In an era where fashion has innumerable followers seeking “individuality”, the amount of choices has become both more numerous, and more potentially bewildering and confusing. There born MOGU, an information platform aimed at female shoppers – in China alone, there are over 671 million females among the population of 1.4 billion.
E-commerce for products, MOGU for contents
“Compared with women in the west, it was only recently that Chinese women started to care more about themselves and modern fashion,” said Lin Feng, a VP at Meili Inc. who is in charge of MOGU.
MOGU was established this April by Meili Inc., China’s largest social shopping platform, to provide fashion information. Meili Inc. was established with three parts: MOGU STREET, targeting young women at the age of 18-23, Meilishuo, targeting white-collar female at the age of 23-30, and Taoshijie, targeting the new wealthy people. The three e-commerce platforms merged this April, creating a customer base of over 200 million registered users.
Data from iResearch indicates that there is a huge e-commerce market for women in China, as nearly 300 million among the 560 million mobile netizens till 2014 are female.
Lin believes that while most e-commerce consumers know what they need, MOGU can provide content to guide female users to products that suit them and, more importantly, help them know more about world fashion and about themselves.
“Our target group is women who care about fashion and want to lead a happy life,” said Lin.
Customized info on beauty, food, and lifestyle
Articles in MOGU range from “recipes that keep your skin fair in summer” to “how to purchase perfume online” and “how to choose your perfect shoes”. It also has more entertaining articles with topics like “Life lessons learned from a breakfast” and “A guide to unique restaurants in Beijing hutongs”.
Links to products are attached to relevant posts so that readers can directly access the products that interest them. Users can find the nearest franchised stores such as Prada and Gucci at the end of the stories that introduce the history and culture of those brands.
To meet the varied needs of different users, MOGU provides customized services by collecting user comments, holding offline conversations with key opinion leaders (KOL) for valuable advice, and applying algorithms to analyze user behaviors via the MOGU app.
Lin said that the fashionable and the pretty is not necessarily the expensive, and that what matters is whether an item suits you.
Behind every good service there is a good team, and partners
Lin is particularly proud when talking about his team. Besides recruiting competitive editors from traditional media, MOGU has talents from tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, known as BAT, as well as from video site Youku Tudou and security provider 360 to make up its R&D team and operation team.
MOGU has made syndicate. agreement with individual media as well as fashion magazines including a leading Chinese magazine Yueji.Self, as well as the Chinese editions of Cosmopolitan and Vogue. It also partners with brands, writing about the stories and the underlying culture of these brands.
But MOGU does not intend to stop at being a mere information platform. “We provide quality information to our female users and help them shape an attitude towards life,” said Lin. The attitude covers a groovy lifestyle, a smart sense of beauty, and a good taste.
Fashion is universal: a global picture from the beginning
Lin said that MOGU has had a global picture from the very beginning, because fashion is universal.
Having gone online in April, the four-month-old MOGU app now has over 100,000 activated users. Although content is now delivered via texts and pictures, videos will be added before long.
Currently, MOGU has two language versions: Mandarin and English. Users can choose from three blocks: Beijing, New York, and London – each offering different contents representing fashion with local traits. Blocks of Milan and Paris may be added in the near future, and so too will French, Italian, Japanese, and Korean language versions be added.
(Top photo from Baidu Images)