Case Study - UNIQLO's digitalization

During this year’s 11.11, UNIQLO has achieved several records - Ranking No. 1 in Women’s Wear, Men’s Wear and Underwear categories and the fastest store to reach RMB 1 billion GMV on Tmall. This is not a surprising result since UNIQLO has been No.1 in clothing category during Tmall’s 11.11 for 5 consecutive years.

How does UNIQLO become Top 1 facing so many challenges (not only from international brands like ZARA and H&M, but also from local Taobao sellers)? There are 2 important things that we can learn from UNIQLO.

1. O2O services UNIQLO provides “Buy online and pick up/exchange in store” service, which saves customers a lot of time that they don’t need to wait for another week to receive the parcel. The online and offline stores keep the same price and discounts, and share the same inventory and supply chain system, strongly supporting the brand.

2. Localized branding UNIQLO has been working with KOLs on multiple platforms, ranging from top ones to micro ones. On RED/Xiaohongshu, UNIQLO works with a large group of micro KOLs and invites them to go to the store and share fitting-room try-on - a typical RED style content super popular among female millennials. Providing different content on different platforms is what UNIQLO keeps doing.