When Yoho! Met Dazed: How the New Media-Retail Supergroup Plans to Captivate China's Gen Z

Recasting new gen youth culture as a series of hybridised trans-global movements, not just an exportable Western phenomenon , today sees the official launch of a potentially ground-breaking new culture-commerce-events coalition: a marriage between ‘90s-born British group Dazed Media – the original window onto countercultural youth tribes – and hyper-influential, noughties-birthed Chinese streetwear empire Yoho!

Backing comes from C Ventures, a Hong-Kong-based venture capital fund with a stake in both.

Kicking off with the unveiling of the first issue of Dazed China, a bi-monthly print magazine, at the Yo’Hood annual lifestyle festival in Shanghai, it heralds, according to Yoho! founder and CEO Liang Chao (known informally as Mars) a non-traditional and “fully integrated” multi-media era of content plus commerce. It will also redefine new Chinese youth: “as creatively diverse as they are unified.”

THE ALLEGIANCE IN NUMBERS

Uniting an East-West smorgasbord of content across fashion and the arts, brand land and youth culture, and straddling physical retail with box-fresh e-media, in the very first instance it stands to intertwine Dazed’s 7 million strong audience (that’s all channels – unique monthly website users and social media followers) and a whopping 35 million Yoho! fans. There’s no shortage of ways to engage; the latter is a number comprised of Yoho’s vast array of platforms including its Yoho Boy! And Yoho Girl! print magazines (both selling way in excess of half a million copies per monthly issue); the Yohoboy.com and Yohogirls.com content-based e-platforms (boasting 7.8m and 7.36m daily page views respectively); and the over-arching Yoho! Now app that’s racked up 2.86m downloads to date.

There’s also the Yoho! Buy e-commerce site, which sells approximately 1000 fashion/streetwear brands from emerging indie labels to well-established stars to 12m ‘members’ – enough to generate 4bn annually in gross revenue and huge insights “into both consumption but also interests”.

The first concept store, an omni-channel flagship which the brand also refers to as an ‘experience centre’ was launched in 2017 in downtown Nanjing. Designed by acclaimed Japanese architects Wonderwall (see also the

Lexus
flagship in NY), it’s a model it hopes to replicate in every first and second tier city across China.

THE EXPERIENTIAL SPRINGBOARD

The flagship matters because physical, experiential connections are a key component in the ‘multi-media content matrix’ as the Yoho! team affectionately calls it; they’re a powerful springboard primed to trigger growth across any number of newly-minted media platforms and partnerships. For while Mars is emphatic that the Dazed x Yoho! partnership is “is no way a physically limited corporation,” and social media is undeniably a gigantic vertebra in the backbone of Chinese e-tail and media consumption, physical lifestyle festivals are booming.

LA-born US streetwear festival ComplexCon remains a core and lucrative forerunner (in 2018 it drew 35,000 visitors paying $90 for the privilege) while hot on its heels is Dubai’s most successful youth culture event, Sole DXB, which is caters to the population’s still-swelling ‘youth bulge’ (28% of the population is aged 15-29) via fertile fusions of sport, music and art and brands ranging from Farfetch and Dior to

Adidas
. US Gen-Z focused “

QVC
meets Comic-Con” app retail app NTWRK has also expressed a desire to shift from URL to IRL in the not-too-distant future with annual physical events that CEO Aaron Levant describes as, “like Instagram factories or selfie museums, but shoppable via e-commerce, of course.”

Now in its seventh year, Yo’Hood (chaired this time around by C Ventures founder Adrian Cheng) is an extensive festival of brands and artists reframing Chinese identity, crystallizing Mars’ belief, ‘that we’re a community for discussion and ideas, a platform for creative social growth. Since we started we’ve introduced brands and artists as a vehicle to nurture Chinese fashion culture. This year it’s shifted from three days to a whole week of activities throughout the city including more than 100 coffee shops, galleries and night clubs. We’re taking it back to the streets where it all started, allowing people to do what they love, getting involved where they can .”

Approximately 60k visitors are expected to attend the event under the creative direction of Dazed icon, its CEO and cofounder Jefferson Hack, with semi-surrealist set design steered by contemporary American artist Daniel Ashram whose work bridges art, architecture and performance. There will be a Dazed x A-Cold Wall (menswear) Factory experience for personalizing t-shirts and an area showcasing limited edition product collaborations between Dazed China and Craig Green, MM6 and Ambush, among others.

RAILING AGAINST COPYCAT CULTURE

Keen to expunge the stain of copycat culture Mars reveals they are already discussing creating a Yoho! like festival in the UK/Europe . “People see Chinese youth as deeply conservative, but they are now very creatively engaged with their own perspectives and interpretations on fashion and culture. We don’t want to be seen as a group that only imports or duplicates.”

WHY THIS TIME IT’S DIFFERENT

Notably, it’s not the first time a British style bible has set its sights on Asia: ID, which is owned by Vice Media, launched online in 2016 (accruing a healthy but barely comparable 1.3m followers on Weibo and 100k+ followers on WeChat), while Dazed itself initially attempted entry in 2016 via a deal with Huasheng Media. The difference this time around is perhaps the aforementioned integration and a more vociferously ambitious, if logistically complex, desire to scale up the potential revenue streams.

THE POWER IN TRANS-CULTURAL FANDOMS

According to Mars, new avenues for ‘the matrix’ may include assisting brands to produce their content – acting as an affiliated creative agency; communicating and potentially selling via China’s Key Opinion Influencers a.k.a. KOL’s (“We’re moving away from mass media towards influencers who have tens of millions of fans”); and having the newly swelled ranks of global networks of brands, many of which Dazed has spent decades nurturing relationships with, deliver exclusive content and product solely for its platforms.

The overlaps are rich, numerous and multi-appeal, as Dazed China’s four launch covers confirm; there’s Chinese singer-songwriter Leah Dou, Chinese actor Zhang Yu, Korean actor, creative director and gallerist Yoo Ah-In and British model and activist Adwoa Aboah: Mars summarizes: “I believe in Jefferson’s creativity. Dazed was always a brand we admired for its global view, its wider cultural lens. We think it can help us transform in terms of relationships, a.) with leading brands and b.) creativity. It’s the right time for East to meet West to come up with something new. We’re looking for the new and the unique.”

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