Love Affairs in Melbourne-Chapter 333 - 328 Not So Easy (2)

July 16, 2015, arrived as expected.

Yan Yan had some doubts about launching shoes under his trendy brand.

But after yesterday’s "Evil Spirit Incident," Yan Yan realized his worries were superfluous.

It was certain that Y·Y’s shoe launch would be successful; the extent of that success would depend on the sales data collected from different locations at the end of the day.

The first minute after Y·Y shoes hit the shelves, all the limited editions were sold out.

To minimize chaos at the event, limited edition purchases were all handled uniformly by the fan club.

After registering their sizes, fans pre-paid the fan club managers responsible for buying the limited editions.

Besides managing their store-specific duties, each store’s fan club also communicated with others.

If a store had unsold limited edition shoes in particularly large or small sizes, that information would be shared on a nationwide fan club forum to see if anyone wanted to reserve those sizes.

Y·Y’s creative team had already made many contingency plans and prepared as meticulously as possible.

Yan Yan had considered every detail, and had handled yesterday’s crisis very promptly.

Together with the fan club’s considerate arrangements for details.

The first day of Y·Y’s shoe launch was unprecedentedly successful.

The Insensitive Shoes designed by Yan Yan for Y·Y were not cheap.

The red limited edition was priced at 599 dollars, and the regular version cost 299 US dollars.

While there was still some gap from the Yan siblings’ ambition to sell Chinese-made shoes for over 1,000 dollars,

these were sneakers, not crocodile skin shoes or the main shoe models at a fashion show.

Compared to regular sneakers, Y·Y’s Insensitive Shoes were exorbitantly priced.

They were significantly more expensive than brands like Nike, Adidas, and New Balance.

Normally, a new brand couldn’t sell shoes at such a high price.

Y·Y’s Insensitive Shoes were first introduced at Paris’s Haute Couture fashion week, and the initial customers were all fixed clients of Haute Couture.

Such a debut naturally influenced people’s initial perceptions of the shoes.

When Y·Y finally announced the pricing for their Insensitive Shoes, it was much more affordable than the industry and fans had anticipated.

Yan Yan wasn’t planning to pass all the costs of patents and production lines onto the buyers of Y·Y shoes.

After all, Yan Yan intended to continue selling materials and production lines in the future.

Revenue from materials was the major future income.

Plus, even though the pricing was set at a "conservative" rate.

Including the store in Rockefeller Center, thirty-seven stores sold twenty pairs of limited editions each, bringing in over 400,000 dollars.

Along with an average of 266 non-limited edition black and white shoes sold per store led to a total revenue of nearly three million.

Together, the first day of Y·Y’s shoe launch generated almost 3.4 million dollars in revenue.

This figure, compiled by Ye Mo, far exceeded Yan Yan’s expectations.

At this rate, even if relying only on selling shoes, it wouldn’t be long before Yan Yan could recoup the investments.

Future regular operations and new releases certainly won’t have such explosive starts.

Still, the popularity accumulated over time for Y·Y meant that the future performance is unlikely to be poor for the foreseeable future.

The prices of Y·Y shoes remained the same, but on the launch day, besides the limited editions coming with specific shoe faces, every pair of shoes, limited or not, also came with a choice of three free shoe faces.

If customers wanted to buy shoe faces later, it wouldn’t be too expensive—just 19.99 dollars each.

Except for a few "wealthy" fans chasing various colors of limited-edition Y·Y shoes,

most fans’ first dream was just to own a pair of Y·Y shoes.

Since many fans couldn’t afford to buy shoes without blinking, they would likely take great care of their Y·Y shoes.

That way, when a "new style" they liked appeared, they would only need to buy the shoe faces.

The larger the volume, the cheaper it needs to be—19.99 dollars was the highest price for a shoe face that Yan Yan felt acceptable.

After Y·Y shoes were launched, many companies became interested in the new patent material from Stanford that Yan Yan used.

Companies wanting a license for this patent swiftly began making moves after seeing Y·Y’s sales on the first day.

During the marketing phase, Yan Yan and Yan Ling had emphasized in multiple interviews the material newly developed by Stanford’s material lab.

These companies, aiming to capitalize on the new material, naturally approached Stanford’s material lab.

When they discovered that Y·Y’s creative director, a young lady, had early on secured the patent and usage rights for this material, they were amazed at her foresight.

Like the major sneaker and sportswear conglomerates they represented, they had only wanted licensing rights.

Y·Y’s creative director, on behalf of herself, had already spent tens of millions of dollars six months ago to purchase a patent material that had never been market-tested.

Industry insiders who hadn’t been optimistic about Y·Y’s brand longevity—believing its success was solely from marketing and hype,

In the United States, too many overnight internet-famous brands existed solely to secure venture capital funding,

often disappearing without a trace afterward.

Only when industry insiders discovered that Yan Yan had purchased the new material patent did they recognize the brand’s distinctive "ambition."

The plan was for Yan Yan to hold onto the patent herself for a couple of years first.

But on the very day Y·Y launched its shoes, over a dozen companies approached her wanting licensing rights for the patent material.

Their responsiveness exceeded Yan Yan’s earlier expectations.

The material used by Yan Yan was bringing wide public attention with the official launch of Y·Y shoes.

Recently, Y·Y had sparked an immense buzz online.

The new material also reached unprecedented levels of attention.

"Material" isn’t normally a leading role in the fashion industry,

yet the material used in Y·Y’s Insensitive Shoes received important media coverage and the most thorough interpretation.