China's Underwear Industry: Several Major Needs And Problems

What is the essence of fashion apparel industry?

The biggest feature of the industry is that consumer demand is hard to predict.

Only by greatly shortening the time from design to completion of sales to meet the uncertain needs of consumers can we achieve a breakthrough success. This is the essence of the whole apparel industry.

Take Zara as an example, it integrates the whole industry chain, integrates production, logistics and sales, shortens the time from design to sale to 12 days.

What does this mean?

It means that it can immediately follow up the hot selling products according to the performance of the listed products and quickly grasp the market pulsation, which is the reason for the success of Zara.

So what is the nature of the underwear industry?

First of all, why do women wear underwear?

There are three reasons: the need for protection, the need for molding, and the need for fashion.

This refers to the basic needs of women in their daily life, work and exercise, and the protection of the chest by wearing underwear.

In fact, it is not just women who use underwear to protect themselves. Men are the same, especially athletes.

It is understood that Adidas's high-tech tights sports underwear Techfit will become a special sports underwear for all 30 teams of NBA.

From the 2009 All Star game, NBA players will be wearing this high-tech sports underwear.

Adidas's Techfit sports underwear is divided into two categories, using high-performance elastic fabrics, to provide effective muscle pack and support for athletes.

At the same time, TPU energy storage strips are carefully arranged in the key muscle groups of the body to help athletes achieve better exercise efficiency and enhance the strength and endurance of players.

The female body changes slowly under the influence of many factors such as gravity, age and so on.

Only the right and proper underwear can keep the figure.

Here, we should specify: underwear is divided into fashion and decorative underwear and functional (adjustment, correction, correction, body) underwear according to function, both can meet the needs of different groups.

Fashion decorative underwear can meet the needs of women with better body proportions, while functional underwear can enhance the shaping function of women with poor stature.

Women's pursuit of body curvilinear beauty makes the need for plastic form the second main reason for women to wear underwear.

Zhang Rongming said: "bra comes from the west, Asian women are not so plump as Westerners, so Asian women use bra to pay more attention to their functionality, such as the effect of gathering and shaping. For this topic, we collaborated with Beijing Institute Of Fashion Technology in a human engineering research institute."

Through this research institute, admiring hundreds of thousands of Asian women's human data models to analyze, get digital support, on the surface you see each bra is almost the same, in fact, each has a small difference.

For example, the design of a shoulder strap contains many different functions, such as skid resistance, sag prevention and so on. Women in different ages have different functions.

After the design, the love underwear has to be tried and tested repeatedly.

The company has a special trial team. After trying on it, it will assess the appearance, comfort level and fashion level, and listen to the opinions of the panel.

The members of the expert group include leaders, shopping guides and customers. In accordance with their opinions, the revised plan is finally implemented to reach everyone's recognition. The sale of the whole love underwear from design, production to terminal needs a long time.

What is fashion?

Fashion involves all aspects of life, such as dressing, eating, behavior, living, and even emotional expression and thinking.

In the history of underwear development, Elizabeth I, the queen of England, raised her corset to an unprecedented "political height" in sixteenth Century, and her corset became popular throughout the country.

The vast majority of women are satisfied with their psychological needs and satisfy their spiritual needs through the products, ideas and even ways of thinking advocated by these opinion leaders.

The strategy of the cat brand is to create an oriental version of the "Vitoria secret" strategy, which is a precise interpretation of "fashion demand".

"We hope that in the next five to ten years, we can have thousands of sexy underwear life experience museums throughout the country, which is our very clear strategic objective."

Cat Man International chairman Lin Lin claimed.

The "secret of Vitoria" is the top underwear brand in the United States. There are 1000 stores in the United States, with sales of nearly US $6 billion in 2007. Its products include women's underwear, bra, underwear, swimsuit, casual wear, women's shoes, cosmetics and all kinds of matching clothing, luxury shorts, perfume cosmetics and related books.

Problems in China's underwear industry

After more than ten years of vigorous development, China's underwear industry has made outstanding achievements, but there are still some problems.

There is such an interesting phenomenon in the underwear industry that most brands feel inadequate assets.

When a brand comes out, it doesn't know what brand positioning is.

What are the functional interests of consumers?

What are the satisfied needs of consumers?

What are the potential psychological feelings of consumers when they consume brand names?

The accumulation of brand assets does not seem to attract many brands' attention.

The reality is that many brands are pursuing a popular brand line, such as internationalization, warmth, romance and so on. In fact, this is a misunderstanding. These elements are actually popular. They are the common characteristics of all brands, and can not become a unique differentiation advantage of a brand. In fact, they are caught in a homogeneity mistake, so it is not surprising that thousands of cards are on the side.

What is even more incomprehensible is that many underwear brands, apart from trademarks, do not have any brand positioning, such as consumer segmentation, recognition system and so on, so many products are of good quality, but they can not afford to sell or sell well.

Although some brands are aware of the importance of brand equity and have consciously carried out brand building work, a common feature is that the degree of individuation of the brand is not enough, and the characteristics of consumers' private psychological needs can not be effectively balanced, thus losing the unique differentiation advantage of the brand.

For example, Manifen, now a fast rising underwear brand, although sales and popularity are rising rapidly, and consciously made some personalized work of the brand, such as vitality, personality and other performance, but it is still not enough system and professional, especially in the effective division of consumers and brand unique proposition, is still relatively vague.

But in underwear industry, it is good to be able to make personalized brand like this.

In terms of image recognition, the major brands are basically at the level of following trends and comparisons. Which models do they use this year or whether they have a consistent image? The result is that the brand is in the first half of the year, and the second half of the year is hot.

Of course, this is only the smallest element of image recognition, and the most important element is that the phenomenon of brand follow suit is very common. You use red as image recognition, and I follow up. You use the oval logo, I also cloned, resulting in thousand cards, no personality.

The homogenization of Image Recognition brings great obstacles to brand breakout.

As a lingerie industry, to some extent, we sell sometimes not just a product, but a look, a hope, a subconscious satisfaction. This is the culture of the brand. At this point, there is no brand in the underwear industry.

This is just like buying Nike sports shoes, which is the spirit of its sport. This is the power of brand culture.

Looking at the current underwear industry, in the operation of brand culture, the "cultural" series of Dunhuang culture show is good. At least, it has given the brand a traditional Chinese and mysterious culture, which has injected some emotional factors and added value. This is a success compared with other brands, though there is no overall brand culture operation system.

This year, we are advocating vitality, and next year we will suddenly come to maturity. At present, many underwear brands often make mistakes.

They do not realize that building a brand requires a long-term and gradual process, and requires a scientific and continuous system.

On the contrary, emotional brand building is very common in the underwear industry. For example, a certain brand has made a good sale in the middle and low grade brand. Under the drive of good quality, the brand has already had enough strength. As a result, it suddenly abandoned the low-end market, and used the same brand name as the high-end market, because of the rapid pformation, it fell into an awkward position.

The way of brand communication is varied. It can communicate with target consumers through various forms and channels, public relations, event marketing, news, advertising and so on. It can be one of the elements to form a communication system for brand building.

But the underwear industry, at present, most of the brand communication methods of enterprises are relatively simple. Apart from the underwear exhibition and show, there seems to be no better brand communication.

Occasionally, some brands have made an image advertisement on TV, but it is also a popular demand. There is no core interest point, so the result can be imagined.

In fact, all these phenomena are caused by the backward brand marketing techniques in the whole industry, and there is still a big gap between the relatively mature industries, such as household appliances, health care products, and so on.

Of course, with the intensification of competition in the industry and the enhancement of brand awareness, there will surely be more and better brands, and the major brands in the underwear industry will surely become more and more beautiful.