Revelation of Crucco: Attitude is Far from Enough
Crucco, Chinese apparel vertical targeting at young Chinese who’re attached to fresh design and simple living attitude, was reportedly in talks with potential sell. The Beijing-based startup was founded by VANCL veteran Xu Xiaohui, former associate director of the latter.
Insider revealed that the company even didn’t have enough money to cover its normal expense and had to break with several suppliers and manufacturers. Though Crucco is trying to sell itself or seeking for new financing, currently no one is willing to take over the hot potato.
Why is so difficult for Crucco to weather the winter?
Attitude is far from enough
The core ideology of Crocco is providing casual clothes with comfort quality, simplicity and creativity in design and delicate details, targeting at youth working in cities. Crucco promotes an attitude of slow living and slow fashion, against the fast fashion led by its peers like VANCL. But actually, running the company by sheer attitude is insufficient to cultivate the stickiness of users. Its targeted user group doesn’t have strong spending power. Its attitude also means that the company is targeting at a niche market.
Insuffient Design Capability
Poor design capability is one of the biggest issues challenging the company. Since its inception, Crucco is in lack of a strong in-house design team. The situation was compounded by its weakness in supply-chain controlling, so the quality of the products couldn’t be guaranteed. The defect of design capability might be the fatal wound to it.
Crucco’s founder Xu Xiaohui once admitted that he was too much influenced by Vancl. Crucco should be ‘unique and artistic’ instead of ‘general and wide’ like Vancl. Every B2C site should have a clearer positioning in the market and differentiate themselves from others. Crucco is no exception. As a matter of fact, Crucco did quite well on that matter, but it failed to recognize from the beginning that it’s far from enough to count all your business on a fancy brand story, you still need to have operate the business like traditional apparel business to survive the market, everyone can tell great stories, while only few can live them.