I’ve been thinking about Luckin Coffee, which was a big story a few years ago in China. It was a digital upstart taking on giant Starbucks. It was Jack Ma’s “new retail” applied to retail coffee. It was a digital innovator. Blah, blah, blah. It was mostly a lot of hype. And the company crashed […]
A couple of topics for today. About how all business begins and ends with the customer. HeyTea and Why You Have to Thrill Your Customers. There was an interesting article last week about retail tea company HeyTea – and their rumored funding round at a price of 16B RMB ($280M). HeyTea is a popular and […]
Jeffrey Towson discusses what Starbucks China could have done to respond to the rise of Luckin Coffee. He argues that Starbucks should have focused on its strengths, such as its brand and its loyalty program, and that it should have been more aggressive in expanding its store network. He also notes that Starbucks could have learned from Luckin’s innovative marketing and pricing strategies.
In Part 1, I argued that Starbucks China most interesting competitor is not Luckin Coffee. It is HeyTea, an upscale Starbucks-type business focused on tea (something Chinese consumers really, really like). And to their credit, HeyTea appears to be mostly focusing not on digital (or financial engineering) but on product development and continually thrilling their […]
So Luckin Coffee has gone public and there are big questions about their revenue growth vs. operating losses. They are building an F&B business fast and aggressively against still unclear demand. But HeyTea is the Starbucks challenger I am keeping an eye on. They have long been referred to as the “Starbucks of tea”. And […]