German Luxury Brand MCM Opens Flagship Store on JD.com
by Xiaoqian Han
MCM, a German luxury brand, launched a flagship store on JD.com on March 2nd, offering a wide choice of trendy items such as bags, ready-to-wear, shoes, accessories, and fragrances.
The collection for the spring and summer of 2022 has also been launched in JD.com’s flagship store. With its romantic, charming, and vibrant colors, the München collection handbags, which are the featured bags this season, have attracted a sizeable group of customers.
MCM was founded in 1976 with the goal of creating leather accessories inspired by German culture. In order to attract worldwide Generation Z and millennial customers in the digital age, the brand mixes the innovative spirit of the times with German origins, focusing on functional and innovative design, and always pursuing cutting-edge technology and fashion style.
To date, JD has gathered more than 300 flagship stores of major fashion and lifestyle brands, including French fashion brand LANVIN and AMI PARIS, Japanese brand Yohji Yamamoto and BE@RBRICK, Italian brand MSGM and GOLDEN GOOSE, etc.
B-roll of JD’s Asia No.1 logistics park in Dongguan
The First Chinese Retailer Among World Top 10: JD.com
by Yuchuan Wang
According to the report “Global Powers of Retailing 2022” released by Deloitte in late February, JD.com was listed as one of the Top 10 retailers worldwide and the only Chinese company that made the list.
The ranking is based on the financial performance and operations for financial years ending within the 12 months from 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2021 (FY2020). With a revenue of over USD 94.4 billion, JD.com moved up four places to enter the Top 10.
Deloitte says that JD has achieved the second highest sales growth among the Top 10 companies, with a year-over-year FY2020 retail sales growth of 27.6%. The company also achieved highest five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR), 31.2%, in FY2015-2020.
The report highlighted that JD.com “delivers the majority of orders to customers through its own fulfillment infrastructure,” and the company is “exploring ways to make their supply chain operations greener.”
With over 550 million active customers, JD.com is setting the global standard for online shopping experiences, offering a vast selection of products, across every major category such as electronics, apparel and home furnishings, FMCG, fresh food, home appliances and more. Nowadays, over 90% of JD.com’s first party orders can be delivered within 24 hours thanks to the company’s nationwide logistics network.
Japanese Makeup Brand Shu Uemura Launches Flagship Store on JD.com
by Xiaoqian Han
Shu Uemura, a high-end beauty brand, opened its flagship store on JD.com on March 2nd, offering the brand’s luxury collection of cleansing oil, foundation, lipsticks, and others.
JD.com’s users can purchase a range of makeup removers on its flagship store, including amber skin-nourishing cleansing oil, grapefruit cleansing oil, green tea cleansing oil, etc., all of which are extracted from plants. Shu Uemura is a leader in the new beauty cosmetics trend, continually innovating and developing professional makeup suitable for Asian consumers.
In recent years, young users have become loyal fans of high-end makeup. Data shows that the number of JD.com’s annual active users reached 552 million by the end of September 2021, and the increase of JD.com’s users under the age of 25 is 2.5 times that of total users year-on-year, which means JD Beauty has catered to a huge number of young and high-potential users. This could be one of the reasons Shu Uemura chose JD Beauty to appeal to a younger demographic.
Furthermore, due to JD.com’s full-spectrum operating capabilities and high-quality after-sales service system, JD Beauty has also attracted Shu Uemura to open flagship stores on JD.com. To date, JD Beauty has brought several high-end beauty brands to JD.com, including YSL and LAB SERIES.
JD Auto and SINOTRUK VGV Launch “First Class for Pets”
by Xiaoqian Han
JD Auto and SINOTRUK VGV launched 3 tailor-made truck models on the live streaming on February 28. These models incorporate advanced car body structure, chassis technology, and interior craftsmanship design, and are created for enhanced living conditions. Among them, the VX7 model is specifically designed for pet owners.
“The car owners of Generation-Z have a more diverse life than ever before, which affects their choices in buying and driving cars,” said Haifeng Chen, vice president of JD’s auto business department. “The characteristic of personalization, diversification, and usefulness have all become new consumption features among Generation Z. Consumers born after 1995 and even 2000 have gradually become a “new force” of automobile consumption. And this is what drives JD Auto to cooperate with SINOTRUK VGV.”
The newly released SINOTRUK VGV VX7 is a collaboration between JD Auto, SINOTRUK VGV, and JD Pet, and is a co-branded version dubbed “First Class for Pets”. It is different from a traditional pickup truck, in which the cockpit and cargo area are separated. This new design offers a hatch in the back and converts the pickup into a utility van, which enables interaction between owners and pets at any time. In the exclusive cabin for pets, an electric panoramic sunroof can be opened to let pets bathe in sunlight and enjoy the scenery outside the vehicle.
“The first pet pickup truck model we rolled out today is an innovative exploration. We have crossover cooperation with JD Auto and JD Pet to achieve a seamless link between the manufacturing industry and the Internet,” added Yandong Guo, the general manager of SINOTRUK.
JD Auto’s business covers auto omnichannel supply chain services and B2B accessories supply chain services, which together form a one-stop model of car consumption. To date, notable auto brands Audi, BMW, Volvo, Buick, and Xpeng Motors have entered JD Auto. JD Auto has also cooperated with various auto brands in various modes including vehicle customization, new car promotion, the online appointment for a test drive, and offline sales conversion, providing full-spectrum support from pre-marketing to vehicle transactions.
JD’s Virtual Anchor Makes Livestream Debut for Beauty Brands
by Doris Liu
JD Beauty’s virtual anchor “Xiao Mei” made her livestream debut on the Super Category Day, February 28, during which more than 1,000 beauty products saw a year-on-year increase of over 100 percent.
Xiao Mei, which means “little beauty” in Chinese, provided a 24-hour live streaming service with professional knowledge and explanation in livestream studios of 21 cosmetic brands including Yves Saint Laurent (YSL), L’Oreal, OLAY and Kiehl’s, attracting more than one million viewers in total .
As a third-generation intelligent digital human, Xiao Mei’s facial features are synthesized by a neural network with hundreds of millions of parameters, and her lip movements can be precisely synchronized with her voice. During the livestream, every frame of the virtual anchor was generated by artificial intelligence (AI), and her voice sounded like a real person, offering online shoppers a more natural experience.
In terms of sales on the JD Beauty platform, high-end beauty brands showed a strong momentum of growth on the Super Category Day, with Lancome, L’Oreal, Estee Lauder, SK-II and OLAY ranking Top 5 in terms of turnover. Over 50 popular products exceeded RMB 100 million yuan in turnover in one single day.
By upgrading the livestream shopping experience through technological innovation, JD Beauty helps brands reduce the training, management and operation costs of human livestream anchors and to obtain continuous growth of the livestreaming scene, which also opens up new possibilities for the beauty industry.
JD Explore Academy Excels at World’s Top Robotic Arm Competition
by Yiming Yan
SAPIEN (SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment) ManiSkill (Manipulation Skill) Challenge 2021, the world’s top robotic arm competition, recently announced the results and final rankings, in which the team “Silver-Bullet-3D” from the Vision and Multimedia Lab of JD Explore Academy ranked the top two in all three tracks.
The ManiSkill challenge builds four tasks out of a large and diversified set of articulated objects in order to demonstrate the ability to employ artificial intelligence (AI) technology in real scenarios like robotic arm control.
Silver-Bullet-3D took first place in both the ‘No Interaction Track’ and the ‘No Restriction Track’ of the challenge. No interaction track requires the solution to only use the demonstration trajectories provided. In order to model the complex texture and structural information of the robotic arm and the manipulated object, the participating team proposed a solution based on imitation learning, which consists of two main modules, behavioral cloning with direct imitation behavior and offline augmented learning, as well as a transformer-based relational modeling network.
The no-restriction track allows participants to do whatever they wish, such as labeling new data, creating a new setting, and so on. In response, the team proposed a heuristic rule-based solution (HRM), which decomposes a complex operation task into a series of subtasks. The solution received first place in the official evaluation, with a margin of 23.8 percent over second place.
JD Explore Academy has been awarded 18 patents in the field of computer vision technology, and its core members have published 180 more papers at premier AI conferences. What’s more, JD Explore Academy won the Best Demonstration Award for its multimodal interaction digital human technology and the Best Open-Source Project Award for its cross-modal analysis technology at the 29th ACM International Conference on Multimedia.
The SAPIEN ManiSkill Challenge was organized by UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University at ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations) 2022, the world’s leading conference on machine learning. Thirty teams from globally renowned organizations and colleges participated in the event.