杭州网红咖啡坠落：关店百家，5年烧光1亿Hangzhou internet celebrity coffee falls: closing 100 stores, burning 100 million in 5 years

Source: Interface News Article | Global Internet Business If it weren't for T97 founder Li Xiao's proactive self disclosure on personal social media platforms, many people may have already forgotten about this coffee brand. In 2022, Big Mouth Girl's magical live broadcast of shouting "Do you brew coffee or not, brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew brew. But recently, Li Xiao appeared in front of his personal account "Xiao Shopkeeper" with a messy hairstyle and a haggard expression, revealing in detail the latest situation of T97: in five years, T97 had signed contracts with over 500 stores, but now there are only 11 left nationwide, with a cumulative loss of over 100 million yuan. He even used the words "big defeat" to summarize this entrepreneurial process. T97 founder Li Xiao reveals entrepreneurial failure on social media According to a search on the group buying platform "Tianxia Wangshang", there is only one T97 store left in Hangzhou, where T97 headquarters is located, the West Lake Zhongshan Park store, and several other stores are closed. The residual heat of Seesaw's bankruptcy liquidation has not dissipated yet, and another former internet celebrity in the coffee industry is falling. T97 has entered a relatively obvious contraction state, and Li Xiao said he has invested his energy in another project. But what is worth recording is not just the history of a brand's rise and fall, but every trial and error that the brand has tried to resist gravity, as well as the new directions it has explored in the cruel market changes. 800 yuan has attracted 6 million people Li Xiao has never been a 'literary coffee youth'. Before founding T97, his identity was "Xiao Shopkeeper", a veteran killed in the trenches of social e-commerce. From cross-border health products to Tmall's number one "Yangge Ge", and to the "Global Catcher" with a peak GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) of billions, Li Xiao's expertise lies in his keen capture of traffic and precise grasp of user psychology. Li Xiao later said in a media interview, "I have actually proven myself. At the age of 24 or 45, I achieved the top spot in the industry and could earn several million yuan a year. I have never been short of money Entrepreneurs who have never been short of money will want to achieve greater results and leave behind a 'representative work'. At that time, social e-commerce platform projects were embroiled in controversy, and new consumer brand startups were thriving. Li Xiao naturally turned her attention to the coffee industry, which had a broad enough track. At that time, the popular brand in the market was the "magic ketone coffee" that focused on weight loss, and the original meaning of the T97 brand name also referred to "weight less than 100". In April 2021, T97 launched its first product, the fat reducing coffee codenamed "Little Black Bar", with sales exceeding 100 million yuan in its first month of launch. Li Xiao stated that the launch of T97 was deeply operated, and the team's private domain operation capability was at the forefront level in China at that time. The first batch of inventory is over 20 million yuan, with a cost of several million yuan. For a new brand, the investment is not low, which shows determination. The real breakthrough for T97 was the unintentional live streaming experiment in September 2022. T97 has been broadcast live in Tiktok since May. At first, the data was mediocre. Until September, the operation team combined shouting and selling, and the popularity suddenly skyrocketed. Big Mouth Girl's magical shouting microphone swept across the entire internet, with a single highest viewing count of 10.82 million. The fan base of T97 quickly surpassed 1.6 million in just a few months. Li Xiao said on his social media that he only spent 800 yuan to attract more than 6 million people to the live streaming room. Offline T97 stores are also being flooded. In 2022, T97 stores announced that their daily revenue exceeded 3000 yuan, and 90% of stores achieved profitability. Li Xiao revealed that this revenue data was "second only to Luckin" at that time. Big mouthed girl with demonic shouting microphone At its peak, Li Xiao shouted grandiose words such as "surpassing Luckin in 35 months" and "opening 10000 stores in 3 years" in the live broadcast room. This is certainly impossible to achieve, "Li Xiao reviewed afterwards. This is just his consistent operation of attracting traffic, making users remember that" T97's boss likes to brag a lot. What I want is for you to know me and remember me. Li Xiao later claimed in the video that 2022 was a year of hot blood and excitement, and Big Mouth Sister was his "benefactor". The live streaming team where Big Mouth Girl works has strong abilities and is very dedicated, constantly refining the live streaming script and iterating quickly. He also mentioned that trust and patience are important. During the same period, a brand was also promoting its products through live streaming with the Big Mouth Girl team, but gave up after only one or two months without seeing any data feedback. The extremely low-cost online traffic explosion has made T97 a "phenomenal internet celebrity" brand. According to Li Xiao, the brand once set a sales record of "nearly 1 billion yuan", including the total distribution of offline stores and private domain products. This "promotion" has also attracted some channel merchants to enter the market. But the strategy of relying too much on traffic also allowed him to see the ceiling ahead of time. I once opened a store next to Seesaw, but T97 can't charge anymore No matter how popular T97 is online, it cannot escape the script of WeChat business tycoons selling goods. Li Xiao wanted to plan a further growth curve for T97, so she turned to opening a T97 coffee flagship store next to Hangzhou Tianmuli and Seesaw - the rent alone was in the millions, and the design cost was over 300000 yuan. Later, this became the "most unjustified sum of money" spent by T97 in Li Xiao's review, along with another flagship store in Hangzhou in 77, which lost over 8 million yuan. Looking back now, T97's Red Flag flagship store is not for consumers or franchisees, but for capital. Until the retrospective, Li Xiao did not believe that the strategy of going offline was wrong. One judgment is that online brands will be surpassed by offline chain brands with some positioning - this can almost be verified today. On this basis, Li Xiao also has practical considerations. On the one hand, T97 quickly achieved hundreds of millions of sales in the private domain. At that time, the top brand Sumida River recruited top celebrities such as Xiao Zhan for endorsement, but the annual sales volume was only in the range of 1 billion yuan; On the other hand, at that time, capital favored offline innovative stores, such as Hutou Bureau and Momo Dim sum Bureau in Changsha, which used dozens of stores to pry up billions in valuation. For Li Xiao at that time, going offline was almost a definite path. But the foresight of strategic judgment failed to offset the collapse at the execution level, and in every specific link of the downfall, it paid excessive tuition fees. For example, due to strict site selection and brand borne site selection costs, the monthly travel expenses of the site selection team alone exceeded 800000 yuan, resulting in the team traveling 50 times in the Guizhou market without opening any stores. Regarding the dispute between T97 and franchisees, Li Xiao also responded that T97 has a total of 75 franchisees who have opened more than 200 stores and have never had any disputes. Due to the relaxed exit mechanism, franchisees who close their stores within one year will receive a full refund of franchise fees and a 50% discount on equipment recovery. On the one hand, this has resulted in a loss of over 200000 yuan for each store closure. On the other hand, it has also led some profitable stores to choose to close early to lock in profits, resulting in a rapid decline in the number of stores in the later stage. But what is more fatal than flaws at the execution level is actually the gravity of the market. 2023 is a turning point for T97, as store expansion rapidly stalled. Li Xiao summarized that the brand is facing many severe challenges head-on. Firstly, it comes from the capital market. Li Xiao hopes to obtain large-scale financing through rapid volume building, and then exchange capital for scale and scale for supply chain. But in 2023, as the investment boom in the consumer goods industry fades away, investors will adopt a more cautious attitude towards the story of "traffic for scale". The T97 achieved a stunning performance from 0 to 1, but on the way from 1 to 10, they found that the "gas station" had closed. Secondly, it comes from the consumer end. The level of competition in the coffee consumption market was unexpected for Li Xiao. In rounds of "price subsidy wars", when Kudi, who was competing with Luckin Coffee, raised the price of coffee to the floor price of 1 yuan, other coffee brands including T97 were instantly squeezed out of their living space. Li Xiao referred to the coffee market as the 'death track', but it is not accurate to attribute the decline of T97 entirely to the track itself. In the past few years, coffee consumption and store scale in China have continued to expand, and what has truly changed is the competitive threshold of this business. T97 excels at obtaining attention through low cost, but offline chains ultimately compete in location selection, supply chain, cup efficiency, repeat purchases, and single store models. A live streaming room can put a brand on the hot search list within a few weeks, but it cannot replace the continuous profitability of every store. The ebb of capital and price wars have only exposed the gap in this set of business capabilities faster: when traffic cannot be converted into stable single store profits, the larger the scale, the losses may also be amplified synchronously. Searching for an exit on the 'death track' In 2026, the boutique coffee brand Seesaw, once known as the "Chinese Blue Bottle," will shrink from its peak of 135 stores to only 34, and the company will enter bankruptcy liquidation. Starting from 2025, suppliers will begin to pursue overdue payments, and some employees will be owed wages. T97 relies on traffic, while Seesaw relies on high-quality storytelling. These two almost opposite paths lead to similar endings. Even the top brand in this track, Luckin, is feeling pressure. As of the end of the second quarter of 2026, Luckin Coffee had 36310 global stores, with quarterly revenue of 15.886 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 28.5%, and is still expanding rapidly; However, the same store sales of self operated stores decreased by 5.3% year-on-year, while the same period in 2025 saw a growth of 13.8%. The number of stores and users is still increasing, but the single store output of existing stores has begun to come under pressure. Kudi's pressure is more direct. According to the big data of Shanliyan, in the first half of 2026, Kudi opened 1674 new stores and closed 2484, a net decrease of 810 stores, and the number of closed stores exceeded the number of new stores for the first time; As of early August, its global store scale remained at around 15000. Tims Tianhao China is also actively clearing out inefficient stores. The latest financial report of the company shows that the total revenue for the second quarter of 2026 was 273.4 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 21.7%; The same store sales of the system decreased by 17.8% year-on-year. But the industry is not in decline. Manner provided another sample. The 2025 China Coffee Industry Report shows that Manner will add over 700 new stores by 2025, with a growth rate of over 40%, and a total of nearly 2500 stores. While rapidly expanding, Manner is also raising prices. Starting from April this year, Manner announced a price increase of 5 yuan for single bean SOE coffee, stepping out of the price war narrative. According to data cited by Kamen, as of July 2026, there were approximately 227000 coffee shops nationwide, with 53000 newly opened in the past year and a net growth of only 1065. Roughly speaking, it is equivalent to about 52000 stores exiting during the same period. The market is not without demand, but rather redistributing traffic, locations, and profits with extremely high opening and closing speeds. The coffee industry is really difficult, every brand is jumping over the dragon gate like a carp. But after jumping over, it's a real dragon Li Xiao did not give up on jumping. After losing 100 million, the opportunity he saw was convenience store coffee. He revealed that the new brand he invested in has opened over 100 offline stores, and the store models are still being refined. The top player on this track is Novacoffee. With the "store in store" model, the number of stores will exceed 2000 by the beginning of 2025 and surpass 10000 by the end of the year. A new round of several hundred million yuan C-round financing will be completed in early 2026. The overall store scale of the convenience store track exceeds 200000, and there is still great penetration space. The rise of T97 was once due to the magical shouting in the live broadcast room, which implanted the brand name into consumers' minds. Nowadays, Li Xiao hopes to rely on the existing convenience store, bookstore, and gym systems to turn herself into a screw and screw herself into consumers' daily lives. Removing the filters of social and lifestyle, coffee is becoming an infrastructure. Although the cup size dividend of Chinese coffee is still a long-term certainty compared to mature markets, the "forced clearance" of inefficient supply has become a foregone conclusion. After the foam dissipated, the whole industry was waiting for the real balance point of coexistence of profits and normalized consumption.