How Should An Independent Designer Brand Operate?

In recent days, LVMH's acquisition of Dior and Coach annexed Kate Spade has captured the headlines of the fashion industry, but I was attracted by an article entitled "the market value of the apparel industry and why it is a foundry enterprise".

This article tells the story of Shenzhou International, which has an annual sales volume of 15 billion yuan, which is the largest knitting company in China.

It is the main supplier of Uniqlo, Adidas (Adidas), Nike (Nike) and Puma (Puma). The market value of Shenzhou listed in Hongkong is about 70000000000 Hong Kong dollars. By comparison, the largest market house of A shares listed in the market is 40 billion yuan, and this year's new Taiping bird is 14 billion, and the 14 billion year old US and the news birds are 10 billion and 5 billion respectively.

Of course, for young people.

The question of market value is not the focus of discussion. What we are trying to illustrate here is that there is a strong supplier behind any successful brand, big or small. For example, Apple has huge support behind Foxconn's market capitalization of over 800 billion dollars, and the success of 3.1 Philip Lim also benefits from the production and supply chain managed by its CEO Zhou Xuanwen (Wen Zhou).

The success of a brand requires many factors. From a theoretical point of view, we can talk about 4P (that is, "products, prices, channels, promotions"). We can also talk about 5C (that is, "customers, costs, convenience, communication, environment"), but in practice, it is difficult to achieve long-term success if a product fails to carry out a good brand marketing.

If things do not taste good, they will not row long dragon every day.

In China, some independent designer brands are very good at talking with the media and consumers, talking about self expression, but in the final analysis, they eventually sell products, and products should have supply chains, but it seems that for them, the topic of supply chain management seems too grand to be mentioned.

For the current observation, many designer brand operations are still in the stage of manual workshop. Management has not yet been effective for some small garment factories. It is hard to imagine how such designer brands can stand out and how to lead the fashion trend.

Many designer brands have three high problems of "high price, high discount and high order". In the final analysis, their capacity and sales volume have not run up, which takes time and customer accumulation.

At the same time, cooperation with suppliers also needs to gradually run in. Shenzhou International is not a huge empire built on a single day.

Designers often complain: no factory is willing to cooperate.

In fact, as far as I know, many large factories on the market are very willing to try to cooperate with designer brands. For example, CHENFENG group has opened the supply chain system to Chen Anqi (Angel Chen), Wang Fengchen (Fengchen Wang) and C.J Yao.

There are many large factories that are full of sincerity for young designers. They say that eight or ten orders can't be produced on the order line, but they will be produced through the sample room. They hope that by supporting young designers, they hope that the volume of orders can grow gradually, instead of always making small efforts.

The reality is that designers often worry about the factory, fail to show their creativity, feel that the location of the factory is too far away, think that the factory owner is not good at communicating, or even despise the factory is not fashionable at all.

But what needs to be clear is that these factories in China support the fashion industry all over the world. They integrate into the global supply chain and operate according to the actual rules of the fashion industry. The Chinese supply chain has been able to complete the majority of the current high standard clothing production, and is in step with the international step, not the designer's brand in the "farming era". In the specific operation, there are many aspects worthy of the designer's brand learning.

For example, the most important thing is the time of delivery.

From the perspective of supply chain, delivery time is also a part of product value.

If you miss the time you can sell, then a good product will be discounted.

The core of fast fashion is to shorten the Lead Time (i.e. order to delivery time). The designer brand that should have walked in the forefront of fashion has already given consumers and media the same half a year earlier. If there is any delay, what is the fashion?

Another example is fabric.

From the point of view of foreign trade orders, if the zipper pin is reversed, it is perfectly clear that this is wrong, but the production of large goods should also be pushed against nails, which is the contract rule.

However, there are always some designer brands who pick up the order, but they find that the fabric can not be purchased, so they replace the big goods fabric privately. This kind of thing has great compensation risk in the international trade rules.

So how do designers ensure fabric? Frankly speaking, it is necessary to prepare fabrics ahead of schedule, especially those that want to run. It is necessary to reserve some materials in advance, so that the fabric can speed up. Even if sewing processes can be urgent, no fabric is like cooking without rice, and it is impossible to deliver goods or goods to the wrong version.

For most designers, it is important to realize a very important principle: deliver goods on time and quality.

In addition to not delaying the delivery date, there is another meaning. If it is not easy to get the product ready early, do you want to send the product to the customer sooner or later? If you don't get the customer's permission, you don't recommend it, because there may be no local storage on the client side, or warehousing needs extra cost, but it's easy to do something bad.

For many young designers, it seems that these problems are common knowledge of Pediatrics.

But unfortunately, this is what happens every day in this industry. It is a thorny problem that will be encountered in practical operation.

In this regard, I think: independent designers who do not start learning to use high quality and efficient production resources in China will not be able to influence in the future.

Young designers who really branded designers should start from the factory now and go to factories to try and run in. The future growth momentum will come from this.

For more information, please pay attention to the world clothing shoe and hat net information report.