Genki Forest: let feedback decide the next step
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
Today I want to talk about a brand I quite like: Genki Forest.
Its founder, Tang Binsen, originally made games. After his company was acquired, he started investing, and one of his investments was a drinks project. He later found he had a lot of disagreements with traditional beverage teams, went through several rounds of people, and finally decided to run it himself. That's how a game maker entered an industry full of giants, where the shelves were already packed.
How a game maker makes drinks
How does traditional FMCG usually develop new products?
First market research, surveys and consumer interviews, then testing concepts and samples. If it looks promising, you produce, get distributors and retailers to stock it, back it with advertising, and push it into the market. This approach has value, of course, and big companies run test sales too. But a consumer saying they like something and actually being willing to pay for it are two different things. As production and channel investment grows, whether real feedback can come back in time matters a lot. By the time the product is fully rolled out and you find sales disappointing, the money for production, inventory, channels and ads has already been spent.
Game makers have a different habit with user feedback. Where users stop, which level makes people quit, which features people will pay for: all of this can be observed continuously through behaviour. After launch, development carries on. Tang brought that habit to drinks: test first, understand consumers through real feedback, then decide how to adjust the product and where to put resources.
Genki Forest once had more than a hundred SKUs in reserve, but many stayed in development and testing. Flavour, packaging and selling points could all be adjusted. Those with a poor response were stopped; those that did well were scaled. What we see are the products that finally stayed on the shelf. What we don't see are the attempts eliminated along the way. It also explored demand for sugar-free drinks first through Ran Cha tea before gradually finding its way to sugar-free sparkling water.
The channel is the positioning
What interests me most, though, is how it turned consumer feedback into concrete business choices. Who is willing to buy? Why? Where are you most likely to meet these people? What price will they accept? Once those questions are clear, product, packaging, pricing and channel can work together.
Early on, Genki Forest tried hypermarkets, with disappointing results. It then shifted its focus to campuses and convenience stores, closer to the young consumers it wanted to serve.
A customer walking into a convenience store may just want a cold, tasty drink right now. Someone at a hypermarket buying a whole case to take home is more likely to compare the price per bottle. In an on-the-spot purchase, customers may be less sensitive to small price differences per bottle, which leaves room for a differentiated product.
Choosing convenience stores isn't just finding one more place to sell. It also shapes which customers you reach, how they compare products, and what price they find easier to accept.
The channel itself is part of the product's positioning.
Seen this way, packaging is the same. Which bottle size to launch first, and when to add cans, large bottles or cases, should each match a real consumption need. One person grabbing a drink on the go and a family keeping it in the fridge to drink slowly may need different product mixes.
That's what I admire about Genki Forest: serve one clear group of customers well first, make one product and one buying occasion work, build sales, repeat purchases and a channel base, then expand to other sizes, other occasions and more customers. As far as possible, each next investment is backed by feedback from the step before.
Many companies want, from day one, every SKU, every channel and every customer. It looks thoroughly prepared, but it may also turn every untested assumption into inventory. The more products, the tighter the cash, until in the end you can't even bring yourself to stop, because you've already put in so much.
Validate first, then concentrate and scale
Genki Forest did grow at astonishing speed early on.
By the figures in some public reports at the time, sales were about RMB200 million in 2018, about RMB660 million in 2019, and about RMB2.7 billion in 2020, jumping in scale within just a few years. That result also owes something to market trends, marketing, funding and team execution, but its approach of finding direction through feedback and then concentrating resources to scale is well worth studying.
Genki Forest also didn't start by putting money into its own factories. It first used OEM production to build the product and market. Only once sales had a base did it gradually build its own factories and take control of its supply chain.
Looking at their recent moves, the focus has become more practical too: control costs, keep prices stable, make choices about SKUs. Once a business is big, you still have to work out carefully whether each product makes money and whether growth leaves any profit behind.
The real value of data is helping us judge which products to keep testing, which deserve more investment, and which should stop. For people in business, these decisions all end up as inventory in the warehouse, work for the team, and the company's cash flow.