Soyoung Showcases Dental Business Success: 'Million-Dollar Clinic' in 90 Days, 70% of Orders from Orthodontics and Veneers

Wien Dental, established in 2006, is a specialized chain of dental clinics offering integrated services in prevention, treatment, orthodontics, general care, implants, prosthodontics, and cosmetic dentistry. Its specialty lies in orthodontic treatments for both children and adults. The brand operates six clinics in Beijing and one in Hangzhou.

Such a scale is not considered large in the dental industry. Over the past decade or more, Viene’s growth has been relatively steady and pragmatic, primarily acquiring customers through offline channels and local lifestyle platforms such as Dianping. However, in the first half of this year, Viene experienced an “unexpected” surge in growth.

“From April to June, Weien achieved a growth rate of over 60% in order volume on the So-Young platform, becoming the first dental institution on So-Young to surpass one million yuan in monthly sales.” At So-Young’s inaugural Dental Industry Summit, Liang Jun, Marketing Director of Weien Dental, publicly shared these figures for the first time.

Such achievements did not come without reason. Although Weien Dental was the smallest institution on the New Oxygen platform when it joined in early 2018, the company placed great emphasis on internet operations, assigning a dedicated team for operations and graphic design to the platform from the outset. Therefore, when New Oxygen began strategically allocating resources to consumer healthcare sectors, represented by dentistry, this March, Weien Dental was well-positioned to capitalize on the opportunity. It became one of the first dental institutions to benefit from the platform’s traffic dividends, with its verified GMV exceeding RMB 700,000 in March alone—more than triple the approximately RMB 200,000 recorded in February.

“These achievements have given us greater confidence in the So-Young platform, and we will continue to increase resource allocation,” said Liang Jun during his sharing session.

“New Oxygen’s successful practices in the medical aesthetics sector over the past six years can be fully replicated in the dental field,” said Jin Xing, Founder and CEO of New Oxygen, at the summit. The characteristics of medical aesthetic procedures—such as high average transaction values and high decision-making thresholds—align almost perfectly with dental services like orthodontics, dental implants, and veneers. For dental institutions, these high-value services represent the most challenging business “fortresses” to conquer.

Industry research indicates that 70% of dental institutions’ revenue comes from high-ticket items such as orthodontics, dental implants, and veneers. However, similar to the medical aesthetics industry, these high-ticket services face the challenge of soaring customer acquisition costs. Meanwhile, patients attracted through low-ticket services like teeth cleaning are extremely difficult to convert into high-value clients. Furthermore, these low-margin services consume institutional “bandwidth,” such as dentist availability, thereby significantly increasing hidden operational costs.

This is precisely the original intention behind So-Young’s expansion into the dental sector: by adopting a content marketing-driven strategy, it aims to help dental institutions and physicians build their own “self-media” channels to attract followers, while providing tools for follower management. In this way, So-Young seeks to become a platform for institutions and physicians to operate their private-domain traffic, serving as the “estuary” that channels online traffic from across the internet. “Be a farmer, not a hunter,” stated Jin Xing, emphasizing a principle that So-Young has adhered to since its inception.

As consumer mindsets continue to upgrade year by year, the dental care market has expanded rapidly, with a compound annual growth rate exceeding 18% over the past decade, reaching a scale of hundreds of billions of yuan. According to the Stomatological Industry Association, there are 250 million annual dental visitors in China, among whom an increasing number are accessing orthodontic services. On the SoYoung platform, “teeth straightening” has become one of the top 10 most-searched keywords within the app, and 52% of platform users report concerns about “misaligned teeth.”

In contrast to the U.S. dental care consumer market, China’s market holds substantial growth potential. According to statistics, annual per capita healthcare expenditure in the United States amounts to $8,497, with dental care accounting for 4.01%, or $341. In China, however, annual per capita healthcare expenditure is only $280, with dental care spending at just $9—far below the U.S. level.

Market demand is reviving, driving substantial growth across the upstream, midstream, and downstream segments of the industry and attracting significant capital interest. Multiple financing rounds exceeding RMB 100 million have taken place in the dental care market. However, as the core entities of this market, dental institutions are facing unprecedented pressures, including rising costs of medical consumables, brand dilution, limited patient acquisition channels, and challenges in transformation.

In May 2019, So-Young listed on the NASDAQ, becoming the first publicly traded company in the internet-based medical aesthetics sector. Its prospectus indicated that the company planned to increase its expansion and investment in the consumer healthcare field. Consequently, starting in the first half of this year, So-Young strategically entered the dental care sector.

Currently, New Oxygen Dental has onboarded nearly 1,400 professional dental institutions, attracted approximately 2,500 authoritative dentists, and accumulated nearly 100,000 real-patient orthodontic cases. Over 70% of dental-related orders on the platform are for aesthetic dental services, such as orthodontics and veneers.

Given that high-stakes dental procedures, such as orthodontics, closely resemble medical aesthetic treatments in terms of consumer psychology and are well-suited to the “content-driven e-commerce” model, Wang Jie, COO of Kunjian Technology, a professional dental operations agency, stated, “New Oxygen will become the next ‘hotspot’ for the development of the dental industry.”

Build a diversified content ecosystem to unlock the value of user word-of-mouth; fully respect the value of physicians and empower them comprehensively, enabling them to highlight their unique strengths and specialties; innovate business models to achieve a win-win outcome for users, physicians, and the platform. SoYoung’s proven success model in the medical aesthetics sector can likewise be applied to the consumer healthcare services market in the future.

New Oxygen leverages its base of precise users as a gateway to attract hospitals and physicians, thereby reducing their customer acquisition costs. On the other hand, it provides consumers with information, consultations, and online appointment services. This approach not only mitigates information asymmetry but also addresses the industry’s pain point of high customer acquisition costs, enhancing industrial transparency and delivering benefits to both providers and consumers.

To address the challenge consumers face in selecting doctors and medical institutions, New Oxygen has innovatively introduced the "Aesthetic Medicine Diary" feature. Currently, the New Oxygen platform hosts millions of authentic aesthetic medicine diaries shared by users. These diaries not only display a series of pre- and post-procedure photos but also provide details on the specific treatment procedures, dates, physicians, and hospitals. Aggregated together, these diaries have become New Oxygen’s “secret weapon” for maintaining user stickiness. Additionally, features and tools such as doctor Q&A, short videos, and live-streamed consultations help doctors and institutions better interact with users and match their needs.

As New Oxygen deepens its integration across the industry chain, SaaS-based digital solutions have become a critical component in empowering medical institutions and physicians. “The rapid adoption of basic medical equipment and data collection devices, coupled with digital empowerment, will significantly enhance efficiency in our industry, allowing doctors to focus on their core responsibilities rather than expending excessive energy on tasks that represent avoidable time waste,” said Cui Yiqian, COO of Dental Steward, which is engaging in deep collaboration with New Oxygen.

At the summit, New Oxygen also stated that it is exploring new forms of dental commercial insurance. As China gradually moves toward a mature dental market, demand for related insurance products is poised to surge. In the United States, the dental services market is valued at $120 billion, with dental insurance accounting for $75 billion, or 63% of the total.

Meanwhile, insurance can also serve as a significant channel for customer acquisition. For instance, dental insurance in South Korea has driven the development of the dental care sector there, with patients’ dental care habits being gradually cultivated through insurance coverage. New Oxygen has stated that it will continue to increase its investment and research in dental insurance.

Expanding into consumer healthcare services such as dentistry demonstrates that New Oxygen is evolving from its early stage of addressing information asymmetry and traffic challenges in the medical aesthetics industry, to becoming a service-oriented platform that delivers deeper value-added services to doctors, hospitals, and users. It is gradually building an intelligent commercial ecosystem with comprehensive coverage and accessibility across all categories and scenarios of consumer healthcare.