Where Is Semir'S Future?

"Wave your hand to your story. It's not over yet, there's a new beginning. It's too busy to forget, gentle and endless hard work is a lifelong friend."

Qiu Guang sums up his decades of entrepreneurial experience with these few words.

In most cases, Qiu Guang and he were very kind, but when they touched some sensitive topics, they showed a strong and unyielding personality.

In an interview, Qiu Guang and he did not want to look back at the past, including China in 2012.

The industry experienced shocks.

According to the world clothing and shoe net, Semir was listed in 2011, once the first Chinese garment, but after 2012, Chinese clothing including Semir.

There are many problems. Behind the appearance of "high inventory" is the drawback of "insufficient supply chain capability" and "slow response to the market".

Now many years ago, many clothing brands are still failing, but Semir may take the lead.

In recent years,

At the same time, at the same time, the success of the children's clothing brand barbarbara has given Semir hope.

But where is Semir's future? Is it possible for local brands to regain the favor of young consumers when ZARA and UNIQLO rapidly divide the Chinese market?

Transformation in winter

Unlike Zhou Chengjian, the founder of tailor, Metersbonwe and Qiu Guang are a typical Wenzhou businessman.

According to historical records, the "seven mountains, two rivers and one field" in Wenzhou are out of the WenZhou South Railway Station.

The situation of too many people and scarce resources also makes Wenzhou people good at business and most of them start from scratch and have a fighting spirit.

Unlike many Jinjiang brands, which are built by imitation, Wenzhou businessmen are deeply influenced by the Yongjia school.

The Yongjia school holds that Tao exists in the thing itself. Therefore, it is different from other Confucian schools to emphasize utilitarianism and dare to take the lead in the world.

Looking back at the development history of Wenzhou and Semir, it is easy to see the shadow of Yongjia school.

In 1951, Qiu Guang was born in Wenzhou Ouhai District, 31 years old, Qiu Guang and went to sea to do business. He was an electrical company in the early days and a sales agent of "Patriot".

In 1996, there was a casual breeze in the country. In December of the same year, Qiu Guang and his son Qiu Jianqiang and son-in-law Zhou Pingfan officially registered Semir company.

"In those days, the concept of fashion and culture suddenly increased, and clothing became a livelihood field."

In the impression of Qiu Guang he, there were only more than 70 garment enterprises in Wenzhou, and there were about 1000 clothing brands nationwide.

Like most garment enterprises in China, Semir regards Nike's virtual business as a dogma.

The virtual business mode is outsourcing the manufacturing and distribution business of products, retaining the most critical functions of knowledge and technology in the enterprise, and other functions are virtualized.

This "horizontal integration" mode greatly reduces the cost of the company's investment, and is also enough to make rapid development of small brands without primitive accumulation.

In March 1997, Semir's first store was officially opened in Huaihailu Road, Xuzhou, Jiangsu, 68.

Without large-scale advertising, the store had a business quota of 39000 yuan on the first day.

After closing, Qiu Guang and the team had a midnight snack and drank beer, which made him very excited and fresh.

From 2002 to 2006, Semir entered the stage of brand management and began explosive growth.

Qiu Guang and recollection, "at this stage, Semir is developing most vigorously, and the annual growth rate is about 45% to 50%."

Like most clothing companies at that time, Semir always chose the most popular celebrity to be an image endorsement. Over the years, the endorsement stars were twins, Nicholas Tse, Show Luo, Han Geng, Lee Min Ho and Kim Su Hyon.

Today, this "star endorser + advertising + agent sales channels" mode continues to be the major brands.

In 2011, Semir landed on A shares, and then its market value hit 44 billion 890 million yuan. It once surpassed other listed companies to become the first stock in China's apparel industry. However, over the years, Semir's market value was still on the day of listing.

Behind the stock market crash is the long term negative expectation of the capital market for the whole industry. In the view of many investors, the outbreak period of China's clothing market has passed.

Semir production vice president Zhang Ren Ren is a witness to Semir's development as well as a witness to the crisis.

According to Zhang Zuoren, at this time, the industry is inclined to open the door store. The vigorous situation conceals that the supply chain and management can not keep pace with the expansion of the channel. Under the background of the upgrading of consumption, this will inevitably lead to the deterioration of product quality, the confusion of product mix and the result that the design can not meet the needs of young consumers.

All problems finally concentrated in 2012. For a time, almost the entire garment industry was falling down, and many brands came out negative reports of "super high inventory".

There were media reports that Semir closed 943 stores in three years from 2012 to 2015.

But unlike the domestic "sad shop tide", the global fashion industry is entering the shuffle stage.

Fast fashion brands represented by ZARA and UNIQLO quickly seize the first tier market in China.

However, most of China's clothing brands are ploughing two or three line cities. Therefore, Semir did not face up to the fast fading brand, which is probably the reason why most of Semir's management has repeatedly mentioned that "Semir's recession is affected by the financial crisis".

Qiu Guang and the reasons for the fall of Semir in 2012 were summed up in three aspects: "financial crisis, consumption upgrading, and the impact of the Internet business".

However, when growth was in a predicament, Semir chose to expand against the trend and began a series of acquisitions and strategic deployments.

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Fight for children's wear market

Compared with other brands in the Semir family, Barbara can be called "a new force".

In the history of Chinese business, Wang Xiaotong once said, "Zhejiang is an alert and sensitive person with a special sense of life."

In Qiu Guang and it seems, "as a garment person, we should always pay attention to the change of population structure".

Qiu Guang decided to stay in the National Civil Affairs Bureau for a few days before deciding to make a children's wear brand.

"In the past, the population structure was jujube nuclear type, and the number of children and the elderly was not large, but now the population structure is dumbbell type.

Children's consumption accounts for more than 28% of each household's consumption.

In 2002, the Barbara brand was established in Wenzhou, the same as Semir brand, and dominated by street stores in the early years.

In Qiu Guang's view, it was one of the important reasons for the success of Barbara's success to seize the opportunity earlier. However, there has always been a large number of tycoons who want to get a share in the children's clothing market, and Wahaha children's clothing is one of them.

According to public information, in 2011, Wahaha children's clothing business income was only 200 million yuan, there was no growth in ten years, and the number of shops was only more than 500.

"Interlacing is like mountain crossing" - this is the only response of general manager Barbara to this phenomenon of Xu Bo.

Compared with the adult clothing market, the children's wear market is very complicated. The entry managers must master and satisfy both the parents and children's psychology and needs.

Xu Bo said that the needs of children at different stages of growth are quite different, and the products of different age groups have different requirements for design and supply chain, and even the national quality standards are different, so there must be differentiation strategy.

Take You Xiaotong, 3~7 years old, for example, children of this age group have their own preferences for clothes, which means that children's psychology and preferences should be given great consideration when designing products, and the requirements of educational institutions for children's clothing should also be met.

At the same time, the mothers are constantly changing. In Xu Bo's opinion, the mothers after 80 and 90 are more fashionable compared with their mothers after 70, and their products are more biased towards international brands.

"All of these require the incoming players to face the changes of consumers directly and strive to find a good balance."

In fact, the development of Barbara is not smooth sailing.

Before 2012, Barbara was growing at a rate of 40% or 50%, but after 2012, the share of growth dropped to a single digit. After a series of reforms, it was restored to an average annual growth rate of 20% to 30%, becoming the first in the industry.

In Xu Bo's view, the key to the success of Barbara's pformation lies in the idea of "a single product".

If we want to create the best single product, we must first upgrade the supply chain.

Barbara's logic is that if you want to get the best raw materials, you have to rely on bulk purchases. Good suppliers can produce good products, but the best raw materials companies only cooperate with the best brands, so making children's clothing is an industry chain problem.

But in the early days of brand development, retailers may be very small. So how can Barbara solve this problem?

The answer given by Xu Bo is coordinated development with the whole industry chain.

"We have gradually made the upstream retail entities realize the corporatization operation. Whether the company and the supply chain can build a good ecosystem is the key to the sustainable development of the brand."

In addition to supplier reform, Barbara has gradually opened up downstream channels. Barbara is almost one of the first domestic brands to enter the shopping mall.

In 2011, Xu Bo pferred from Wenzhou to Shanghai and deeply felt the difference of life style.

"Before in Wenzhou, it was easy to stop the car and go shopping at the street store, but in Shanghai, Beijing, it was very difficult to find a place to park, and the way of life in a big city would definitely affect the medium-sized cities, so we decided to change all stores to shopping centers."

Shopping center is the most important solution to the one-stop consumption demand, while street stores want to enter the shopping center is very difficult.

Barbara first upgraded the store design, re planned the layout of shops and added children's leisure areas, which further attracted consumers and met the requirements of shopping centers for shops.

At present, there are more than 300 suppliers of Barbara and more than 4000 outlets.

In fact, even at the moment of the second child bonus, the Chinese children's wear market is also a hot day.

On the one hand, the traditional children's wear enterprises are on the decline; on the other hand, the entry managers are constantly changing. Balbala has begun to compete with the international brands such as Eddie Chloe.

Xu Bo is convinced that the children's clothing market in China will continue to differentiate. In the era of oversupply, the brand with low professionalism and poor integration is doomed to withdraw from the market.

At present, Barbara has a domestic market share of 5%~6%, ranking first in the industry and even in Asia.

"Barbara needs to find new growth points."

Xu Bo told reporters, "the right way to play is to focus on the terminal market, always focus on constantly refurbished customer groups, and meet consumer demand."

The half year report released in Semir not long ago shows that Semir's children's clothing industry has surpassed adult clothing for the first time, accounting for 51% of its revenue of 2 billion 247 million yuan, and Qiu Guang and Barbara have always hoped to build Barbara as the next "Semir".

It is worth mentioning that in addition to Barbara, Semir group is also incubating other children's clothing brands, including the focus on 0~7 year old Macal.

In addition, early childhood education, leisure, entertainment, shopping as one of the children's business complex - dream town has also established a preliminary model in Wenzhou.

Semir children's clothing industry may become a microcosm of the pformation and upgrading of the entire Semir line.

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Online and offline

Compared with the growth rate of children's wear industry, the growth of Semir's electricity industry is faster, with annual growth of over 80%.

According to Qiu Guang and introduction, in 2012, Semir set up an e-commerce department, with sales of 157 million in that year, while Semir's sales quota in 2017 has exceeded 5 billion yuan.

Of course, the development of Semir's electricity supplier was still resisted at the beginning.

Shao Feichun, director of Semir electric industry, told reporters that the biggest obstacle to traditional enterprise pformation to the Internet is the change of ideology.

According to Shao Feichun, from 2012 to 2013, Semir electricity providers were in the "go to inventory" stage, Semir electric business sold products at a slightly higher price than the cost of the company, and quickly opened up the situation with high cost performance, and quickly accumulated a long-term stable user group in Tmall, Jingdong and other e-commerce platforms.

At that time, the whole industry talked about the conflict between online and offline.

Semir brand nine Chengdu is a franchise system, and the electricity supplier will undoubtedly affect the interests of the original agents.

"But our logic was very clear at that time. Where consumers are going, we have to go through the complementarity of the online and offline complements."

Beginning in 2014, Semir entered the stage of brand upgrading, and started the concept of "big news horse". Besides selling products over the third party platform, it also launched new products online, complementing and rapidly merging with offline businesses.

For the electricity supplier channel, double eleven is always a topic that can not be avoided.

Different from previous years, 2017 double eleven, many clothing brands have closed Jingdong channels.

A person familiar with the matter told reporters that for most clothing brands, Jingdong or the 20%~25% of the total channel sales on the busy line, the "two election one" in 2017 undoubtedly made the brand entering a short-term impact, and this incident also exposed a big problem in the development of the brand e-commerce. For a long time, the brand has been subject to the "flow" and over reliance on the platform.

At present, the offline channel of Semir is still in the process of pformation, and the large-scale entry of local leisure brands into the shopping center will take some time. This leads to the short term Semir channel can only rely on the original street stores, greatly reducing the growth of sales.

In order to increase the share of the market, each brand is fighting for money, and advertising investment and celebrity endorsement will increase.

In contrast, ZARA has always been the only marketing activity of social media, with little advertising cost.

In Shao Feichun's view, Semir electric business has entered the stage of pformation to the fashion content operation platform.

"Since 2016, we hope to integrate the fashion content with Semir's supply chain and provide consumers with better fashion products."

This seems to coincide with Zhao Yingguang's idea of building Han Du Yi house as a media company.

According to reports, nearly 80 people have been involved in the public relations team of Han Du Yi house. Zhao Yingguang asked him to "get news every day and find news everyday", so that the brand gradually became personified and spread fragmented.

It is reported that the current membership of Semir and Barbara is around 12 million. If the platform can move from operating goods to operation content, it should create more value and increase the intangible assets of enterprises.

Can you copy the ZARA myth?

At present, Semir group has four major industries, including leisure wear, children, e-commerce and new business. The new business sector is responsible for capital investment in agriculture and medical health. Qiu Guang and son Qiu Jianqiang are responsible for it, and the casual wear industry is naturally responsible for Semir brand clothing itself, and is responsible for Qiu Guang he's son-in-law Zhou Pingfan.

Among all the businesses, the group's investment in Semir brand is the biggest. Whether China can produce second ZARA has always been a problem that the industry is constantly exploring.

Semir and a lot of domestic clothing brands have used the "horizontal integration" virtual management mode. However, there are drawbacks in this mode: if the intangible assets can not be increased, such as brand effect, light assets will reduce the market value of the company.

From this stage, the impression of young consumer groups on Semir, Mei bang, Anta and other domestic brands is much worse than before. Qiu Guang and also stressed more than once: "brand aging" is the biggest bottleneck that Semir has encountered at present, and the key to solve the problem is absolutely inseparable from the improvement of supply chain, products and channels.

According to Zhang Zuoren, vice president of production, in 2012, Semir shut down many large shops with poor efficiency, and at the same time cut down the series of improved products, and the number of upstream suppliers decreased accordingly.

In 2014, Semir brand suppliers were adjusted from over 300 to more than 70, and quality management was carried out to ensure the quality of products and the stability of orders.

However, the industry generally believes that the main reason for a large number of shops is that enterprises can not react quickly to the market. ZARA seems to rarely have a stock crisis.

Different from the virtual business mode, ZARA, H&M and other fast fashion brands use SPA mode.

The SPA model, put forward by GAP, an American Apparel giant in 1986, is a vertically integrated form of sales linked to product design, manufacture and retail.

Although the SPA mode also has the characteristics of "horizontal integration" which will outsource most of the business, the downstream sales side is mostly self operated, which ensures the close integration of supply chain and consumers.

Take ZARA as an example, ZARA 90% stores are direct outlets.

In the production process, ZARA will divide products according to the different sensitivity of fashion, and the products with low fashion sensitivity will be outsourced to China or Morocco for direct production.

But for fashion products with strong sense, ZARA will implement the buyer system in all parts of the world. The new version will be ordered in small quantities, and then sold in a small area. Finally, it will react quickly to the market through terminal sales data and consider whether or not to turn the bill. This greatly avoids the risk of pressure.

Domestic clothing brands are always trying to learn from ZARA, and Semir is no exception.

Semir Marketing Director Wen Chen told reporters that 2017 was the first year that Semir vigorously entered the first tier cities and worked hard with shopping centers.

"Earlier, Semir has been ploughing the three or four line market, although the future channel will continue to sink, but the second tier market is the important direction of future layout, shopping center will become the main channel of development."

Unlike Semir's strategy in the three or four line market, in the second tier market, Semir will focus on direct sales and try to join the fashion buyer system in the supply chain.

It is understood that the current proportion of Semir brand ODM is between 40%~50%, and this proportion is still being constantly adjusted to try to find the best.

In 2012, the time from design to sale of a Semir product was 9 to 10 months, and now it has been shortened to 2 to 3 months.

Semir's reform has indeed achieved results, but there is still a gap compared with the mature fast fashion brands.

ZARA part of the product from design to sale, 2~3 weeks to complete, but now, fast fashion brands in China's development also encountered problems.

In January 14, 2017, the newly upgraded Semir store was officially opened on the two floor of Wanda Plaza, Jiangqiao, Shanghai. The business area of the new shop reached 1500 square meters, and the sales volume reached 1 million 80 thousand in the two days before the opening, which is not inferior to the results of the next UNIQLO.

"From the second half of 2016, we began to explore how to achieve better cooperation with shopping centers. So the management visited the shopping centers represented by Wanda. After listening to the suggestions, we invited the Korean design team to pform the store image, brand promotion and product research and development.

In the whole process, we also made some fast fashion product categories.

It is reported that there are more than 300 shopping centers in Semir, mainly in East China and Southern China.

Among them, there were more than 160 upgraded stores in 2017, mostly in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

But in the morning of Wen Chen, the pformation of Semir brand has just begun to exert itself.

According to Wen Chen, Semir plans to open another 1000 shopping center stores in the next five years.

There is no doubt that Semir is working hard to return to the battlefield.

Turning to the future, Qiu Guang and Semir hope to achieve a 80 billion sales target in 2021, and become an enterprise with a market value of over 100 billion, and the four plates of its layout can also develop healthier and more quality.

"Despite the challenges, we have confidence in the achievement of this goal."

Qiu Guang and added.

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