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Hunter Boots

We helped the world’s leading rubber rainboot brand identify the size of the opportunity in China.

Hunter Boots case study

Industry

Key Deliverables

The client

Founded in 1856, Hunter Boots is a British footwear brand renowned for its iconic rubber Wellington boots.

The challenge

Hunter Boots was interested in bringing its flagship Wellington boots to the Chinese market to capitalize on growing affluence amongst hundreds of millions of consumers in tier-1 and tier-2 cities, but the company needed to identify the size of the opportunity, in order to determine which SKUs to bring to the market.

Our solutions

WPIC conducted market research using Discripto®, our custom-developed data technology, which acts as distributed script engine to download and index select parts of the Chinese internet to gain insights across the “rainwear” industry.

Discripto® targeted eight distinct competitors in China and found that the combined in-market yearly revenue was in excess of $98 million USD. At a sub-category and SKU level, WPIC conducted research into the ladies’ footwear market in tier-1 and tier-2 (wealthier) cities in China.

Discripto’s analysis of e-commerce platform transaction history from Alibaba and search queries from Baidu showed that Chinese consumers had interest in purchasing outerwear, similar to their counterparts in Europe and North America. However, WPIC indexed data for competitors of Hunter Boots and saw that higher-end SKUs of rubber boots were not selling in the market at all. The total monthly revenue from boots that sold for between $130 and $150 (Hunter’s Wellingtons sold for $150 USD) was only $5,203 USD. The data showed that Chinese consumers were only interested in rubber boots between $51 and $100 USD. Shoes that cost between $151 and $200 USD were only receiving 6 per cent of shoe revenue in a given month.

Results

If Hunter had chosen to enter the market with their flagship product, they would stand to make roughly $65,000 USD per year in revenue – a paltry amount that would not even cover up-front registration and licensing costs in the first year, not to mention the thousands they would need to spend on advertising and promotions. As a result of the data that Discripto® and WPIC were able to provide, Hunter decided not to move forward with its go-to-market strategy in China with the Wellington boot. They went back to the drawing board to re-assess which products could successfully enter the market.

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