Evo Menswear: Modular Customization

Custom tailored "advanced customization" is the most profitable segment of the clothing industry. He Guanbin, CEO and founder of Evan's men's clothing, was deeply attracted by Savile Row in London when he was studying in England. The street began to gather in the world's top tailors from the beginning of nineteenth Century, and was praised as a sanctuary for advanced clothing customization.

The process of customizing an advanced garment can be regarded as an extraordinary experience. Professional tailored master will communicate with customers in a two-way way, understand their personal life, occupational characteristics, dressing environment, provide professional advice, and record the characteristics and special requirements of customers in detail. For example, the location of mobile phone, checkbook, pocket of pen and even driving habits are all details to be considered when tailored to suit.

There are thousands of choices not only for fabrics, but also for customers to choose styles, collar types and pockets.

After the general direction is decided, it is a more delicate and considerate personal measurement process to get fine-tuning personal dimensions.

In tailoring, first-class tailors will closely integrate each customer's special requirements into the work, so that the details of each custom made garment are not only fully fit to the personal size, but also integrated with the pure personal concept, from the whole to the details. The new customers of special shape may need to go through two or three different tests before making the final decision.

If you want, customers can also embroider their own Pinyin abbreviations on the inside lining of the suit and the cuffs of the shirts.

However, the time and money required for advanced apparel customization are discouraged by many consumers. It is hard for mass consumers to accept this expensive, time-consuming, demanding advanced customization mode.

Especially in China, on the one hand, because the purchasing power of most consumers is limited, on the other hand, because of the different understanding of clothing consumption culture, the scope of the concept of "advanced clothing customization" pplanted to China is limited.

But can we build an operable fashion production and sales model, which can retain some of the benefits of high-end customization and adapt to the Chinese market?

　　在規(guī)模和定制之間

In 2006, He Guanbin founded Evo global custom dress Co., Ltd., first of all, chose to enter the field of clothing e-commerce.

In the absence of popular online shopping in China, Evo has become the first apparel e-commerce company in the Chinese market, and has also pioneered the apparel customization business.

In the process of "custom tailoring" through the network platform, He Guanbin found that it is difficult to imitate the advanced customization mode of Saville street in China.

In the consumer survey conducted at the beginning of Evo, evor found that the majority of the consumers in the middle and low level in the domestic consumers were more likely to buy large scale production of ready-made garments.

In Saville street, a custom-made suit usually takes 4-12 weeks and goes through three tries and adjustments. This is still a guest in London.

In fact, many Americans have to wait for a year to customize clothes for Saville Street top tailors visiting the United States.

Each Saville Street suit is made up of 40 hours, and 95% is done by hand. The price of two suits is about 1700 pounds.

For many Chinese consumers, clothing is more like a fast moving product. Such high prices and long waiting time are hard for many people to accept.

On the other hand, the most attractive part of "advanced clothing customization" comes from the fact that the designer is no longer the designer, but the consumer himself.

The clothing styles, specifications, materials and other elements are determined by the consumers themselves, thus ensuring the unique characteristics of each garment.

However, many Chinese consumers are hard to describe exactly what kind of design is needed, but conceptually feel that they need some elements that are close to fashion.

Large scale production of garments can not only save consumers' money and time, but also keep up with fashion trends.

However, to He Guanbin's delight, during the investigation, many white-collar consumers, especially male white-collar consumers, expressed their dissatisfaction with the stereotyped clothing types.

Because men's formal clothing is relatively regular, and the business clothes they wear are basically custom-made by clothing companies, it is difficult to have personalized elements.

They hope to buy some personalized fashions in their own capacity to match their identities.

In such a case, Evo began locking the custom business in the white-collar men's clothing market.

The first step for Evo's customization is to simplify the customized production process.

For most of the male white-collar consumers in China, they do not need too complicated design, nor can they spend so much time buying a dress.

While they want to get personalized clothing, they also pay more attention to the price performance of garments. What Evo is doing is to provide them with a clothing that can highlight individual characteristics and cost-effective.

However, the early reliance on network sales of Evo quickly discovered some limitations of the network platform.

In online sales, because consumers can not directly touch objects, consumers themselves are very difficult to control the quality of clothing.

Coupled with the influence of sales habits, Internet sales have long been the pronoun of "low quality and low quality", which is also very harmful to the establishment of brand image.

In order to make more white-collar consumers have a more direct contact with Evo's "clothing customization", and in order to set up a good brand image of Evo, Evo decided in 2007 to launch its own physical store at the same time of Internet marketing.

In order to get closer to their core consumer groups, Evo's 7 chain stores have chosen to operate in the commercial center of Guangzhou.

　　個性元素模塊化

In order to facilitate large-scale production, Evo began to try to modularized men's clothing. For example, a shirt, Evo decomposed it into several parts, such as neckline, sleeve, plate body, rear swing and so on. According to popular fashion, different styles were introduced in each part for consumers to choose.

This modular design not only provides the possibility for mass production of Evo, but also provides a premise guarantee for He Guanbin to achieve "standardized customization" and meets the needs of target consumers.

"These male white-collar workers need personalized elements, but it is very difficult for them to design their own clothes.

After we have made a modular distinction of clothing, we have launched different designs so that they can do multiple choice questions, and simply draw a few strokes to get a piece of clothing that belongs to you.

To provide customized services for consumers is bound to face the problem of increasing costs.

The production cost of small batch or even single garment is much higher than that of mass customization. If we want to make customized products with large-scale production methods, we must solve the problem of finding production suppliers.

On this issue, Evo combines its own advantages with the traditional clothing production enterprises' peak season production characteristics to minimize their own production costs.

Because the traditional clothing production enterprises received orders in the previous season, they began to produce the next season's clothing. Especially for most men's clothing, autumn and winter were usually the peak season for consumers to buy. Therefore, for the enterprises, spring and autumn became the peak season for production, and by the autumn and winter, many enterprises' machines and workers were in idle state.

For garment customization companies, seasonal production is required in season, and no seasonal production is required.

Therefore, when the production demand of Evo is expanding, it is just the relatively idle time for most garment manufacturers.

After receiving orders from consumers, Evo will assemble a small batch of orders to the factory. The factory can make swimming production according to the orders of Evo (Evo's off season production, will not occupy the main production time of the producers, and the producers can flexibly arrange the production time).

Under such a mode, Evo can cooperate with larger manufacturers at a lower price, while ensuring the quality and quality of clothing, and also has a beneficial complement to the entire apparel industry chain.

At present, there are already six or seven large garment manufacturers in China for garment processing, but He Guanbin firmly believes that "more manufacturers will fully understand the production mode of Evo and join them. On the one hand, they can reduce the production risk of Evo, and at the same time, they can maintain a good complementary relationship with suppliers, which will create an innovative production relationship".

In fact, Evo's "standardized customization" mode can not only complement the industrial chain effectively, but also reduce the waste of resources.

The traditional P to D mode adopted by traditional clothing enterprises (traditional enterprises must produce according to the seasonal orders obtained ahead of time) determines that enterprises must predict consumers' needs for production.

After predicting the market demand for the next season, the factory will mechanically carry out mass production according to this demand.

Large scale production enterprises must purchase large quantities of raw materials at a time to ensure production, and in actual production process, they often consume all raw materials and produce a surplus of raw materials.

These raw materials, which have no problems with their own quality, are not likely to be processed in large quantities, and are likely to be treated at low prices to small garment factories, and even many materials can only be treated as waste products.

This not only caused the enterprise to bear enormous production pressure, but also caused a lot of waste of resources.

And Evo's "standardized customization" usually requires only a few or even a few small batch production of the enterprise, and it can just use these remaining materials.

Therefore, Evo only needs half price or even 1/3 price to get good quality imported fabrics, which can guarantee the quality of clothing and the price is low.

In the clothing store of Evo, the price of a shirt is about 300 yuan, and the price of a suit is about 2000 yuan, which is basically the same as that of some large domestic brand manufacturers, far lower than the price of foreign advanced customization.

　　“店神”提速生產(chǎn)周期

It is at least 3 weeks to customize a shirt by a garment customization company abroad, but consumers can get one shirt in Evo within a week, and a more complicated suit can also be delivered within two weeks.

The efficient customization process of Evo is attributed to the standardized management implemented by Evo based on the IT system, which effectively improves the production efficiency of Evo and shortens the customized production cycle.

He Guanbin called the system "store God".

Evo's "store God" system can first analyze what products the other Internet traders are selling now.

Other consumers who shop on the Internet, what kind of shopping behavior do they have?

According to these analysis data, Evo can quickly grasp the fashion trend of fashion, and then combine different fashion models to provide consumers based on these trends.

This will enable Evo to control the launch time of new products within 7 days, which is almost comparable to the fast fashion giant ZARA (ZARA usually has 7-14 days to launch new models).

The supplier will send each type of raw material to Evo via the network platform, and choose according to the raw materials provided by the supplier.

In the process of modular production, Evo's IT system will detail the size, specifications and materials of each part to the supplier in detail.

After receiving the order, the supplier only needs to make the standardized production according to the order of the raw materials, instead of making two modifications. Finally, according to the customer information stored by the computer, it will be combined into the finished product.

The supplier's production schedule can also be sent back to Evo in time. If there is a problem in one link, Evo can change the manufacturer quickly without procrastination to the whole process of garment production.

On the Internet customization platform, Evo simplified the complex personal information that consumers need to fill out, and simplified it into some standard language for consumers to choose.

After filling out the necessary information such as size and waistline, consumers can only complete the pre customization process by selecting their favorite styles according to the different styles of different parts.

Beginning with the customization of a product, Evo will also track the consumer through this IT system.

In the process of production, Evo will inform consumers in a timely manner through SMS, e-mail, etc., how much time the customized products have been produced, and how much time it will take to get them, so that consumers can further ease the waiting anxiously.

Some small and medium-sized clothing customization companies often encounter the problem of customer information management in the process of enlarging scale, thus affecting the centralized management of data and hamper chain operation.

EVA uses the "store God" system to get centralised management and distribution from the beginning of the consumer data. A consumer customize a garment in a store of Evo, his size information will be retained in the system and pmitted to various branches and online stores.

If the customer's data change, the store God system will also update customer information in order to ensure the most suitable products for customers.

He Guanbin expects the future of Evo to serve China's 5 million white-collar workers, and its expansion may exceed the clothing sector.

"Evo is more like making clothes in the Internet mode. The IT system is the real core of Evo. With this core technology, Evo does not necessarily focus on the field of clothing only."

But on the way to expand the market scale, Evo is also facing new uncertainties.

For example, after the gradual expansion of the market scale, the existing standardized management system of Evo will not meet the needs of the market, which will also increase the cost of R & D in enterprises.

At the same time, the relationship between Evo and suppliers will also change, so the production in season may not be sustainable.

In the face of these challenges, what Evo needs to do is to further tailor its business model according to market demand.