As a growth engine, new retail has shaped how the retail industry has operated in recent years by integrating online and offline channels. Secoo (NASDAQ：SECO), China’s largest premium ecommerce platform, has followed this trend closely. Recently, it released its new brand slogan of ‘devoted to you’ at its brand upgrade press conference in Beijing on April 17th. The change of slogan signals its aim to transform from a luxury e-commerce into a premium lifestyle platform.
There is no doubt that New Retail is oriented towards the blurred boundaries between online shopping and offline shopping. Taking Secoo as an example, Secoo was born as a luxury ecommerce platform in the beginning. Since then it has cooperated with several retail giants to enter the area of offline retail. Under this strategy, Secoo can permeate more and more offline shopping centers and enlarge the scale of targeted consumers.
In general, Secoo has shifted itself from an online luxury goods e-commerce marketplace to add lifestyle, art, finance, agriculture, and cloud computing services into its ecosystem. According to Richard Rixue Li, the founder and CEO of Secoo, Secoo has been revealing its ambitions since its establishment. Secoo has always focused on high net worth consumers by providing them with satisfactory commodities and the best services.
Today, businesses are transboundary. Commercial giants in China have diversified from their core business into far more varied areas. For example, tech giant, Alibaba, has invested in different areas including medicine, education, travel, finance and so on in the past few years and has made new retail a key strategy. Thanks to the internet it is possible to equip businesses with various possibilities. It is technology that can integrate different areas, people and capital. Applying similar logic, Secoo expands its business into various areas, which is a typical example in the era of new retail.
Secoo went public in 2017 in NASDAQ after a 10-year operation. According to its unaudited Q4 fiscal report, the gross merchandise volume (GMV) reached RMB 5.2264 billion (about USD 808.8 million) in the full year of 2017, growing 51.6% YOY.
