Jedi Counter Attack In Department Stores? Dispute Between Buyers And Agents

With the characteristics of buyer purchasing, the business and selected products include the major brand commemorative edition, limited edition new product or cross border cooperation special edition, and regularly organize their own fashion week, concert or art exhibition.

Unlike our children's department stores.

In fact, not long ago, at the end of 2010, most of the independent designer brands, and the 3 phase of the new world fashion, which had part of the buyer's shop, was unveiled in Shanghai. It has become a new fashion landmark in Shanghai.

In Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou, fashion shops are mushrooming.

The "buyer's fashion" is increasingly emerging in the Chinese perspective and has brought new boutique stores and shopping malls to mainland China.

How fine quality department stores are?

"More than 20 years ago, shopping with family members in department stores was always the most exciting time of my holidays.

Now, department stores are closing down and replaced by huge shopping centers.

Here we can find cinemas, restaurants and hundreds of shops.

You can even spend the whole day. "

Lan Guoying, chief executive, said in an interview, "but do we really need those big shopping centers that can stay for a day? How many people are willing to search for shops that are suitable for their own style in a large shopping mall that can be shuttled to the lost mall? Consumers need a new type of shopping ground" Allan Namchaisiri.

In the definition of LAN Guo Ying, such a shopping area "will not be particularly large, characterized by buyer procurement, with only a few dozen brands, but each has its own personality".

He believes that "even in other shopping centers or department stores will also appear in the brand, in this shopping location will be the first to show new products.

There will also be regular fashion week, concerts or art exhibitions.

I call this a shopping place as a boutique department store.

As we are now familiar with, The Inn Boutique is small but unique.

Nearly half of the brand merchandise is selected by buyers, and the company operates on its own.

Buyers usually choose products from all over the world in commemorative edition, limited edition or cross-border cooperation special edition.

Compared with traditional department stores, boutique shopping space is open, and there is no counter to create a sense of distance for consumers.

But compared to shopping centers, boutique stores are small in size and display styles are more distinctive.

"Their operators and planners will also organize some special art and fashion activities, such as boutique shopping malls, their own fashion festivals, art exhibitions and DJ parties.

They even invite different brand designers to work together to design limited products that only belong to the mall, such as jewelry or jeans.

Andrew Keith, chairman of JOYCE, a senior retail brand and fashion shopping center, told reporters.

This fashion industry veteran served Lane Crawford, a famous buyer department store in Hongkong, and served as its vice president of procurement.

In the interview with the reporter, the president is behind the unveiling of the JOYCE 40th anniversary commemorative exhibition, "A Journey in Fashion", which was opened in Shanghai Rock the Bund yesterday.

This buyer's fashion shopping center has worked with artists Ceng Fanzhi and C et dric Rivrain to create a series of limited products.

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Although boutique stores are not as luxurious as the shopping mall, they are all powerful, but they can effectively break away from the incantation of the current shopping center in China.

The operation of the joint point deduction mode is that the brand does not need to pay the rent to enter the shopping mall, but by extracting the deduction point from the sales volume of the brand as the gross profit of the department store.

Those major brands who want to improve their visibility and local market share through large shopping centers in prime locations are also the main objects of other shopping centers' pursuit and investment. They often appear in different shopping centers in the same city, but the items they sell are roughly the same.

This is not only easy to make consumers "aesthetic fatigue", but also easy to let the owners of different shopping centers get into the homogenization competition.

"Many suppliers are acting on multiple brands at the same time, making more and more capital to department stores, leaving less and less profit for shopping centers.

To solve this problem, we must increase the proportion of self purchase and sale, such as hiring buyers to purchase goods.

Huang Yongzhi, general manager of [27.44 -0.87%], once told the media, "although this pformation is very difficult, it is a trend of the development of fashion department stores in the future."

Buyers are hard to cultivate?

"Department store" has become an old word buried in the distance for most post-80s and 90s.

And 20 years ago, it used to be a fashion endorsement.

With the emergence of shopping centers and specialty stores, the commercial form that once dominated the fashion retailing industry was also struck out in the irreversible years.

As the first luxury department store in Shanghai, Mei Mei department finally ended on Huaihai Road last year.

Old stores are closing down, which makes people have to question the future of new boutique.

Lian Crawford used to be the first buyer's market in China.

In December 2006, after 6 years in Shanghai, he announced his withdrawal.

3 months later, 3 years in Hangzhou, he continued to bid farewell to West Lake.

Many people in the industry have attributed the withdrawal of 4 years ago in mainland China to "the difference between buyers and consumers' selection criteria is too large, consumers do not know enough about many fashion brands, and the risk of buying is too large."

But only 4 years later, can the boutique department buy a place in mainland China? Wang Xinmin, President of Beijing Seth group, once said: "when domestic department stores are learning international management, the most difficult thing to learn is international sourcing and buyer training."

Lan Guoying thinks, "the more and more buyer shops in China's two or three tier cities, this shows that the consumer groups have become bigger and bigger. They are fashionable and fashion conscious. They have an independent view of originality and should be the first to be the first to experience the latest trend.

Usually, consumers with new thinking tend to choose luxury brands such as Martin Margeila, Neil Barrett, Raf Simmons or Vivienne Westwood, rather than mainstream luxury brands such as LV or Chanel.

At the same time, with the emergence of the buyer shop, Lan Guoying said he believed that there were more possibilities in China to cultivate buyers familiar with the local market: "for example, there are fashion buyer stores Shine and Arrtco Collection in Hangzhou, and their operators have chosen from all over the world for brands that Chinese consumers are not yet familiar with and more special fashion brands."

The dispute between agents and buyers?

Wang Xiangsheng, a fashion industry veteran and fashion industry researcher, believes that there is still some "acclimatization" in the mainland market for "buyer style operation": "although the buyer's business is the way out for the development of department stores, it can not be denied that the actual operation of this mode is rather complicated."

Although the buying system is regarded as the straw to save the homogenous fashion shopping center under the joint mode, whether the international brand that persists in shaping the "unified image" will raise objection to the unique display mode of the buyer's department stores? Will there be conflicts of interest between the buyer's boutique department and the brand agents? These are the unavoidable problems of the development of boutique stores under the buyer's mode.

"Different brands have different views on this. Different ways of dealing with these contradictions will directly determine whether they support, or to what extent, they support the buying department store."

Andrew Keith thinks, "these contradictions need specific problems to be analyzed in detail, so it is difficult to generalize.

However, more and more international brands are optimistic about the mainland market and cancel or stop renewing contracts with agents. This will be an opportunity for the development of boutique shopping sites.