Brand Interpretation: Late GAP

"If it doesn't come, it must be wrong, but there is no" coming late. "Yang Deming, President of GAP Group China, describes the company's new decision.

The largest chain clothing retailer in the United States announced its expansion to China at the end of June, which is the largest brand in the group.

In Shanghai and Beijing, 4 shops are being renovated.

Shanghai's two are in the Huaihai middle road Hongkong square and Nanjing West Road Shimen intersection, one of Beijing's two is in Wangfujing APM.

With the entry of GAP, Huaihailu Road and Wangfujing look more like the high street of the United States or Britain: GAP, ZARA, H&M...

These brands always come together. Even GAP's new competitor, American Apparel, has entered Beijing and Shanghai in recent years. The fact is that GAP is really late.

Whoever comes late has to pay higher rent. This is one of the reasons why GAP can only open 4 stores this year. Good places have been occupied by peers. It is not easy to find the right store.

In fact, about 8 or 9 years ago, GAP had already appeared in China. At that time, there were GAP counters in some shopping malls in the country, but only wholesalers sold them in the form of franchising. Only more than 100 square meters of space were displayed.

This GAP is real.

It has dug its Lorenzo and Moretti from China's best buy and Tesco, two of them being the president and managing director of GAP China, and also appointed the chairman of Standard Chartered Bank, Greater China, Ceng Jingxuan, as a member of the board of directors of the Moretti.

The new heavyweight team shoulders the most important plan of the whole group in 2010: opening up the Chinese market.

Unlike H&M from Sweden and ZARA of Spain, GAP has a very large local market, which has focused most of its efforts on the US in the past 40 years, and the current international market accounts for only 19% of GAP group's total sales.

But the big domestic market in the United States is still saturated after all.

"We can't open 1000 more stores in the United States. The new space is definitely outside North America."

Yang Deming said.

GAP is not just aware of this, but the continuous decline in performance over the past few years has given it no time to take account of its development.

GAP has been the source of China for 20 years, and like its counterparts, it has also regarded China as one of its production bases.

Before entering China, GAP has purchased over 10 billion US dollars from China, and about 300000 workers from more than 400 factories have produced 30% products for GAP.

Now, this is gradually changing from the world factory to the world market.

So ZARA occupied the eye-catching position of major business circles in Shanghai and Beijing. 33 of the 86 new stores opened in the first half of were in China, and UNIQLO opened the world flagship store at Shanghai Nanjing West Road subway.

For GAP, it is necessary to display all the 6 products of men's wear, women's wear, maternity dress, children's wear, baby's clothing, underwear and household wear, and the size of each store should be 1100-1500 square meters.

Rents in commercial real estate are soaring now, which means that the cost of entry will be much higher.

Besides the high cost of shops, the production and logistics cycle is also a problem.

From clothing design to physical objects, ZARA takes 12 days, H&M takes 21 days, and GAP takes 90 days.

But GAP is not worried on the surface, and its quick response to fashion and popularity is not its selling point.

Yang Deming doesn't even think of himself as a fast fashion brand. "People need casual clothes after work, fashionable clothes on Party, and high quality clothes to wear at work.

We have good fabrics and workmanship, and fashionable and practical design. People need our stuff. "

More fashionable and more sense of design is what GAP has been trying to do in recent years.

A few years ago, people could describe GAP's clothing with "comfortable, nice looking, no mistake, but no personality".

Shops are everywhere, customers are everywhere, but the style is not rich enough, so it is very easy to crash shirts.

But now, GAP already has the backing of the big designer, the lineup is quite strong: the shoes designed by French shoe master Pierre Hardy, the children's clothes designed by Stella McCartney, the latest quarter's co designer is the hot Chinese designer Alexander Wang, who designs a series of costumes less than 100 dollars for GAP.

Although GAP pays more attention to design than ever before, it is not as popular as its peers.

Compared with last year's thousands of people queuing up at the H&M gate of Huaihai middle road to catch up with Jimmy Choo's cooperative shoes, GAP's performance was simply low-key: when it launched the women's shoes series designed by Pierre Hardy, there was no shoe box, shoes were packed in pparent plastic bags, and only Designer Collection was printed on the bottom of the hot metal, even without the name of the master.

"We don't pursue the effect of more than 1000 people queuing up on the first morning," Yang Deming said. "Usually we sign a year with designers, not just for a while, but we have to do a lot of business."

More design details are hidden in places that consumers may not be able to notice. For example, intimate subdivision sizes are always the characteristics of this brand.

For jeans, in addition to the American version 8 and 10, there are three letters, A, R and L, which correspond to shorter, normal and longer trouser legs, which are convenient for waistline and hip circumference. However, guests with different height proportions choose the trousers that best match their figure.

On the official website of GAP, women's clothing is also divided into two categories: Petite and Tall. Different designs are made for the same size of the same garment, including sleeves, sleeves, crotch and crotch.

In China, GAP intends to further emphasize this subdivision. They have arranged specialized teams to research and design local consumers, and design some suitable local styles for the East and West and the north and South markets.

I hope this example will not offend readers from different regions, but it may be more clear: under the same height, Chongqing girls have short waist and long legs, while Shanghai girls have shorter waist length legs, so long T-shirts are more suitable for sale in Shanghai, while short ones will be more popular in Chongqing.

In addition, China is a price sensitive market. H&M sells jeans to 99 yuan, and UNIQLO T-shirts rarely exceed 100 yuan. To fight price wars, the space left for GAP is already small.

In fact, in Europe and the United States, the price of GAP is slightly higher than that of the others. Especially after the company cut off the product of less than US $20 in 2002, the market positioning of GAP brand has a slight improvement: it seems to be still in the high street parity army, but the price is increasingly close to Banana Republic, which is the main high-end business route of J.Crew, Ralph Lauren and GAP group.

In the Japanese and Korean markets, the price of GAP is higher than that of the European and American markets. It has changed from civilian brand to quasi major brand. Usually, a pair of jeans will be sold for more than 100 dollars.

For the Chinese market, GAP emphasized that he had never taken the high margin route, and 30% of the products were produced in China. According to the principle of "setting the retail price at a cost," the price would not be too high.

Yang Deming said that although there is no specific pricing at present, the price in China should not be much different from that in the United States, which is cheaper than in Japan and Korea.

In addition, there will be so many promotions - so many costumes, each has more sizes than others, and the inventory must be very high. When it is necessary to make room for new storage, the old money will be sold at a discount like abroad.

Whether it's expensive or not, it's up to those people who carry their wallets into the store.

GAP product series is comprehensive, trying to please everyone, but this kind of location that wants to take care of the whole family is easy to appear widely and obscure.

Fortunately, this problem has nothing to do with the Chinese market. Here, the age of consumers is positioned at the age of 25-35, which may fluctuate slightly, but generally speaking, it is clear.

For this group of people, online shopping is just as important as physical store shopping.

When the first batch of 4 stores in China is being renovated, the online sales platform is being built, and the shop will open at the same time with the entity store before the end of the year.

Among competitors, in addition to UNIQLO, the other few have not yet launched online sales, and GAP, which has no advantage in rent, apparently wants to do something in the online store business. Even in 2008, when the sales volume of the entity stores was frustrated, GAP's global network sales also exceeded $1 billion.

The GAP with big money came into China, which is only the forearm of the whole group.

It also hopes that other brands such as Banana Republic and Old Navy will also march into China when the first tier cities are firmly on their feet and infiltrated into the two or three tier cities.

According to its China plan, this year is Beijing and Shanghai, next year is Hongkong. In 2012, it can enter the second tier cities. By 2015, the Chinese market will surpass Japan and become the second largest market outside of the GAP group.

Such plans seem a bit familiar, but ZARA, H&M and UNIQLO are already taking the second step. If GAP is late, we need to have a more competitive strategic development model, but even if the problem is global, it seems that no solution has yet been found.