What does the Good Me merch shortage say about the coffee shop industry?

Good Me's collaboration with the game Honkai: Star Rail drew a queue of more than 1.2 million people in its official mini-program on the first day, and stores in many cities sold out within about three hours. Limited items such as NFC chip badges, acrylic standees and translucent cards drove demand, while high-priced full sets appeared on second-hand platforms.

The brand said it had prepared its largest stock in history, yet the run still fell short, and many stores said they would not restock, ending the event early. The mismatch between traffic and supply is a common lesson in the history of coffee shop industry collaboration marketing, where limited merchandise can lift attention but also leave loyal customers frustrated.

The collaboration between Good Me and "Honkai: Star Rail" was supposed to be a fan carnival, but it turned into a reputational crisis due to severe merchandise shortages. On the first day of the event, the official mini-program queue exceeded 1.2 million people, stores in many locations sold out within 3 hours, yet high-priced full sets of merchandise appeared on second-hand platforms. Although the brand claimed to have prepared the "largest stock in history," compared to the previous "Love and Deepspace" collaboration whose stock was only one-third of this one, it clearly underestimated players' purchasing power. What made fans even more dissatisfied was that many stores explicitly stated they would not restock, causing the collaboration to end prematurely. This imbalance between traffic and reputation has sounded an alarm for collaboration marketing in the coffee and tea beverage industry.

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Recently, Good Me teamed up with the popular game "Honkai: Star Rail" to launch a collaboration event. The merchandise buying frenzy once pushed the brand to the top of trending searches, but widespread shortages of collaboration products also exposed many operational shortcomings, sparking intense discussion among fans.

It is reported that this collaboration centered on the game characters "Blade" and "Kafka," launching two limited-edition drinks. Consumers who purchased designated sets could receive exquisite merchandise such as NFC chip badges, acrylic standees, and translucent cards. Among them, the badges featured an interactive easter egg that, when tapped with a phone, played character voice lines, precisely catering to players' preferences and becoming a key driver of the order surge.

However, when many game fans, full of love for the two characters, opened the Good Me official WeChat mini-program at 10 AM on April 18, what greeted them was not milk tea or merchandise, but a continuously climbing queue number—"Over 1 million people waiting ahead," "1.07 million," "1.2 million"...

For a time, social media was flooded with screenshots of Good Me's ordering page failing to load or queue numbers exceeding one million. According to fan feedback, the peak concurrent online user count once exceeded 1.21 million. The mini-program crashed due to excessive instantaneous traffic, and many orders were forcibly exited due to system delays, requiring users to re-queue, leaving them saying "speechless."

Although Good Me officially responded quickly after the event problems arose, claiming emergency capacity expansion had been done and orders could be placed normally, this statement did not quell users' dissatisfaction.

What was even more unexpected was that while there were impossibly long online queues on one side, offline stores in multiple cities reported "collaboration sets sold out" on the other, especially the limited-edition merchandise, which vanished almost instantly. Some players said that after queuing for hours, they went to pick up their orders at noon only to be told by staff that there was no stock, sending their blood pressure soaring.

Although Good Me claimed that the merchandise stock for this collaboration was the "largest in history," on the first day of the event, more than half of the 4,700 participating stores nationwide showed sold out within 3 hours of launch. Some southern cities even saw "zeroed out upon opening." Due to insufficient stock, some stores unilaterally canceled orders due to merchandise shortages, leading to the awkward situation of "drank the milk tea but got no merchandise."

Meanwhile, many fans discovered on second-hand platforms that the collaboration merchandise, which showed as out of stock at all major Good Me stores, appeared in the listings as brand-new full sets, priced at 80 to 298 yuan.

As posts calling for official restocking surged day after day, on April 20, the hashtag #GoodMeRestock pushed the brand onto Weibo's trending searches again, and the shortage issue of this collaboration set once again triggered widespread complaints from netizens.

Although Good Me claimed to have prepared inventory "far exceeding daily levels," people noticed that compared to previous similar collaboration events—for example, the stock for "Love and Deepspace" was a full 3.5 times that of this collaboration—the brand clearly underestimated the spending power of "Star Rail" players this time. Many netizens pointed out that Good Me's pre-event market research and inventory preparation were severely insufficient, which led to such a chaotic situation after launch.

What puzzled players even more was that after triggering a wave of "stockout fever," they expected Good Me merchants to strike while the iron was hot and urgently replenish materials, but unexpectedly, upon inquiry, they were told that many stores had no plans to restock in the future.

In this regard, some store owners revealed that the first batch of products was the company's standard allocation. Due to the small stock, it sold out early. For subsequent restocking, franchisees would need to pay out of their own pockets. For such unprofitable bills, most merchants obviously did not want to bear them. So, to further stir controversy, they would directly remove the relevant links with merchandise from the system, "forcing" the collaboration period to be shortened.

For game fans, once the merchandise sets were gone, it meant the collaboration was over. For Good Me, although this collaboration gained a lot of traffic, it also lost reputation due to various shortcomings.

Image source: Internet screenshots

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