The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Strategic decision · 2022–2023
T97 Coffee's Douyin livestream got 600 million views — half its 600 stores still closed
The chant '咖啡你冲不冲？冲冲冲！' made it a sensation. The founder aimed for 1,001 stores in a year. Franchisees lost money. About half the stores shut.
T97 Coffee · 2023-04-16
What happened
T97 Coffee was a new Chinese coffee brand founded by Li Xiao (李潇) that went viral on Douyin livestreams with the catchy chant '咖啡你冲不冲？冲冲冲！' (Coffee — do you brew it? Brew brew brew!). The livestreams attracted enormous traffic: reports cite 600 million plays, single-day views exceeding 100 million, and over 100,000 concurrent viewers.
The founder set an ambitious target of 1,001 stores in one year. At its peak, T97 had over 600 stores nationwide. But the livestream traffic did not translate into a sustainable franchise business. Franchisees reported losses, stores closed quickly, and consumers gravitated toward established brands like Luckin Coffee. By April 2023, about half of the stores had shut.
The case became a reference point in Chinese business media for the gap between viral livestream traffic and real-world unit economics. The founder was described as someone who 'could not take the traffic' — the attention was real, but the product and operations behind it were not built to convert viewers into repeat customers.
Why it happened
- Livestream viewership is a marketing metric, not a revenue metric — 600 million views do not pay rent, and the conversion from viewer to repeat coffee buyer was never demonstrated
- The 1,001-store target was set to match the viral narrative, not the operational capacity to train staff, source beans and maintain quality across hundreds of locations
- Franchisees were sold on traffic numbers, but the traffic lived on the founder's livestream, not in individual stores — a franchisee in a second-tier city did not inherit the Douyin audience
- The Chinese coffee market was already intensely competitive, with Luckin Coffee offering lower prices and denser store coverage — T97 had no product advantage to justify its franchise premium
The lesson
A livestream audience belongs to the streamer, not to the franchise — selling 600 franchises on one person's Douyin traffic is selling a shared resource as if it were a private one.
Aftermath
T97 Coffee's store count contracted sharply through 2023. The case was cited in 36Kr, Sina Finance and other Chinese media as a defining example of the 2022-2023 'livestream franchise' bubble, in which viral Douyin brands scaled rapidly on attention and collapsed when the attention could not be monetised at the store level.
Sources
- 36Kr: T97 Coffee's viral rise and franchise collapse
- Sina Finance: T97 Coffee store closures and franchisee losses
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