Cafes are too noisy, private clubs are too expensive, shared tea rooms are too cold: Chalandi taps into the 21.8 billion yuan third space market with its "light business small private rooms".
Since Starbucks entered China, the concept of the "third place" has been widely known. Precisely because it is so well-known, the Starbucks-style third place seems to have become an unshakable standard model.
In fact, looking back at Chinese history, tea houses, tea shops, and teahouses based on tea drinking have long been the "third place" ubiquitous for ordinary Chinese people. Starbucks simply replaced tea with coffee, and changed the space layout and decoration tone to Western aesthetics. In the past few decades, during the historical period when the United States was the sole superpower, the cultural influence brought by the admiration for strong power was obviously irresistible.
But today, the era of unprecedented great changes in a century has officially started, and "Chinese culture trend is the top trend" has been demonstrated in many fields. In the third place market, the "Chinese-style third place" that conforms to Chinese people's aesthetics and inherent emotional preferences has also emerged as the times require. The booming development of new-style Chinese teahouses such as Teastone in the past two years has proved that tea consumption in China still has a broad and solid mass base. As for Teastone's unsatisfactory commercial performance, it is the inevitable result of the superposition of multiple factors.
The reason why Chalandi can enter the third place track is that we have spotted a more segmented demand: a real new-style Chinese teahouse that is quieter and more private than coffee shops, more service-oriented and more humanized than shared tea spaces, more relaxing and cheaper than traditional teahouses. It is a "teahouse" that focuses on the space experience, rather than a tea drink shop that focuses on tea beverages, nor a tea shop that focuses on selling tea leaves.
What Chalandi hopes to build is a "small teahouse" that integrates communities and office buildings. We expect this kind of small teahouse to re-become the teahouses that are commonplace for ordinary people as they have been for thousands of years in the past, a brand-new lifestyle-oriented store form, widely scattered in every corner of the city. Whenever people need a quiet, warm, relaxing and affordable place to chat and discuss business, they will come to the Chalandi "small teahouse".
Veteran chain industry practitioner enters segmented track, Chalandi reconstructs the light business third place
Xu Yong, a veteran who has worked in Suning Appliance Chain and Red Star Macalline Internet Group and has five consecutive entrepreneurial experiences, brings the brand-new Chalandi small teahouse chain project to cut into the segmented market of the light business third place. According to public data, the number of shared tea room stores across China reached 42,000 in 2024, with the market size exceeding 21.8 billion yuan, and the compound annual growth rate in the past three years exceeded 25%. The demand for business spaces is shifting from "occasional" to "rigid demand". Xu Yong found that there is an obvious gap in the current market supply: coffee shops are too noisy and lack privacy, traditional high-end clubs have excessively high access thresholds, shared tea rooms are mostly hardware-oriented and lack human warmth, and most traditional teahouses take tea sales as the core, with heavy decoration, high pricing and insufficient privacy. The light business crowd has never been able to find a "quiet and relaxing" space for chatting or negotiation, which has become the core opportunity for the birth of the Chalandi project.
From October 2023 to December 2024, Xu Yong's team has completed the market test of the 1.0 version of the project. Initially, they tried to benchmark the new-style Chinese teahouse community store model. After one year of implementation, the team found that the direction of benchmarking open coffee shops did not meet market demand, so they adjusted the positioning, targeted the pain point blind spots of traditional teahouses, and launched Chalandi small teahouses that focus on the light business third place. The 1.0 version has completed the verification of design tone and service mode, with user satisfaction close to 100%. In addition to the core founders Xu Yong, Ding Huaming and Zhu Weixing, the core team also includes a professional person in charge of space decoration implementation, as well as exclusive supply chain support that has been deeply engaged in tea sales for more than 20 years and owns its own tea factory, providing professional support for project implementation.
Different from most new-style Chinese teahouses on the market that benchmark Starbucks and focus on open leisure spaces, Chalandi's core differentiation is very clear: it is positioned to focus on quiet private rooms for 2 to 4 people for light business scenarios, puts forward the core logic of "light business third place", abandons the deliberately stacked cultural symbols and heavy decoration of traditional teahouses, and creates warm independent private rooms in the style of "leisure tea rooms", each of which is independently soundproofed and adopts a warm log style, taking tea as the product carrier rather than the core profit source. Innovations have also been made at the service level: the complex ritual settings of traditional teahouses are abandoned, and 500ml extra-large cups are launched by referring to coffee drinking habits to meet the convenience of casual drinking.
The project adopts a small store model, with the single store area strictly controlled within 60 square meters, divided into 6 small private rooms for 2 to 4 people. The startup capital for a single store is about 340,000 yuan. According to current calculations, the monthly revenue of a single store is about 84,200 yuan, the monthly profit is close to 30,000 yuan, the operating profit margin is about 35%, and the payback period is controlled within 11 to 12 months. The model with small investment and low risk meets the needs of chain replication. At the site selection level, Chalandi anchors the "combined area of business communities and residential areas", requiring that the 500-meter range of the store covers both the office building enterprise cluster and high-quality residential communities, taking into account the needs of 60% core business customers and 40% high-quality community social customers. The project first chooses to start in Guangzhou, relying on the local mature consumer mindset of "discussing business over tea" to reduce education costs, and then expand to high average customer order markets such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. At the customer acquisition level, a three-wheel drive model of word-of-mouth fission, content marketing and local life services is adopted. Limited-time experience coupons are launched relying on Meituan and Dianping, and "leisure tea room" scenario content is output on Xiaohongshu and Douyin, to achieve low-budget customer acquisition through stored value fission of old customers and cross-industry alliances.
The current shared tea room track has been verified by the market. The demand for friends to find a quiet place to chat, or to find a private place to discuss matters with customers, has been proved to be real. The growth rate of the shared tea room industry has exceeded that of traditional coffee shops. Chalandi fills the gap in the middle track of "light business, humanized, high cost-effective", with broad potential market space. In view of the core uncertainties in the project promotion, Chalandi has formulated a clear risk hedging strategy. This time, it launches a 1 million yuan angel round of financing, releasing 15% of the shares, and all the funds will be used for the model verification of the first 2 model stores, of which 68% will be used for the preparation and construction of the two model stores, and the rest of the funds will be used for brand digital construction, core team building and operation reserve. Appropriate site selection has been locked at present, and decoration and operation can be started as soon as the funds are in place. According to the team's plan, the project will complete the model verification of 2 stores in the first year, ensuring that the payback period is controlled within 12 to 14 months. In the second year, it will intensively replicate 10 to 15 stores in the core areas of Guangzhou, precipitate standardized operation SOP and membership system, and expand to 30 to 40 stores in the third year, gradually expanding across cities to core cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. The long-term goal is to become the leading brand in the small teahouse light business track. Relying on the chain industry resources accumulated by Xu Yong in the past, franchise cooperation will be opened later to rapidly expand the market scale.
Mr. Lin, an old customer of the 1.0 version community store, said, "Chalandi's log-style decoration is very warm. The tea made by the professional tea brewer is totally different, and the way of serving tea is very innovative. I come here very often. The only pity is that there are no private rooms. My company is also nearby, so if there are private rooms, I will definitely bring my clients here to discuss business."
As a serial entrepreneur, Xu Yong said that more than 20 years of experience in the chain industry and entrepreneurship have made him understand that the small model verification of the blank segmented track is the premise of large-scale development. This financing is to make the site selection logic and single store model solid, and lay a solid foundation for subsequent chain replication. "We will not be Internet-famous stores that pursue quick money, but long-term brands that truly meet the needs of the light business crowd." At present, information such as the project's financing round and investors has not been disclosed, and the team is pushing forward financing docking, planning to complete the implementation of the model stores as soon as possible.