What the chain of coffee shops can learn from the Tea Yan Yue Se opening

Tea Yan Yue Se opened its first Nanjing store and shut it the same day. Crowds queued from 4:30 a.m., tickets sold out five minutes before the nine o'clock opening, and scalpers openly resold cups at 200 yuan, forcing the Xinjiekou branch to close while the Jiangning Jingfeng store stayed open. Regulators said proxy buying is illegal.

The brand plans five Nanjing stores. Its path from Changsha to Shenzhen mirrors the wider chain of coffee shops and tea brands balancing quality control, supply chains, and consumer hype after industry-wide price cuts. The history of the coffee shop industry shows that opening-day chaos can lift awareness but also invites scrutiny over fairness and access.

On the day its first Nanjing store opened, Tea Beauty (Chayan Yuese) shot to the top of trending searches because of the sheer number of people queuing and scalpers driving the price up to 200 yuan a cup, forcing the Xinjiekou store to close while the Jiangning Jingfeng store stayed open. The brand revealed that it plans to open five stores in Nanjing in the future, while market regulators made clear that scalper proxy-buying is illegal. This article reviews Tea Beauty's expansion trajectory in cities such as Changsha and Shenzhen, compares it with the development path of similar brands like Nayuki, and explores the balancing act facing internet-famous tea drinks among quality control, supply chains and consumer rationality.

After a round of collective price adjustments across the new-style tea drink industry, milk tea priced at half a hundred yuan is no longer common. Yet this morning's opening of the Tea Beauty Nanjing store brought phenomena such as scalpers charging 200 yuan a cup for reservation-based proxy purchases and customers queuing in the early hours back to the surface, and related topics quickly climbed onto Weibo's trending list.

According to media reports, well before dawn, when the store had not yet opened its doors to customers, a large crowd of waiting consumers had already gathered outside, among them people who had arrived as early as 4:30 in the morning. Searching Xiaohongshu for notes related to Tea Beauty Nanjing, a blogger posted live photos of the area around the Xinjiekou store at 8:32 a.m., and reminded office workers in nearby buildings that some entrances and exits had been closed and they needed to plan their routes in advance.

Regarding the long queues on the opening day of the Tea Beauty Nanjing store, many netizens expressed their views.

Reports from Yangzi Evening News show that five minutes before Tea Beauty officially opened at nine o'clock, sold-out notices were successively posted at the various entrances. Because it was declared sold out before the doors even opened, customers who had failed to get into the queue became dissatisfied, and there was even a scuffle on site over a war of words. What's more, after the sold-out notice was posted, scalpers openly hawked Tea Beauty milk tea on the spot, claiming it was 200 yuan a cup and could be taken away upon payment.

A person with knowledge of the matter revealed that the Xinjiekou Tea Beauty store sold out and closed its entrances not because the store had insufficient stock, but in fact because the on-site order had spiraled out of control and drew complaints from the public.

In addition, proxy-buying and queue-sitting services for Nanjing Tea Beauty sprang up on some trading platforms, with asking prices ranging from 10 yuan to 200 yuan. The Nanjing Market Supervision Administration responded that scalper proxy-buying is illegal and that people who encounter such situations can call 110 to report it. Staff at Tea Beauty also said they do not recommend consumers buy from scalpers and that they can wait patiently, as five stores will be opened in Nanjing in the future.

Nanjing's highest temperature on August 18 reached 38 degrees Celsius. After milk tea is made, the longer it sits in a high-temperature environment, the easier it is for bacteria to breed, so it is not advisable to buy high-priced second-hand milk tea from scalpers.

Today, two Tea Beauty stores in Nanjing opened at the same time. The Xinjiekou store suspended business because of the excessive crowds queuing, while the Jiangning Jingfeng store maintained normal operations. Even by noon, consumers' enthusiasm for queuing had not diminished, and many people persisted in waiting under the scorching heat. Jiangning Police Online dispatched officers at midday to help the mall maintain order and posted a police reminder on Weibo, sincerely advising citizens not to go and queue that day, saying "the water you drink while queuing is enough to buy many cups of drinks."

In response to the phenomenon of reservation-based proxy purchases of Nanjing Tea Beauty at 200 yuan a cup, People's Daily Online published a commentary pointing out that milk tea is ultimately just a drink and should not be overly "deified." With brand promotion everywhere and social media inducements omnipresent, it is indeed not easy for consumers to keep a tight hold on their wallets. But a proxy-buying fee of up to 200 yuan for a cup of milk tea, with scalpers also involved in reselling, is absurd no matter how you look at it. In recent years, the scene of long queues in front of internet-famous brands has become commonplace, and the feeling afterward that "it was nothing special" has also been experienced many times. In the face of internet-famous brands, consumers should stay rational and "act according to their means," so as not to be led by the nose by merchants and scalpers.

On the other hand, as early as April 2021, that Hunan Changsha tea drink brand that consumers nationwide had always kept in mind—Tea Beauty—finally stepped out of Hunan Province and entered Guangdong Province, officially opening at Shenzhen Wenheyou on April 2. This surprised many Guangdong consumers, who even made special trips to Shenzhen to check in.

The Tea Beauty Shenzhen Wenheyou store had been open for only three days, yet its popularity could still be felt from Weibo comments. Some netizens commented that you could get a drink after queuing for an hour; others complained that they had queued for three hours and still hadn't gotten one.

Everyone surely knows how strong Tea Beauty's appeal is. In mid-July, a topic appeared on Weibo's trending list: "Tea Beauty Changsha proxy purchases to Hangzhou triple in price." A cup of overnight Tea Beauty was hyped to 40 yuan, with the price rising three times within 11 days. In the end, Tea Beauty stated on Weibo that if a purchase was verified to be a proxy purchase, it would refuse the order. At the end of July, there was also news that "two confirmed cases in Beijing bought Tea Beauty in Changsha," as the two people wanted to drink a cup of Tea Beauty even as they were leaving Changsha.

The two offline stores Tea Beauty opened in Shenzhen were originally positioned as pop-up stores, initially planned to return to their home base of Changsha, Hunan, in July, but on June 4 it was decided to extend them to September 15.

Then, at around 11:45 p.m. on September 2, "Shenzhen Tea Beauty to withdraw" climbed to third place on Weibo's trending list.

Now that Tea Beauty has withdrawn from Shenzhen, some people, without distinguishing right from wrong and without understanding the concept of a pop-up store, accuse it of hunger marketing.

Tea Beauty founder Lü Liang once said at the FBIF2020 Food & Beverage Innovation Forum, "Opening a store in a city requires forming a relationship with a fixed group of people, so we place great importance on whether this cup of tea can get customers to repurchase." But after going out, the difficulty of managing quality control, organizational capacity and the supply chain increases. Lü Liang worried about this, saying, "It's not that we don't want to, but that if we go out, we really will die."

In sharp contrast stands Nayuki, which secured financing, spread offline stores across first- and second-tier cities nationwide, and even listed in Hong Kong to become the first tea drink stock. Yet it has repeatedly been hit by food safety problems, the most recent being the Nayuki food safety incident on August 2, when Xinhua reported that multiple stores in Beijing had a series of problems including dirty and chaotic food processing sanitation environments, spoiled food ingredients, and altered labels.

So Tea Beauty founder Lü Liang's worries are not unreasonable.

As for the Shenzhen Wenheyou where Tea Beauty opened this time, according to Baidu Baike, the brand is dedicated to the study of traditional folk dining culture, excavating regional folk snacks and combining them with trendy culture to form the "Wenheyou dining model." From photos of Wenheyou in Changsha, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, one can see that its characteristic is "nostalgia."

The interior is filled with the feel of the street alleys of the 1980s, even somewhat resembling scenes from last century's Hong Kong films, and the merchants stationed inside are all well-known old brands. Take Guangzhou's Super Wenheyou as an example: it originally hosted representative brands such as Grandma's Beef Offal and Shawan Milk, but its value for money is far removed from the food shops in the truly old districts. There is even Changsha's signature specialty dish, crayfish, appearing in a place that shows off Guangzhou's regional characteristics.

Money from "nostalgia" is really easy to make, but is this a long-term strategy? Of course not! Less than three months after opening, business at Guangzhou's Wenheyou declined severely, and many local food and beverage merchants withdrew. Isn't this high entry, low exit? If you want "nostalgia," Dongshankou, Changshou Road and Ximenkou can satisfy you immediately; there are buildings with more than a hundred years of history, and which villa or arcade house there isn't better looking than those inside Wenheyou whose age can be counted on one hand?

With Tea Beauty about to withdraw from Shenzhen, shall we all make a date for Changsha's Tea Beauty?

Image source: Internet

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.