A month ago, Taiping Bird Clothing Group from Ningbo, Zhejiang Province held its second fashion show for New York Fashion Week for its menswear brand PEACEBIRD MEN. When the brand's advertising blockbuster appeared again on the LED screen of Times Square, a certain stage of Chinese fashion was officially announced. Wang Mingfeng, general manager of PEACEBIRD MEN, put forward a central idea for this show. "The new world is flat." If you understand the history of the peacebird and Chinese fashion, it is not difficult to understand the meaning of this sentence.
In his best-selling book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, Thomas L. Friedman analyzes the process of globalization in the early 21st century. His main argument is the cooperation between scientific and technological progress and social agreements. Next, the world is being smoothed out. In the past 30 years, China's fashion industry has been following this trend – from passive foundry to active innovation, from introduction to going out, from the low point of the industrial transfer ladder to the free output of the highlands, thus being extremely extreme in a poor information. In the shrinking flat world, how to adapt to the new order and even create new rules has become the main theme of all efforts.
Local fashion exploration
After China implemented reform and opening up in 1978, the global labor-intensive industry transfer found new destinations. As the most typical labor-intensive industry, apparel manufacturing has begun to take root in China's coastal areas. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, from 1978 to 2000, the apparel manufacturing industry grew at an average annual rate of 14%. Most garment factories in various regions are produced in OEM mode and OEM for foreign brands.
In the Ningbo area of Zhejiang in the 1990s, the apparel manufacturing business became a common practice. In 1992, Zhang Jiangping and his younger brother Zhang Jiangbo borrowed 20,000 yuan to establish the Mengdis Garment Factory, with only six sewing machines and seven or eight workers. At that time, Chinese consumers began to have the habit of wearing business men's clothing, which formed the “Zhepai” men's clothing industry cluster in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, the “闽派” men's clothing industry cluster in the southeastern region, and the Pearl River Delta men's clothing industry cluster. Among them, Ningbo, Zhejiang and other places to produce business equipment as long. The men's wear brands that grew up with the Taiping Birds, such as Shanshan and Youngor, initially completed the original capital accumulation by processing. The growing competition has prompted these manufacturers to register their own trademarks, and the first batch of Chinese fashion brands in the contemporary sense have surfaced.
In 1997, the men's start-up of the Pacific bird gradually expanded the industry to the women's field. In 2001, the women's brand was reorganized into a subsidiary of the group, Ningbo Taiping Bird Fashion Women's Co., Ltd. In the next 10 years, Taiping Bird expanded its group to include the brand matrix of children's wear MINIPEACE, Lecho, MG, and through the large-scale channel expansion, it became the second largest apparel group in China after Haishu.
Due to its geographical location, the northern inland area does not undertake the landing of foreign apparel manufacturing business, but concentrates on the distribution of native apparel manufacturing in specific regions. Ordos, the cashmere brand of the same name located in the prefecture-level city of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is a typical embodiment of such clothing manufacturing. Thirty years ago, Chinese consumers became familiar with the cashmere brand through the slogan “Ordos, warm the world” in black and white TV sets, and gradually cultivated a deep cashmere complex in the long time.
Cashmere is called "soft gold". It is a rare and precious special animal fiber in the world. It is a high-grade raw material for the textile industry. It is a fine and rich fluff that goats grow at the root of the mountain wool to resist the cold. According to the China Cashmere Industry Report, the world's main producers of cashmere are China, Mongolia, Iran, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Turkey and other countries. China is the world's largest producer of cashmere, accounting for more than the world's total output. Inner Mongolia is the largest cashmere production area in China with the highest cashmere goats, accounting for about one-third of the world's cashmere production. One. On the plateau of Ordos, there is a kind of cashmere-type goat called Arbas White Goat, which can produce top cashmere.
Thanks to this natural resource advantage, Erdos covers the entire cashmere industry chain from pasture, sheep, cashmere to retail terminals. Unlike the ordinary apparel manufacturing industry, the preciousness of cashmere determines the high price of raw materials, and cashmere manufacturers often need to invest a large amount of research and development budget on the production side. Although the early Erdos is also oriented to the consumer side, the huge industrial chain seems to make the brand less market-oriented, and the trust of raw materials has become an important reason for Chinese consumers to choose Ordos. For a long time, Erdos seems to be farther away from the concept of “dress” and closer to the concept of “material”. In the subconscious of consumers, they buy derivatives of cashmere, whether it is a cashmere sweater or a jacket with cashmere.
The era of large industry left a deep-rooted manufacturing property for the Chinese fashion industry. Even in the later stage of the collective transformation of Chinese fashion brands, this attribute is also a background color that cannot be ignored by the Chinese fashion industry. Chinese brands from the manufacturing business are born and pragmatic, production-oriented, but relatively lack of innovative genes, which also form the biggest difference between China's first-generation fashion brands and Western brands. In the thinking of the big industrial era, scale is a very important indicator, so these clothing brands have used 20 years to build a giant framework, extending their reach to more remote cities and richer categories, or to the industry. The farther chain, the bigger the clothing business.