The e-cigarette retail channel brand Laiyan has recently completed an angel round of financing with an amount of several million yuan in China, and the investor is Jidou Capital. This round of investment will be used for market development and operation upgrades to provide a systematic and digital sales platform for more e-cigarette practitioners.
According to the data of Tianyancha, Laiyan was founded in 2019 and is positioned as an e-cigarette channel brand company. Through the new retail form of chain stores and smart vending machines, it helps product parties to expand the offline market of e-cigarettes and access WeChat payment/person Face recognition and other identity authentication systems implement the Minor Guarding Plan, and minors are strictly prohibited from buying.
In terms of market expansion strategy, the Laiyan team launched the city partner system and has reached cooperation with partners in Tianjin, Shandong, Zhuhai, Hainan and other provinces/municipalities for regional promotion. In order to allow merchants to improve customer acquisition efficiency and repurchase rate, Laiyan mostly adopts the strategy of “laying 10-20 sales cabinets centered on the store and 2 kilometers away”.
There are two types of unmanned self-service retail cabinets currently launched by Laiyan. The cost of a small machine is about 700 yuan, and that of a large machine is about 1400 yuan. According to Laiyan’s revenue statistics, the machine can be paid back on average in three months. According to reports, the team will continue to expand other markets across the country, focusing mainly on scenarios such as shop-in-shop, convenience store, bar, coffee shop, subway entrance, and business district. By setting up experience areas, users’ trial rates and retention will be improved.
As of now, Laiyan has deployed dozens of offline e-cigarette stores and hundreds of smart sales terminals. There are many brands that cooperate with Laiyan, such as RELX, vvild, Esun, and Jingye. The business team of Laiyan is still in constant contact with other excellent e-cigarette companies to help the brand reach more offline retail scenarios.
The Laiyan team had many years of experience in the Internet and retail markets. After self-developing an independent retail system based on a small Wechat program as a platform, it began to cooperate with offline collection stores of e-cigarettes. The terminal is extended to crowded scenes such as shopping malls, pedestrian streets, and subway entrances.
