New Zealand skincare company Trilogy has set up a cross-border e-commerce flagship store on Alibaba’s T-Mall platform.
Trilogy has been exporting to eight countries across Asia, raking in NZ$4 million (US$2.9 million) in sales last year, almost double from the previous year’s $2.8 million.
CEO Angela Buglass says the online store was set up after the company found a distributor in China.
Buglass says the T-Mall store is a more formal route to market than the daigou channel, where products are shipped through Chinese personal shoppers recruited by consumers in China to buy and send goods individually.
T-Mall’s platform means the business has control over the content, price and products being sold. Alibaba this year opened its Australia/New Zealand head office in Melbourne, and Trilogy’s T-mall manager is based there.
While China is Trilogy’s oldest market in the region, Japan continues to be a strong focus, says Buglass. The Japanese beauty market was worth $84 billion last year, and it has been estimated that while Chinese consumers spend about $30 average a year on cosmetics, Japanese consumers spend about $234.
Trilogy has also created bespoke products for its Japanese and South Korean customers that better suit humid climates, such as lighter formulations of its rosehip oil and face sprays.
“You try to keep things as homogenised as possible, but the reality is that Japan needs something different to Korea and Vietnam,” says Buglass.
She says Asian consumers are very suspicious of products because of counterfeit or fraudulency issues, but New Zealand’s reputation “puts us a step ahead”.
