How Long Does It Take for a Brand with Almost No Private Traffic Foundation to Grow Private Domain Sales from 1 Million to Over 50x and Become Category Leader?
The Answer: 3 Years.
This is a real case study from the Jeling platform, featuring Taranis, the #1 brand in the private domain for infant and toddler walking shoes.
During a single brand event on September 25th, Taranis achieved a record-breaking first-day sales figure of 51.2 million RMB, setting a new benchmark for single-brand, single-day sales in the private domain.
Through conversations with Hu Xiaofang, Head of New Retail at Taranis, and Canghai, VP of Supply Chain at Jeling, we delve into the mechanics of this exhilarating “24-Hour Frenzy.”
The 3-Year, 50x Growth Journey to #1 in Infant Walking Shoes
Founded in 2011, Taranis grew rapidly by focusing on the vertical children’s footwear category and developing professional products tailored to the foot shapes of Chinese children. It evolved into a comprehensive children’s shoe brand covering ages 0-18, all sizes, and various scenarios.
Before building its private domain presence, Taranis had already established a channel matrix including e-commerce and physical stores nationwide, investing tens of millions in brand promotion and image upgrades. By 2016, Hu Xiaofang believed the time was right for Taranis to build private domain channels. Their confidence in Jeling led Taranis to become one of the platform’s first flagship brands.
From the brand’s perspective, Jeling solved two critical challenges:
First, Customer Reach. Jeling’s “near-field” expertise helped solve the “last mile” problem crucial for sales. While Taranis’s store customers were concentrated in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai region and key first- and second-tier cities like Beijing, Wuhan, Shenyang, Chengdu, and Guangzhou, Jeling’s reach is nationwide—top regions being Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangsu, Sichuan, and Zhejiang—creating both overlap and valuable complementarity with Taranis’s existing customer base.
Jeling’s user base is highly aligned: over 80% are female, with the 30-40 age group (45%) being the core, followed by 20-30 (27%) and 40-50 (22%)—precisely the primary purchasers for children’s shoes. Partnering with Jeling gave Taranis precise access to a massive private domain user base nationwide, especially in previously untapped lower-tier markets.
Second, Integrated Supply Chain Services. Jeling offers end-to-end supply chain solutions. Brands can essentially “plug and play,” avoiding the heavy lift of building a private domain from scratch. They gain access to精细化 custom services encompassing marketing planning, traceability events, and lead generation solutions, resulting in significantly lower comprehensive operating costs on Jeling compared to other channels.
For this specific event, the trust built over years of cooperation meant Taranis entrusted Jeling with everything from initial benefit planning to execution details. The brand side focused solely on backend inventory management and logistics fulfillment. “Our collaboration with the Jeling team is excellent, built on mutual recognition and respect. That’s why we chose Jeling as the launch platform for this event,” Hu Xiaofang stated.
Jeling now accounts for approximately 50% of Taranis’s cooperative private domain channels, making it the brand’s largest private domain partner. In just three years, both parties have witnessed each other’s rapid growth:
2021: Taranis first reached 1 million RMB in private domain sales.
2022: Sales soared to over 20 million RMB, a twenty-fold increase, with a single campaign breaking 8 million RMB.
April 2023: A single campaign surpassed 20 million RMB in sales.
September 25, 2024: Taranis achieved a breakthrough, recording 51.2 million RMB in first-day sales.
This 50x growth in three years solidified Taranis’s confidence in the partnership. Hu Xiaofang has set the target for the next single event: 80 million RMB.
Deep Dive: The Meticulously Planned “24-Hour Frenzy”
Planned since late 2023 and finalized in June 2024, the intensive preparation for this Taranis event spanned nearly three months.
From the outset, Jeling and Taranis set an ambitious sales target of 50 million RMB, nearly triple the previous peak. This was followed by dozens of rounds of close communication and deployment.
Canghai explained the planning focused on: effectively communicating brand value to Key Opinion Consumers (KOCs) and customers; attracting key KOCs for early warm-up mobilization and product previews; and building momentum among fans to secure pre-orders, ensuring substantial pent-up demand before the sale went live.
Key success factors included:
- Precise Persona-Product Matching: Jeling’s proprietary SCRM system tagged and categorized all KOCs for segmented community operations. This allowed Taranis to identify and match with the most relevant users early in the planning stage and co-create activities with representative KOCs.
- Multi-dimensional Deep Engagement: A mix of strategies was employed: sending samples for trials, offline salon presentations in key cities, and community check-in shares by existing users, achieving layered deep seeding.
- Advanced Demand Lock-in: Community dissemination helped KOCs identify and lock in precise potential customers early, collecting advance orders. This allowed the brand to manage inventory more effectively.
After thorough preparation, Taranis was fully poised for its “highlight moment” on September 24-25.
Sept 24: The Traceability Event
Jeling developed primary and alternative plans for the Taranis brand traceability event. The execution not only followed the optimal primary plan but also featured two standout elements:
The Child Model Fashion Show. Moving beyond simple internal displays, the event featured a professionally staged fashion show with venue, backdrop, and live child model presentations. When toddlers (~3 years), older children (~6 years), and young teenagers (12+), dressed in stylish outfits, walked confidently, KOCs immediately started recording, generating a wealth of high-quality content that sparked intense interaction and sharing.
Expert Endorsement. Representatives from global testing service provider Bureau Veritas and AI gait analysis company Chuanggan Technology attended, providing professional endorsement regarding product quality and stability technology, giving KOCs and consumers deeper insight into the brand’s strengths.
The fashion show and expert endorsement worked synergistically, from surface appeal to core substance, resulting in pre-sales add-to-carts exceeding 100 million RMB before the official launch, laying a solid foundation for conversion.
Sept 25: Launch Day
The launch on September 25 was structured in four phases. Canghai explained that staggering the launch of different product types while rhythmically mobilizing traffic ensured capturing user attention during each peak traffic period.
The Midnight Launch (00:00) was crucial for early momentum. Hu Xiaofang deployed Taranis’s ace product—the European Good Design Gold Award-winning “Ideal Series”—with its most aggressive pricing: “a price we haven’t offered for a very long time.”
This super event, specially priced for Jeling, proved its worth: within just over ten minutes, 80,000-90,000 orders were placed, far exceeding Taranis’s ERP peak capacity of 40,000-50,000 orders. The Ideal Series ranked in the TOP 5 for the entire event, with one single style selling over 7,000 pairs.
8:00 AM, 2:00 PM, and 8:00 PM served as key inflection points for releasing additional inventory, boosting sharing, and sustaining sales momentum. Ensuring supply was critical. To handle Jeling’s continuous traffic flow, Hu Xiaofang mobilized the company’s entire product resources, “essentially pulling inventory allocated for Douyin and Tmall.” Jeling leveraged its digital capabilities to make supply precise and controllable while ensuring availability.
When pre-sales add-to-carts exceeded 100 million RMB during the launch, Jeling’s backend already displayed structural data like top-selling styles and their price bands. Jeling’s Business Development team promptly shared this data with the brand, enabling swift risk alerts and contingency planning for post-sales.
Anticipating that sizing would be the primary post-sale issue, Jeling first worked with Taranis to standardize size charts across channels, then made real-time filtering and adjustments based on live demand.
Jeling’s robust digital capability was also evident in handling technical issues. Hu Xiaofang noted that shortly after launch, overwhelming traffic caused delays in order transmission back to Taranis’s ERP. “The shipping system lagged; actual sales were higher than what the system showed. We detected this issue about half an hour after launch.” Facing this, Jeling’s technical and business management teams worked onsite to assist with inventory adjustments and system fixes. “By morning, the issue was resolved through our joint efforts,” Hu Xiaofang said.
51.2 million RMB – Jeling delivered on the sales target promise. But Taranis’s gains from the “24-hour frenzy” extended far beyond that figure.
“Working with Jeling, private domain KOCs have progressed from knowing and understanding us to recognizing, liking, and actively recommending us. Customer recognition for Taranis has significantly increased,” Hu Xiaofang shared. “This year, so many people signed up for our traceability event that we unfortunately had to turn many away.”
Ongoing Channel Upgrade: Co-creating, Co-prospering, and Growing with Brands
A quality channel can “sell 1 product to 1,000 people.” A quality private domain can do more—it can even “sell 1,000 products to 1 person.” This is achieved through the trinity of brand, product, and service within the private domain.
Especially amidst rising customer acquisition costs and difficulty in public domains, low-cost, high-stickiness private traffic is becoming a key growth driver.
Canghai pointed out that in this private domain growth channel, Jeling, as a leader, holds irreplaceable advantages in sectors like apparel and footwear:
- Powerful KOC Network: Jeling focuses on providing integrated supply chain services for professional, sales-driven KOCs aged 25-55. Its users inherently possess stronger selling attributes and capabilities.
- Merchandising DNA: Retail awareness and product expertise are core to Jeling’s supply chain. “We don’t operate on a public domain traffic-selling logic. Jeling’s account managers and merchants easlier reach consensus on the product level.”
- High Efficiency & Conversion: The combination of deep community seeding/mobilization + a flash sale model ensures stronger burst performance for brands, with delivery efficiency and conversion rates far exceeding those of public domain platforms.
As mentioned initially, achieving these outcomes requires minimal effort and cost from merchants.
“Users in the maternal & child category will demand richer, higher-quality products from Jeling, meaning we have more work to do in strengthening private domain channel construction and operation,” Canghai stated, outlining plans for the continuous evolution of Jeling’s supply chain:
Deeper Collaboration: Plan to further deepen supply chain cooperation with brands, such as joint development of exclusive new products and co-marketing. Continue expanding supply chain resources to introduce more high-quality brands and products.
Model Innovation: Continuously explore and innovate supply chain models, like reverse customization (C2M), to meet personalized, customized consumer demand. Strengthen collaboration with upstream and downstream partners to build a highly efficient, synergistic supply chain ecosystem.
Tech-Enabled Optimization: Leverage advanced technologies like AI and big data to optimize supply chain management, improving efficiency in selection, procurement, warehousing, and logistics, further reducing operating costs, and increasing shipment speed and conversion rates.
Diversified Channels: Provide brands with more diversified marketing and sales channels.
This aligns with Taranis’s expectations for Jeling. “We hope to leverage Jeling’s private traffic advantage to achieve more brand exposure that better matches our brand positioning, continuously enhance brand recognition and customer approval, and accelerate the journey from seeding to transaction,” Hu Xiaofang noted.
The future looks promising.
Having achieved 50x growth in 3 years, Taranis will continue deepening its national footprint. Jeling aims to partner with more excellent maternal & child brands, becoming their essential private domain channel partner.
Anticipating mutual growth is the greatest gift that such a partnership can bring.
