Zhi Aijia Xiong Lin: Home decoration should not be a package.

A few years ago, entrepreneurs always pursued the trends.

Capital, technology, and people collaborated to enhance the power of the trends, but they were also concerned that once the wind weakened or ceased, they would fall. Therefore, the company's scaling speed, the market's life cycle, and people's actions became increasingly rapid, and the efficiency value was maximized, just to reach the shore as soon as possible before the wind stopped.

In the increasingly competitive home decoration field, the same holds true. Especially after 2021, when the industry became a low-temperature market, enterprises began to compete in products, prices, and human efficiency. The process tended to be extremely standardized, and designers and other service providers who needed to come up with creative ideas also became "tool people" who rapidly promoted solutions, and the products provided became increasingly "package-based".

During the process of decorating his own home, Xiong Lin, the Chairman of Ziroom Group and CEO of Zhiai Home, had an idea repeatedly: A home should not be like this.

Many people have spent a large sum of money to purchase a house, and they will spend most of their important life time in it. This space should have a design that makes the owner like it and even be proud of it, turning it into a unique living carrier. However, for home decoration enterprises, in order to obtain scale and profit, they often sacrifice the designers' and homeowners' love for the home...

Therefore, in 2022, Xiong Lin led the team to establish "Zhiai Home" and entered the home decoration market, focusing on "productized customized design and artistic intelligent whole-house decoration".

With more than five key words, it can be seen that Xiong Lin has very high requirements for the products of Zhiai Home, hoping to achieve both beauty and technology, functionality and experience. He even does not want to simply classify Zhiai Home as a home decoration industry, but rather as a disruptive super industrial product, similar to a classic car that changes life and triggers people's new love for life.

For this reason, in the two years since the establishment of Zhiai Home, he has not emphasized the development speed, has not pursued employees with efficiency, and has not even emphasized profits. The reason behind this can be explained by the founding inspiration of Zhiai Home and his own understanding of the home: "The home is everything."

01

Produce the Thickest Design Plan to Make the Home Not Like a "Set Meal"

What is the most common process for decorating a "home"?

Get the key to the house, walk into the store of the home decoration company, follow the designer's ideas, choose a package from the samples, and then replicate it in your own house. This is the decoration experience of most people.

The mainstream logic of the current home decoration industry is to "summarize" tens of thousands of families into several templates as much as possible, just like assembling building blocks, changing the positions of cabinets, beds and other furniture, and switching and combining a few color tones.

In order to improve efficiency, home decoration companies will calculate carefully and control the number of freely selectable parts within the same package. No matter how you want to change it, the designer will do exactly as you say, so that the matter of "decorating your home" can be completed quickly, and then the final payment can be made.

The unique family characteristics are disappearing from the inner space of the house.

Should a "home" really be like this? Why does the decoration process become very tiring, gradually consuming the longing and joy for the home?

In 2019, Xiong Lin began to decorate his own home. It was originally expected to be completed in one year, but due to the epidemic, the construction time was doubled. The designer was also able to get out of the previous rhythm of one order after another, and they had a lot of time to communicate repeatedly.

With the deepening of communication, Xiong Lin's decoration needs also began to increase and became clear and specific. He is an engineer and an enthusiast of intelligent products, so he hopes to use intelligence to make living simpler; the elderly in the family often come to live, and a space that meets the habits of the elderly and has a high degree of comfort is needed; he has many books and the need to work at home, so the atmosphere of reading and working should also be added to the home; there are also some small objects that enhance the beauty in the home, and the decoration design must be able to match their appearance... The designer also has more space to try and play, and the decoration process has become a re-creation of the home.

After the decoration was completed, he invited friends to his home. After the friends visited, they kept saying "Wow", and the most frequent sentiment was: In the era of package-based decoration, it turns out that so many unique "thoughts" can be made in the home.

Zhiai Home Product Style - Milan, meaning "Italian style"

Under the huge difference from the mainstream home decoration experience in the market, he once again examined the home decoration industry and found that this industry seems to have gone astray in recent years.

The current mainstream logic of the industry was born in the rapid development stage of the previous stage, pursuing the trends, rapidly scaling the company, maximizing the efficiency of employees, competing in prices, costs, and construction periods. The entire process is like a factory workshop: "1, 2, 3, 4, next set".

"A home should not be like this." Xiong Lin said, "When the process (of decorating my own home) was completed, I thought I should go and create a new business with my partners."

Therefore, in 2022, Zhiai Home was born, carrying the founder's idealized imagination of the home from the very beginning, "Hope it can reimagine the life of a family many years later towards the future, and carry the family's redesign of future life."

Xiong Lin's positioning for Zhiai Home is "Productized customized design, artistic intelligent whole-house decoration", which can be decomposed into: Whole-house decoration, Productization, Customized design, Art, Intelligence five key words.

• Whole-house decoration is a trend that is occurring in the home decoration industry. All decoration-related needs can be solved from one brand and one store, and all links can be completed without having to collect and connect from multiple platforms;
• Productization means that it has a mature product system, a complete and stable supply chain, and can deliver products with standardized quality;
• Customized design is an important feature that distinguishes Zhiai Home from most home decoration enterprises. It will give designers more time and space to communicate with the owner of the house from the existing subtle living needs to the possibilities of future life, dig out their potential needs, and produce a design plan that is several times thicker to make the home unique;
• "Art" represents the aesthetic sense, which is the visually comfortable side that a home should have;
• Intelligence provides more convenience, and it is also a lifestyle that can make people more "lazy", make the home smarter, and make the interaction between people and space stronger.

Meeting the above five requirements is a difficult process. Entering the home decoration field and starting a business again is very different from decorating one's own home. When it changes from a personal case to an enterprise operation mode, and puts the idealized thinking into the increasingly competitive real environment, it involves the entire reorganization of processes, models, systems, and even the company's orientation and values.

Zhiai Home Product Style - Chanson, meaning "French romance"

Unlike the "efficiency" pursued by traditional home decoration, Zhiai Home redistributes "energy" to different links of the home decoration process.

"We do not pursue signing the contract in a very fast way. We will have detailed communication in the design link and put 70%-90% of the work in the front", Xiong Lin explained that the home decoration process starts with understanding the other party's family. In the decoration process of Zhiai Home, the importance of the designer has been greatly enhanced, giving them double the time to communicate and explore the needs of customers. Sometimes, in order to make the design effect of a living room better, even up to 20 versions of the plan are produced.

The home after the decoration shows the possibility of uniqueness and carrying unique family memories, and the customer satisfaction will increase. Currently, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) of Zhiai Home after use is as high as more than 70%.

"Choose a direction to start a business and move forward together, it requires a long time", Xiong Lin said, "When we started to do (Zhiai Home), the core is actually to ask ourselves more, do I like this thing? Do I have enthusiasm?" Just like "Before we just started the rental business, I would be excited, happy, and fortunate because I rented a good house."

The original intention of starting a business is to solve the problems found in the market. Zhiai Home is the same.

Therefore, Xiong Lin said, "I don't want our team to care too much about what kind of company is our competitor", he wants to know who his customers are, whether they have some better ideas for their current and future homes?

02

No Switches in the Whole House, and the Home Can Also "Understand People"

It has been about 2 years since the establishment of Zhiai Home, and it has completed the customized design and whole-house decoration of more than 1000 families. People who choose Zhiai Home have some common characteristics: They not only have a deep love for the home and the space of the home, hoping that their home is unique, but also are more willing to use an open mind to try the life changes brought by technology and intelligence.

"Up to today, in the more than 1000 homes we have delivered, not a single one is not a whole-house intelligent home." Xiong Lin said that this is a very important insistence of Zhiai Home. "Intelligence" not only represents the Zhiai Home team's understanding of future trends, but also recommends the best systematic products they have experienced to users.

In a traditional home space, the owner must manually switch the modes of all items. Sometimes you must stop what you are doing now to adjust another thing. If intelligence can enter the home, just like new energy vehicles, making intelligence an "assistant", many instructions will naturally be simplified.

Xiong Lin used the actual needs of his own home as an example to demonstrate an intelligent scene: The temperature difference between morning and evening in Beijing is large. In the traditional way, the elderly will wake up from their sleep at night to turn on/off the air conditioner. After the intelligent system is involved, it can be set in advance according to the temperature that the elderly are accustomed to at different times.

Zhiai Home Z-Touch Intelligent Panel

The intelligent system can also undertake some other responsibilities. For example, Zhiai Home's Lingzhi Intelligent System can provide a whole-house solution in terms of safety, convenience, fun, and care. Just for safety, it can not only realize intelligent door lock security, but also monitor hidden dangers such as fire, water leakage, and gas leakage and actively alarm. The video monitoring mode is equivalent to having an extra "security guard". It can even remind the elderly to take medicine and rest according to the situation of the elderly.

If a house has an intelligent brain and nervous system, it can give an experience different from the traditional space. Therefore, Zhiai Home takes intelligence as a basic configuration of its home decoration business.

Behind the Lingzhi Intelligent System of Zhiai Home, there is a specially established R & D team dedicated to the research and development in the field of smart home. This team has a history earlier than Zhiai Home, has been for ten years, has accumulated the usage experience of millions of family users, and after continuous iteration and upgrade, and landing verification, the "Lingzhi Intelligent Platform" used by Zhiai Home today was finally born.

Some Application Scenarios of Zhiai Home Lingzhi Intelligence

Compared with the intelligent module that is independent of the home decoration, Lingzhi Intelligence not only has a wider coverage of the family scene, including six systems of safety protection, flexible control, constant temperature and humidity, scene lighting, full-time self-cleaning, and whole-house water purification, but also combines better with the overall decoration in terms of design style, installation and maintenance, does not damage the artistic beauty of the home, and the installation and debugging cost can be more than 20% lower than the market price, and has lifetime OTA upgrade.

Xiong Lin said that there are enthusiasts of intelligent products who are very "biased" in the users of Zhiai Home, so the team of Zhiai Home also needs to be as persistent in technology as geeks, upgrading for ten years, for an ultimate goal: to become the most understanding of family users' true whole-house intelligence, and make the intelligent platform like the nervous system of the home, becoming an invisible life butler.

From design to landing end-to-end service, integrating the intelligent system into the whole-house decoration product system, taking into account the artistic beauty, and the whole-house decoration plan that the designer comes up with that best meets the needs of the customer's family, an ideal home is gradually taking shape.

Zhiai Home Product Style - Visi, meaning "The Color of Life"

However, the combination of the family and the space makes the decoration a complex matter. To deliver a good product with stable quality, a strong supply chain and after-sales guarantee are needed.