Ikea, Gucci, Mercedes-Benz These luxury brands can't afford it, but they can afford to eat and drink.

Luxury goods in the auto world have also begun to open restaurants across the border. In May 2016, Mercedes-Benz opened a creative restaurant, Mercedes me, in Sanlitun, Beijing, which combines catering and entertainment, boutique shopping, product display and test drive, which can be said to be Mercedes-Benz's cross-border work in terms of brand experience.

As we all know, Ikea's main business is home furnishings, and its catering business is just to allow consumers to stay longer at IKEA. However, Ikea found that the momentum of its catering business was no less than that of the home business. It is understood that 30% of consumers go to Ikea for dinner. Ikea executives also revealed recently that they are now seriously considering developing the Ikea restaurant into a small independent restaurant dedicated to the downtown area.

It is widely believed that Ikea has been looking for new profit points and that its catering business may be able to make a difference. Ikea's food division had sales of about $1.8 billion in 2016, accounting for only 5 per cent of the company's total sales of $37.4 billion, according to the data. But in terms of volume, it is comparable to the $2.472 billion in 2016 revenue of Domino, the second largest pizza chain in the United States.

Ikea's revenue has maintained a good momentum of growth in the past five years, with growth at one point more than double the total revenue growth in 2013 and 2014. Food sales have grown by about 8% since Ikea restaurants were refurbished in 2015. Today, IKEA serves 650 million diners from 48 countries around the world every year. It can be said that Ikea has grown into a dark horse in the catering industry.

In fact, not only Ikea is interested in the catering industry, Chanel, Gucci, Armani, MUJI, Mercedes-Benz and many other companies have set foot in the food and beverage industry one after another.

A few days ago, after Tokyo and Toronto, Miss Chanel Coco Caf é Coffee Coffee also opened in Modu Shanghai. Unlike previous pop-up stores such as Tokyo and Toronto, which only sell makeup but do not provide actual drinks, Chanel Cafe in Shanghai can not only try all kinds of cosmetics, but also offer three types of coffee so that customers can taste coffee for free while experiencing the latest makeup on the market.

Although it is a pop-up store, Chanel is really eye-catching. It is worth mentioning that among the luxury goods, Chanel is not the first to try cross-border. Compared with Chanel's flash stunt, perhaps these bosses are the real winners of the protracted war.

In July 2015, Gucci opened the world's first restaurant, 1921Gucci, in Shanghai, China, which aroused a lot of interest. In fact, this is not the first time Gucci has dabbled in catering. Previously, Gucci has opened Gucci cafes in Italy and Japan, but this is the first time that Gucci has appeared as a restaurant in Shanghai.

Compared with an expensive Gucci bag, the price of Gucci restaurant is relatively close to the people, with 150 yuan per person for lunch and 300 yuan per person for dinner. In other words, if you buy a Gucci bag, you can have a meal at Gucci Restaurant every day for a month.

Not far from the Gucci restaurant is the cafe of the Empress Dowager's house. This store in K11 is actually the first in the world. Walking into the cafe of the Western Empress Dowager is like straying into an afternoon tea party in Europe in the 18th century. Wooden tables and chairs, beautiful tea sets decorated with Scottish tartan patterns bring a strong sense of retro. Its dessert is particularly good-looking, strawberry cheesecake, banana chocolate tower, lemon tart, latte. Dessert colors are very bright, but also in a variety of ways to present the signature Saturn logo, all directly hit the girl's heart.

However, many customers have criticized Vivienne Westwood Cafe's dessert or coffee as not as expected because the entire coffee shop is run by Pacific Coffee rather than by the brand itself. Although the taste is not good, but for the sake of the soft cuteness of desserts, it is difficult for many people to resist the impulse to pull weeds in the shop.

Armani Cafe's first store in China is in Haiya colorful City, Shenzhen. Although the style of the store is not as special as the concept store, the food is the same as that of the Paris store-the daily limited supply of dessert ice cream is a special Armani/Dolci line launched by Armani and Italy's top chocolate maker Venchi.

In addition, LV, Prada, Herm è s, Bulgari, Armani, RalphLauren and other luxury brands have been involved in the food and catering business, entering dessert shops, coffee shops, chocolate shops, restaurants and other fields through their own establishment, equity mergers and acquisitions, brand cooperation and other ways.

In addition to luxury goods, MUJI, who is well known to fast fashion brands, has also played a cross-border play. At present, MUJI has three restaurants in China, which are located in Chengdu, Shanghai and Taiwan. The restaurant maintains MUJI's consistent concept of "vegetarian food". By selecting ingredients and cooking in a more natural way, with less oil, less sugar and less salt, the restaurant restores the authentic taste of the food. At the same time, the restaurant also uses a fully transparent kitchen design, which can see the whole production process of cooking.

Luxury goods in the auto world have also begun to open restaurants across the border. In May 2016, Mercedes-Benz opened a creative restaurant, Mercedes me, in Sanlitun, Beijing, which combines catering and entertainment, boutique shopping, product display and test drive, which can be said to be Mercedes-Benz's cross-border work in terms of brand experience.

On the first floor of the restaurant is the Mercedes-Benz brand showroom and Me Caf é, Me Cafe featuring simple meals and coffee, using high-quality ingredients from Southeast Asia to interpret the classic flavor of Southeast Asia in a modern way. The second floor is a Chinese restaurant, which focuses on Yunnan-Guizhou-Sichuan cuisine, with a per capita of 200 yuan, advocating a healthy and innovative cooking concept of less salt and less oil.

Behind the world-class big brand "gathering together" to open a restaurant, it is much more than using conceptual tricks to attract attention.

On the one hand, enterprises can strengthen the brand culture in the restaurant. Marketing scholars have found that brand community can enhance brand experience and enhance brand loyalty. Cross-border enterprises obviously want to create a brand community through the carrier of restaurants.

Miuccia Prada, the third-generation head of Prada, said: "for modern people, the most important thing for luxury goods is no longer just goods, but attitude towards life." By opening a restaurant, enterprises can achieve the goal of selling the concept of lifestyle and skillfully publicize their brand culture.

MUJI said: "tables and chairs, cutlery and water cups in MUJI restaurant are not for sale." Non-catering brands to open restaurants, seems to cross the boundary, in fact, the brand to increase the frequency of contact with consumers is one of the best ways, but also the transmission of the brand concept. "

With the expansion of the scale of middle-class consumers, people's concept of consumption is also quietly changing, making the boundaries of environment, art, humanities, healthy diet and trend more and more blurred.

Han Ming, president of the China Hotel Association, once said, "in the future, the catering industry is not only as simple as traditional eating and drinking, but also a platform industry with basic functions of catering services, theme culture and consumer experience. Cross-border cooperation and cross-border development will become a common practice."

In fact, fashion brands cross the catering industry, can also make fashion more "approachable" and close to the people, after all, "food, clothing, housing and transportation" is inseparable from everyone's life, there is no contradiction between the two. That being the case, why not make an interesting combination? In the Internet era, nothing is impossible, how to make their brands more fashionable, this is also a topic that many catering brands should consider.