Clothing Agency System Difficult Chain Stores

Editor's note: in August 28th, Beijing's contemporary shopping mall took a step of chain expansion, and chose Shijingshan, known as CRD Capital Recreation Disteict (Beijing entertainment center), as the first stop of brand chain.

Stepping out of the single store mode is now a collective move in department stores.

Under this increasingly obvious trend, what will be the situation of clothing brand suppliers with department stores as the main sales channels?

Li Yuanhui is the marketing director of a women's clothing brand in Shenzhen. This brand has special counters in many shopping malls in the south. Hangzhou's intime department store and Shenzhen Maoming industry's many chain stores are the shopping centers where they often deal with each other.

After the chain operation of department stores, there were many adjustments in his work details and directions.

With the accelerated pace of chain stores, it is also a mixed blessing for clothing suppliers.

The clothing brand agency system is difficult to adapt to the department store chain store chain network resources can help the supplier's brand quickly occupy the national market, and the attraction of chain department stores to suppliers is constantly improving.

"Chain stores have their chain advantages. For example, our brand goods were not originally planned to go to Jinhua, but after the cooperation of the company and Yintai department, they entered the Jinhua branch of Yintai.

This is good for our brand to expand the market. "

Li Yuanhui said.

Chain stores have the ability to help suppliers expand their original market.

If the Wangfujing brand agency and the NAUTICA brand of the United States signed the agency agreement in the group system, NAUTICA entered the Northwest China market with the expansion of Wangfujing.

At present, chain has become the mainstream business organization form of retail enterprises. Many people talk about how to upgrade traditional department stores.

However, it is not easy for domestic department stores to link up.

In the true sense of chain operation, the headquarters of department stores must adopt the way of "centralized procurement and unified distribution", so as to ensure the quality of commodities, reduce procurement costs and circulation costs, and achieve maximum benefits through centralized management of capital.

As one of the key points of chain operation, centralized purchasing has been very popular in other retail formats, such as supermarkets and hypermarkets, but it has been difficult in the department store industry.

In recent years, domestic department stores have been expanding their scale, mergers and acquisitions, chain stores and other initiatives, but the scale efficiency is not satisfactory.

"This is mainly because the department stores still mostly use the traditional mode of" store to agents ", and the control of the branch is very weak.

Li Yuanhui believes that the agency system of clothing brands restricts the chain operation of shopping malls to a certain extent, especially when department stores want to cross regional business.

"For example, we have our own general agent in Hubei province. They are responsible for the market in Hubei province. If we put the product directly into Wuhan store, we must first communicate with Hubei general agent, and this communication is not smooth at times."

Because of this, at present, the proportion of national chain department stores in domestic department stores is not large. State department stores are only big businesses and Wangfujing has taken the first step. Other state-owned department stores mostly operate in the region or operate locally.

"In order to reduce the cost in the middle, some chain store department stores are constantly increasing the counter set up by manufacturers. This is a big trend."

Li Yuanhui said.

The supply chain relationship between upstream suppliers and downstream department stores has been unbalanced, and department stores have stronger bargaining power.

Li Yuanhui said that the discount points put forward by suppliers in the shopping mall have been rising steadily, and they will regularly eliminate the ten suppliers after sorting, which shows the strong position of department stores.

At present, the operation mode of domestic department stores is mainly based on joint operation points, supplemented by self run income and management revenue.

The point of joint operation is to agree with the supplier in advance on the rate of deduction. The department stores will receive a unified payment. After about 30-40 days, the supplier will settle the bill and return it to the supplier's remaining accounts.

From the point of view of the profit distribution industry chain, department stores can obtain gross profit of 25-30% from the total sales volume of products as compensation for rental shops.

The chain stores have strong advantages in negotiating with suppliers because of their scale advantages.

Not only that, many domestic department stores have begun to learn the successful experience of chain stores abroad, but are gradually changing their joint mode to self run mode, so as to maintain and improve their profitability.

They either buy goods or build their own clothing brands, such as Yintai, and create their own women's clothing brands.

However, it is not easy to change chain stores to self run mode.

"At present, several major department stores in China emphasize the need to improve the proportion of self operated companies, but how to solve the shortage and shortage of buyers is a major practical problem."

Li Yuanhui said.

Besides, due to the present situation of the Distribution Agency System in the multilevel area of domestic brands, the unified procurement of the department stores will take a long time to come true.

As a benchmark for domestic chain store operations, Wangfujing department stores first took the lead in the industry in 1996.

They revoked the merchandising department of each branch according to the commodity category and floor, and set up the purchasing center of the group, which was the first to achieve unified purchase at the store level in the whole country, which greatly improved the operational efficiency.

At present, the Wangfujing department store basically implements the centralized purchasing system of the same city, such as the Beijing area and Chongqing area, which will lay a foundation for the further realization of centralized procurement in the future and the advantage of chain operation.

"The development of chain stores is still at the stage of management replication in our country. When the upstream supplier's multi-agent sales system with regional core is changing with the development of retail chains, the bargaining power of chain stores to suppliers will make their profitability even higher."

Li Yuanhui believes that when the sales system of branding headquarters is connected with the purchasing headquarters of department stores, the scale effect of chain stores can be better turned into profitability.

The relationship between suppliers and chain stores should be more intimate. When talking about Maoming department store, a chain store in Shenzhen, Li Yuanhui thinks that the development mode of "real estate + department stores" is worth learning from, and the cooperation between suppliers, especially Shenzhen's local clothing brands and Maui department stores, is also worth learning from other chain stores.

"When Mao branch opens a branch, it will often inform the supplier of long-term strategic cooperation at the first time, or find the supplier that is most suitable for the new store from the database of the company's management department, and then take these suppliers to the new store to investigate, so there are many Shenzhen brands in different locations."

Li Yuanhui said.

In the Maoming Chongqing branch, more than 150 brands were brought from Shenzhen, and Shenzhen's leading brands such as BELLE, Dizon, lady house and Ma Tiannu entered the store.

Chengdu people's shopping center Yanshikou store, hundreds of suppliers are stationed under the recommendation of Maui department store.

Maui City, Wuxi, is popular with local fashion men and women. The main reason is that there are many "deep" clothes there.

Li Yuanhui believes that Maoming group and Shenzhen brand products jointly develop the market and promote the development of Shenzhen's advantageous traditional industries, which is a good way of strong cooperation.

"The department store chain is different from the hypermarket. It opens too much at once, and the supplier can not support it. It is easy to form a bottleneck in terms of capital, talent and management.

More importantly, the department stores should be more stringent in terms of business area, property and site selection due to their local consumption.

For the expansion of chain stores, Li Yuanhui also made recommendations.