How did it catch on?
Open a shopping platform, search for “face towel”, many different brands pop up, and the head few can not move is the whole network sales of 100,000+; Chatting with the young girls around me, I found that almost no one used towels; Coupled with the impact of the epidemic, disposable face towels have become the “real fragrance” in daily necessities.
However, an interesting phenomenon is that when you type “face towel” on Zhihu, the first topic that automatically matches is “is the face towel an IQ tax”; On Douban, more straight men sent out soul torture: Isn’t it just a napkin, and it is pasted on the face all day?
In the industry, whether the face towel is a cotton soft towel, whether it is a mother and baby product or a daily chemical product, there is no accurate statement, but this has not blocked the increase of disposable face towels by 939% during Tmall Double 11 in 2020.
From towels to face towels, this is a face washing revolution that is not just for young people.
A face towel for 1 dime per tablet
The whole family was planted with grass
After 90, Ms. Liu suddenly found that the washcloth at home had run out. “No, last year’s Double 11, I hoarded a lot, I have long calculated it, with two pieces a day, it should be enough to use this year’s 618.”
How do face towels work so quickly? After casually asking, I found that Ms. Liu was not alone in using it. Husband, mother-in-law, and the family were quietly planted with a face towel, “one pump, one wipe, one throw, so convenient.” ”
In the last two years, face towels have replaced towels with an unstoppable trend. This kind of disposable product, which looks like a paper drawer and looks like a cloth, is not easy to breed bacteria like a towel, and it is really convenient to use.
It seems that consumption upgrades have made everyone more and more serious about their “face”, and the skin care steps are also further advanced, in addition to choosing better skin care products, they also pay special attention to how to wash their faces and what to wipe their faces.
Open a shopping website, everywhere is the promotion of disposable face towels, the reporter enters “face towel” in the search box, jumps out of the major brands of face towels, at every turn is the whole network sales of 100,000+, a subsidized price of 5.9 yuan of extractive face towels, containing 60 pieces (20×20cm), an average of 1 cent.
If you wash your face once a day in the morning and evening, if you use two tablets a day, 60 tablets is exactly a month’s amount. Even for “slum” girls, the price doesn’t seem to be as high as big-name skincare and bags.
The old towel factory spends tens of millions of yuan
Promote disposable face towels
The rise of disposable face towels, in addition to the real needs of young consumers, is inseparable from the unsparing promotion of factories, brands and platforms. These three form the “right time and place” for the development of disposable face towels.
In Zhejiang, many textile factories have switched to the production of face towels. The reporter opened the “Yiwu Purchase” platform and found that many textile factories showed that disposable face towels could be processed on behalf of the company.
“We started deploying disposable face towels in 2017.” A person in charge of Yiwu Kaidi Textiles told reporters that their factory has been in existence for 20 years, including 10 years of producing towels. In the past, it was mainly engaged in foreign trade, but in recent years it began to turn to domestic sales, and now it is mainly a foundry for washing towels, and some of them are sold directly on e-commerce platforms as their own brands.
“In four years, face towels now account for 20%-30% of our entire business, and they are still growing.” The person in charge said, “Because I have been deeply cultivating in the field of textiles and paying special attention to the cutting-edge information in the industry, I decided to invest in equipment, raw materials and labor for the first time to try, and at present, the path chosen was not wrong.” ”
The first time to find disposable face towels is not only the factory, but also major brands. “We started noticing the market for disposable face towels in 2015, and in previous years it was actually in a small-scale exploration phase. Until May 2019, when a promotion with a budget of more than 10 million was made, basically all online channels were full, especially on Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Douyin and other platforms, and the effect was not bad. “As a well-known textile enterprise in Zhejiang, Jielia revealed that the main concept at that time: the face towel is an upgrade of the towel.” Subsequently, the proportion of face towels in our total sales has become higher and higher, in 2019 it was about 10%, in 2020 it has accounted for 30%, and these two years have reached exponential growth. ”
What really makes disposable face towels popular is the promotion of various platforms. According to incomplete statistics, there are currently more than 1,000 brands selling face towels on the Ali platform, and on platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Kuaishou, major bloggers also have a lot of grass stickers for face towels. The reporter entered “face towel” in the search box of Xiaohongshu and jumped out of 100,000+ notes, and some bloggers’ face towel reviews had thousands or even tens of thousands of likes.
During the e-commerce promotion, face towels and paper towels have become popular for everyone. According to data, in the first three quarters of 2020, the sales of face towels on the Ali platform exceeded 2.5 billion yuan; During Tmall Double 11 in 2020, disposable face towels increased by 939%.
From the era of towels
Transition to the era of disposable face towels
It has to be said that from its birth to the present, towels are still a must-have daily necessities in every family bathroom. Although the older generation does not change towels frequently, they will often disinfect through exposure to the sun or boiling water, and many life experts have summed up a variety of “tricks” for cleaning towels and making towels soft.
After asking around, there are indeed young people who are still strong supporters of towels, and they give no more than two reasons: one is from the perspective of environmental protection, disposable things are difficult to reuse; In addition, from the perspective of scientific experiments, as long as it is used properly, the bacterial content of towels and unhygienic are not equated. After all, some experts have demonstrated that towels as long as they are changed every three months do not affect health.
After the face towel is on fire, it has a certain impact on the dominance of towels, but in the eyes of some brand merchants, what may have a greater impact on the towel market is the change in consumer demand. “The consumption scenarios for towels are becoming more and more diversified and more segmented, such as bath towels, hand towels, and now dry hair hats and men’s sports towels that young girls like.” Jielia revealed.
Speaking of which, disposable face towels do not have a clear birth timeline, and the industry basically believes that it was only in 2014-2015 that this name was born. In fact, everyone is more familiar with its sister products – cotton soft towels, maternal and baby products, this consumer demand was tapped by merchants, only to break out of the field of mother and baby, “incarnated” into disposable face towels.
For the disposable face towel industry, it is still difficult to see cotton soft towels or face towels on the shelves at the offline retail end, let alone placed in a conspicuous position.
There is still a certain uncertainty in the entire market, especially some small brands or pure OEM factories, and the input-output ratio should be comprehensively considered. “At present, the competition for disposable face towels is quite fierce, taking the factory side as an example, each factory that originally made paper products, wet wipes, towels, and diapers has added face towel business.” The person in charge of Yiwu Kaidi Textiles said.
Next, the entire industry will gradually return to rationality from the barbaric rapid development, giving priority to shuffling those products without brand and awareness, “small but beautiful, high-end, word-of-mouth brands also ushered in greater opportunities.” Jielia also said.
Whether it is a face towel, a hand towel or a sports towel, the “derivative” of these towels makes washing your face every day from simple cleaning to paying attention to safety and health, meeting everyone’s diversified needs and reflecting the changes in everyone’s habits in pursuit of a better life.