How a Japanese porn star and a Chinese brand convinced men to buy lingerie online

When it comes to internet fame in China, few people can rival Japanese porn star and all-around entertainer Sola Aoi. Although pornography is technically illegal in China, many of the country’s internet users are, ahem, intimately familiar with her oeuvre. When she opened an account on Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo, it exploded. As of now, she has more than 15 million followers (to put that in perspective, she’s even more popular than Xiaomi founder Lei Jun).

But she isn’t necessarily the kind of person you’d turn to if you wanted help selling women’s underwear. Her online following, although massive, is (for obvious reasons) predominantly male. And she’s more famous for taking clothes off than she is for designing or selling them. Since pornography is illegal in China, she’s also a controversial figure.

Any publicity is good publicity, though, and Chinese underwear maker Xianyidai began discussions with Aoi regarding a possible collaboration. The company was cautious at first, as it feared that her reputation could make their brand seem vulgar. But eventually she was brought on board to design a signature lingerie collection for a Xianyidai brand called Spakeys.

On May 19th, she announced her first designer series on Weibo, and the post exploded. It got nearly 30,000 re-tweets, and her follow-up posts cheekily asking Weibo tech stars like Lei Jun for ecommerce advice brought further attention. When the first 500-plus sets of the lingerie went on sale, they sold out in less than six hours despite the fact that the set cost RMB 1,288 (US$210).

Spakey’s Black Swan line on Tmall. Not cheap!

But things got really interesting when Aoi’s lingerie designs hit Spakeys’s brand store on Alibaba’s B2C ecommerce platform Tmall in August. The data shows that 36 percent of the Tmall store’s visitors and 56 percent of its paying customers were male that month.

That’s extremely unusual for Spakeys, a representative named Mr. Ding told Chinese tech site Sina Tech. Typically, 99 percent of the company’s customers are female. “This is an unexpected harvest,” Ding said of the flood of men buying Aoi’s lingerie products. And that’s despite the fact that her products had not gotten cheaper since their May debut. For example, a nightie from her “Black Swan” line costs a whopping RMB 1,588 (US$260).

To be fair, although Spakeys claims impressive sales figures in August, based on the company’s Tmall numbers now, it doesn’t seem like the underwear sets are selling very quickly anymore. That probably isn’t a surprise given the astronomical price point. But the amount of attention they garnered during their August launch, along with the new demographic of customers they’ve given Spakeys access to, are a testament to the value of partnering with celebrities, especially online celebrities, and taking advantage of social media connections when it comes to promoting your ecommerce operation.

This case is also probably a testament to the value of taking risks: Xianyidai was taking a big risk associating a controversial figure like Aoi Sola with its brand Spakeys, but in the end, that decision seems to be paying off.

(Source: Sina Tech)