Report from Shanghai Fashion Week：Chinese Designer Brands in the Eyes of Fashion Buyers

The fashion industry is not just about sense and intuition, importantly, it’s also led by rational surveys and data. Fashion buyers form a special group of people in the industry, one which places emphasis on research and is adept in the application of data.

With fashion consumption maturing and becoming increasingly diversified, the number of newly opened buyers’ shops has surged. During the last Shanghai Fashion Week, we saw various training courses for buyers organized by showrooms, but as industry insiders all know, there’s a large gap between theory and practice. To really know what you’re talking about and achieve growth, it doesn’t matter how many courses you take. One experience in failing to sell the stock you’ve purchased will teach you, as a buyer, more than anything else could.

During this season’s Shanghai Fashion Week, Luxe.CO exchanged opinions with buyers, beginner and expert alike, and discovered a few interesting new trends:

Trend one: Buyers are placing orders faster, more rationally and with a deeper understanding of their target consumers.

Lei Wang, the founder of Pinchuan Showroom said: “[I] clearly sensed that the clients are more high-end this time, and buyers also have a better understanding of the positioning of their shops. When buyers see clothes that fit their shop, they will place an order on the spot instead of just showing an interest.” Nana (a pseudonym), manager of Tanghui, a multi-brand store that has already opened in two locations in Tangshan, implied that her purchasing budget has increased from 800,000 to 1 million RMB for this season. Nana said that fashion purchasing power is strong in Tangshan, with a large group of potential customers. She plans to open another shop in Tangshan this year, as well as joining a leading local shopping centre.

Qiuqiu (a pseudonym), a fashion buyer who lives in Italy, attended the autumn/winter 2017 Shanghai Fashion Week this April for the first time at the invitation of Hive+Showroom and with the recommendation of her friends. She marvelled at the new force of Shanghai Fashion Week, and considers her trip to have been very fruitful. She visited a couple of exhibitions and showrooms, and has made plans to place orders with several Chinese designer brands, including Awaylee by Wei Li, Museum of Friendship by Tianmo Wang, Ground Zero by British-Chinese brothers Eric and Philip Chu, and JINNNN by Chongyu Jin.

According to Ting Zhou, purchasing director for the clothes and bags department of the cross-border Bailian Group, the group allocates a budget of 1 to 1.5 million RMB to support native Chinese designers. Xue Xingfeng, a shop owner in Chengdu further exemplified this trend with his actions—while Xu has attended the MODE trade show before, he had never made any purchases; this time, however, he placed an order of 100,000 RMB on the first day of the show. He said: “Coming to the MODE show this time, [I] feel that the clothes are much more wearable. The clothes from the last few seasons had not been satisfactory, which limited my choices.”

Trend two: an increasing number of buyers have joined the market with more diversified identities

Among the new buyers, some are familiar with overseas brands and some are from traditional retail department stores; alongside, there are also many non-professional buyers.

Compared with experienced shop owners and buyers, new buyers have only the consumers around them to study and from whom to learn how to run a buyer’s shop. Among the buyers interviewed by Luxe.CO, is a couple from Yiwu (a tier 3 city in Zhejiang province), who left their jobs in a state-owned company to pursue higher earnings after the birth of their child, and decided to open a shop. At the time of the interview, they had placed orders totalling 50,000 RMB, many of which were with overseas brands. Though they have just opened their store, they have gained an initial understanding of the potential customer group in Yiwu. For instance, they believe that accessories are not popular in autumn and winter in Yiwu because of the cold local weather; in addition, limited by the local level of consumption, the retail price of their clothes items will be around 1,000 to 3,000 RMB.

In 2013, Qiuqiu opened a small, integrated store of 80 square metres, named Chicparis, in Wenzhou. Monthly sales now total more than 600,000 RMB. Because of the store’s location in a wealthy residential area, the per customer transaction value is relatively high. According to Qiuqiu, the store’s main customers are mothers, many of whose children have recently returned from overseas study. These young people enjoy the brands in her store as well. With very little regard for whether they are luxury brands, young customers are more inclined to accept new designer brands. Qiuqiu said: “the store’s previous target customers were women from 25 to 45, but recently, [I] have observed that women under 25, and those from 20 to 30, in general, are demonstrating stronger spending power.”

No doubt, buyers' added practical experience, as well as their improving professional skills, will play a role in pushing the market to grow out of this initial stage of chaos, into a more mature, regulated and systematic future.

Trend three: buyers expect designers to be more down to earth

When asked about her view of Chinese designer brands, Qiuqiu expressed her frank opinion that Chinese designer brands have more rules and restrictions for buyers than their European counterparts. She has struggled over whether to increase her orders with Chinese designer brands. She said: “The minimum order with Chinese designer brands is higher than with some of the European brands.” For instance, the minimum order with Italian fashion brand N°21 is 10,000 Euros with a 60 to 65 per cent discount, while some Chinese designer brands she has encountered require a minimum order of 200,000 RMB with discounts of around 50 per cent.

On this topic, director Ting Zhou shared her opinion with Luxe.Co: “I think for Chinese designer brands to be competitive in the Chinese market, their designs need to be as good as those of overseas brands; in addition, their pricing needs to be more down to earth, so that more Chinese consumers can afford them.”

The manager of the Shanghai store “Zhengjingke” suggested that in his 40 years of experience as a buyer, he has favoured brands that fit his shops’ aesthetics. However, according to him, many of the designs by Chinese designers remain semi-finished, with overwhelming personal characteristics, making them less suitable as products for the mass market.

Lacking the energy and experience to deal with sales channels directly, designers study the market with the help of showrooms. Despite this, they should also build communication channels with multi-brand stores, buyers and sales personnel to gain a better understanding of their own brands and the characteristics of their customer group, as well as their spending habits in physical stores. For example, in the team of designer Minjie Ou’s brand Ricostru, staff are assigned to maintain frequent communication with buyers’ shops and to provide training for sales personnel. Awaylee’ s founder Wei Li also told us that when starting out she would visit Brand New China stores where her products were first sold and actively gather feedback from the customers through the sales personnel. Both of these techniques are proven to be effective ways to directly improve sales and perfect the brand and the product.

Although domestic buyers have raised several concerns for Chinese designer brands to address, it’s hard to deny that domestic brands have matured. Menswear buyer Jack Cassidy of the British department store Selfridges stressed to Luxe.CO that he believes that the young Chinese designer brands place a special emphasis on quality, the level of which is approaching that of some of the top designer brands in London.