Beherbs: A Standardized, 30-Square-Meter TCM Clinic Model with 300,000 RMB Initial Investment Targets Urban Wellness Consumers

Image provided by Bencao Life TCM Clinic

On a May morning, the streets in Beijing’s most bustling district were already teeming with traffic. At the Bencao Shenghuo Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic located at The Place, the store manager was leading the staff through their pre-opening preparations, while Luo Feng wandered about, casting his designer’s discerning eye over every item in the clinic.

Hailing from a family of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, Luo Feng studied computer science in college. After graduation, he worked in the internet industry, served as a journalist, and held a position as a civil servant. Having lived in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, he is now the CEO and jack-of-all-trades at Bencao Life. In his spare time, he is often found frequenting the design, coffee, and art circles.

From Luo Feng’s perspective, primary healthcare provides basic medical services, and the key lies in ensuring these services are widely accepted by grassroots populations. Bencao Life TCM Clinic excels at packaging fundamental Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) services into a more consumer-oriented format to integrate them into market competition. Its functional positioning is pre-hospital management within TCM care.

Recently, VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) conducted an exclusive interview with Luo Feng, discussing his perspectives on primary healthcare and his work, “Herbal Life.”

In recent years, the state has issued numerous policies for primary healthcare, covering community health service centers, village doctors, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) clinics, and family doctors. This has brought great excitement to Luo Feng and his peers, who believe that TCM clinics have finally ushered in a springtime of policy support.

Luo Feng believed that speed is the ultimate competitive advantage, so he immediately embarked on his entrepreneurial journey. In 2015, Luo assembled a team and developed an app called “See a TCM Doctor,” which allowed users to book online appointments for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioners to provide home-visit consultations—a typical “Internet + TCM” model. That year, they secured Series A financing based on this business model. At the time, two-sided subsidies were a common survival strategy in the “Internet +” sector. However, once the subsidies ended, things returned to normal.

“Patients do not develop trust in doctors through the internet. How can primary healthcare deliver medical services to the grassroots level in a way that is acceptable to the public? I believe primary healthcare should emphasize practical implementation, lower the barriers to accessing medical care, and move toward marketization and productization of medical services,” interpreted Luo Feng. He realized that Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) should be integrated into everyday life, which requires an offline consumption scenario. This insight led to the establishment of Bencao Life TCM Clinic.

Opening a clinic in Beijing entails high costs, but Luo Feng stated that establishing a Bencao Shenghuo TCM clinic requires only around RMB 300,000. From the outset, he aimed to create a standardized, compact, and refined TCM clinic to provide users with a distinctive traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis and treatment experience.

To this end, Luo Feng adopted a simple yet refined Japanese aesthetic for the interior design. He believes that this style conveys a sense of rigor, order, safety, and naturalness, thereby communicating his “craftsman spirit” to customers. He is convinced that good design can make visitors feel comfortable upon entering the store. In Luo Feng’s vision, customers might stroll into Bencao Life after visiting MUJI or enjoying a cup of Heytea, experiencing their preferred health products in a relaxed environment and receiving healthy lifestyle advice through casual conversations with doctors.

Meanwhile, the team operates under a lean model. With fewer than 20 members, it maintains a well-structured division of labor, with some staff dedicated to backend development and others to product design. “I prefer elite, small teams for their high efficiency and flexibility, which aligns with our logic for running stores,” said Luo Feng.

Throughout the various stages of preparing to open his clinic, Luo Feng placed particular emphasis on site selection. Rather than relying on real estate agents, he personally inspected every commercial property in each business district. “In fact, Beijing has many high-quality locations for opening a clinic at relatively low costs, but such opportunities are fleeting.”

Luo Feng has clear requirements for site selection. On one hand, the location must feature a well-equipped commercial complex with office buildings. This serves two purposes: first, to avoid path dependence associated with older business districts and ensure an enhanced user experience; second, to guarantee effective organic foot traffic, as both office spaces and residential areas are indispensable. On the other hand, the site must offer convenient transportation access, with bus stops and subway entrances located within close proximity.

The first Bencao Life TCM Clinic, located in Jianwai SOHO, primarily offers services such as TCM consultations, external therapies, and internal treatment prescription counseling, with prices ranging from RMB 68 to RMB 188. It also provides Chinese herbal medicines and TCM-related products.

Image provided by Bencao Shenghuo TCM Clinic

Bencao Life TCM Clinic differs from traditional TCM clinics. Luo Feng has implemented numerous “subtractions” from the perspectives of physicians, services, and products. Bencao Life is positioned as a TCM healthy-lifestyle expert targeting the pre-hospital market. “We provide standardized services, aiming to help users establish healthy lifestyle habits,” said Luo Feng. In simple terms, the “subtractions” made by Luo Feng mainly include three aspects.

First, the medical team is youthful.At Bencao Life, you won’t see elderly TCM practitioners with white hair and beards; instead, the team is composed of young doctors. According to Luo Feng, over 70% of Bencao Life’s physicians were born in the 1970s and 1980s. They come from public Grade 3A hospitals and have more than five years of clinical practice experience. The youngest doctor is just in his early thirties. “In fact, there are many such TCM practitioners in every city. Building a TCM team like this has another advantage: during rapid store expansion, we don’t need to worry about the supply of physician resources,” said Luo Feng.

Second, service standardization.At Bencao Life, users do not experience the often tense doctor-patient relationship; instead, they receive consistently high-quality service grounded in user satisfaction surveys and customer journey analysis. To achieve this, Luo Feng decoupled store managers from specific locations in his management system. Regular rotations enable store managers to comprehensively understand user characteristics and needs, thereby delivering consistent service. Furthermore, Luo Feng granted store managers significant authority, stating, “Just as Haidilao waitstaff can waive bills for customers, our store managers can too.” This approach fosters genuine friendships between store managers and users.

Third, product standardization.At Bencao Life, one does not hear doctors communicating with patients using obscure, specialized terminology interspersed with Classical Chinese; instead, standardized and concise consultations are employed. Luo Feng believes that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has fallen far behind the times, as its consultation scripts, algorithms, expressions, diagnostic and treatment methods, and herbal prescriptions have yet to be standardized. Internal standardization is the foundation for the application of artificial intelligence technologies. Luo Feng has attempted to flatten and modularize TCM theories using computer code, condensing the personalized TCM diagnostic methods of inspection, listening and smelling, inquiry, and pulse-taking, as well as its question-and-answer interactions, into homogeneous inputs and outputs.

Furthermore, Bencao Life is highly selective about its “neighbors,” favoring new-retail TCM clinics, with Luckin Coffee—founded by the former COO of Shenzhou UCAR—as a typical representative.

Streamlining operations at a TCM clinic is no easy task. If too many services are cut, the clinic becomes too “light” and risks devolving into a purely consumer-oriented setting; if too few are removed, it remains too “heavy” and reverts to a strictly medical environment. According to Luo Feng, striking the right balance between “light” and “heavy” can only be achieved through continuous experimentation. “It took us nearly two years of adjustments and navigating countless pitfalls to finally get a handle on it. No one in this field understands this balance better than we do.”

According to Luo Feng, Bencao Shenghuo currently operates six TCM clinics. The clinics that have been in operation for more than five months have already achieved profitability, while the newer ones are not yet profitable but are performing well. He is currently seeking the next round of financing.

“Offline TCM clinics don’t rely on storytelling for fundraising; they focus purely on business.” Luo Feng is highly confident in Bencao Life’s capsule clinic model, believing that the company has secured a distinct competitive advantage by identifying standardization as its path to growth. On one hand, traditional TCM practitioners pursue personalized, specialized excellence, which precludes standardization and uniformity; on the other hand, the general public cannot manage their health through standardized approaches. “Bencao Life is unique in this field,” said Luo Feng.

By the end of 2018, Luo Feng plans to replicate the existing model of Bencao Life TCM Clinics and expand to 50 locations within Beijing. “Once the TCM clinics in Beijing are operating smoothly, we will attempt to expand beyond the city,” said Luo Feng.