs to comply with regulations, and there is no point in spending extra costs.

In contrast, the business logic of independent websites focuses more on brand building rather than simple sales. The goal is to deeply understand consumers, establish long-term brand relationships, and attract new users through continuous interaction.

Insight into user needs and building brand value is also what Huang Mimi has been emphasizing, and independent websites also give him the opportunity to collect and analyze user data. Huang Mimi told reporters that once, TIJN previously discovered through Google data insights that about 40% of its customer user composition, in addition to purchasing its products, would also visit other luxury websites to buy luxury goods. This data gave them very strong confidence, and then they gradually increased prices, ultimately doubling the sales price.

Another time, they found through data analysis that many users were very concerned about environmental issues in addition to shopping. This insight prompted TIJN to develop a new environmentally friendly product line, using environmentally friendly materials such as corn stalks and cotton and other natural materials to replace traditional chemical raw materials for glasses. Through this innovation, TIJN became one of the earliest brands in the eyewear industry to launch environmentally friendly products.

"In some independent website construction, sellers may not initially be aware of collecting information. Without a full understanding of consumers, it is not easy to succeed." Liang Cuiping told reporters, "Merchants need to generate better interactions by understanding consumers better, making them trust the brand more, and achieving higher stickiness. This is the idea of operating an independent website."

In addition to the most basic business logic, operating an independent website will also face many detailed issues in business operations. Compared with platform e-commerce, operating an independent website has significant differences and greater difficulties in website construction, logistics distribution, payment docking, and customer service processes. Especially for small and medium-sized cross-border sellers, due to the limitations of enterprise scale and resources, it is often difficult to cope with the challenges of transformation when starting independent website business.Huang Mimi also told the reporter that they encountered a multitude of issues in the initial years. On one occasion, the company discovered during product shipment that, according to local regulations, all products entering the market must be accompanied by the corresponding inspection reports. Due to a lack of understanding of the industry standards in the North American market, they failed to prepare these necessary documents in advance and had to halt shipments, only to resume after the reports were completed and reconnected.

Similar challenges often arise, and it is no longer sufficient for companies that only excel in product development to cope with the situation. If you ask these independent site practitioners what is most important, they would still say it is to meet the unique needs of consumers. To be more specific, they would say to find the right partners and then overcome the immediate challenges step by step.

"From the beginning to now, we have encountered problems in all aspects, but after going through them, they seem quite ordinary," Huang Mimi told the reporter, "like eating and drinking every day."

Today, whether it is brand merchants or those seeking to avoid risks, independent sites are an important choice. Reports show that the independent site market has occupied about 40% of the overseas e-commerce market share, and it is expected to continue to be a growth dividend for independent sites in the coming years.

Huang Mimi feels that although competition in the industry has intensified, with the rapid development of cross-border e-commerce, American consumers' acceptance of Chinese brands has significantly increased compared to the past, which is undoubtedly better for their overseas brands.

"The development of cross-border e-commerce has been unexpected. From today's perspective, although there are some difficulties, I believe there is still a very large volume of space that cross-border e-commerce can convert," said the reporter.