Shanghai Fashion Week Observation: Can Niche Business Have Big Business?

The fashion week of Shanghai has entered a period of rapid commercialization, and showroom's import is becoming more and more familiar, and it also presents an explosive growth.

According to the latest statistics, the domestic buyer shops are participating in Shanghai.

There are more than 3000 retailers operating in the "purchasing system".

In the 2018 autumn and winter fashion week in Shanghai, there were more than 60 showroom at home and abroad.

In the past 4 years, the development of designer brand market, which looks like "niche", is indeed amazing.

However, showroom, as the "middleman" of designer brand and buyer shop, is currently in China.

The positioning is still vague, not only in the "exhibition" mode, but also in the "agent" mode, as well as the "comprador" type of sales intermediary operation. In the information age, "de intermediation" is often mentioned, and showroom is the one.

Where is the core competitiveness of the industry's important "middleman"?

For many years, TUDOO, which has attracted the attention of the industry in Shanghai fashion week for many years, was born in Guangzhou. But it was founded in Shanghai in 2013. It was founded in Guangzhou in 2013. In just 5 years, it has developed into a professional brand agent from its original studio. Now, showroom showroom has more than 1500 square meters of fixed exhibition hall in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, with more than 30 agent brands, and more than 500 buyers of customers nationwide.

In the process of communication with Su long, director of operations of TUDOO, he emphasized TUDOO's "agency" business more than once, "we should be known as the brand" agent "rather than the simple showroom.

He said that although TUDOO is called TUDOO showroom, its business is deeper and more diverse than other showroom.

Su long believes that agent brand is not only simple to display and sell products, but also for the management of the market in the process of brand development, including sales, promotion, supply chain management, after-sale, market supervision and so on.

A brand will inevitably encounter complex management problems in its development. TUDOO can help the brand to deepen its understanding of the market and make better development according to the different stages of the brand.

Whether it's sales or promotion.

Fashion industry must be professional.

It is noteworthy that, with the continuous expansion of business, TUDOO opened a branch TUDOO PR CONSULTING in Beijing in 2016, which independently operated the public relations business. This is the first time in the industry. At present, there are about 20 international luxury fashion brands, and it also provides localized media promotion and image packaging for TUDOO SHOWROOM's commercial agency brand.

Xu Xiaotang, the head of TUDOO PR, thinks that unlike ordinary public relations companies, the mode of operation of TUDOO is very special, especially in the promotion of commercial agents.

In addition to traditional clothing management, media and celebrity bloggers, activity planning and execution, and social media operations, TUDOO has created a more innovative and effective marketing PR mode outside in house PR and PR agency. How to find its core competitiveness and ensure profitability in fierce competition is a problem that every showroom organizer must think about.

Xu Xiaotang said that the TUDOO PR sample seeding and clipping are not only celebrity stars or media promotion that can provide some image matching and traffic flow for the brand, but also match the commercial rhythm of the brand at the time node. They will fully calculate the pushing cycle of the public relations material to embed the sales nodes of the whole season, whether it is before the show or on sale, every public relations point is back to the sales channel in the established time period.

It is reported that because of the relatively high degree of commercialization of the agent brand, the brand of TUDOO agency can produce 4 to 8 series a year, some even 12 series, so the order of TUDOO will be carried out by month, and there will be 12 orders for the whole year.

Su long said that Shanghai fashion week is the most important activity of TUDOO throughout the year, but the number of fashion Zhou Qishi in the two quarter of the year only accounted for 1/6 of the company's annual orders.

The high frequency order rhythm reflects the new rhythm on the market.

Nowadays, the pace of fashion industry is growing faster and faster, and the consumers in the information age are changing rapidly. It is easy to be attracted and influenced by diversified new things. Buyers need to constantly display or online activities through new stores to attract consumers, seize the traffic volume, who has high frequency and precise content, and whose odds are large, so this rhythm is also different from the traditional fashion industry.

According to Su long, TUDOO currently has about 400 to 500 customers in the country. How to provide efficient and professional services to such a large number of customers is the biggest challenge for its company.

In order to make the order efficient and accurate, TUDOO developed a complete set of ordering system, from order management to logistics distribution, to after sale management, can be completed by the system, and data analysis is more and more important for fashion retailing.

This year's Shanghai fashion week, apart from setting up an independent stand in MODE SHANGHAI, TUDOO showroom also joined hands with Ontimeshow to launch a new concept of "Ontimeweek" in fashion week. This action draws on Paris's famous exhibition TRANOI and London showroom's cooperation mode TRANOI WEEK and WEEK, and has made localization improvement, that is, with a longer order period, more powerful media support, better upgrading service, more comfortable and private negotiation space to enhance buyer's order experience, and refresh business logic thinking again.

As for the importance of showroom's role, Su long said that the Chinese market is not particularly mature now, from brand to showroom to buyer's shop. Everyone is growing up in search, and brands and agents should be interdependent and shared development.

Suon pointed out that there are too many factors contributing to the success of a brand, and sales and promotion are only one part of it.

If there is no substitute relationship between the cooperative brand customers and the corresponding buyers, it is easy to be eliminated.

And if the three parties are not mature enough, there will be no mature marriage.

This also means that showroom can not only fashion thinking, but also return to the essence of business.

In the face of hundreds of designer brands seeking cooperation every year, TUDOO has its own stringent threshold for cooperation. The brand must first meet TUDOO's dozens of business hard conditions, including brand creation time, global business volume, quarterly output capacity, duration of the delivery cycle, and supporting public relations publicity. TUDOO team will objectively analyze the aesthetics and design performance of the brand itself, and predict the commercial performance of the brand in the next three to five years in China.

"In the process of brand development, mature agents can bring the existing channels and rich market experience to the brand, even if some experience is inconsistent with the brand presupposition, or the brand has not experienced it.

Since choosing agents, brands and agents should not be simple agency relationships.

There are a lot of failed cooperation because the two sides have reservations and can not invest fully. "

Su lung added.

Today, China Fashion Week, Shanghai fashion week, Shenzhen fashion week and other local fashion week are improving. Although there are still more room for improvement than the four international fashion week, the Shanghai fashion week, which is more popular, connects the four forms of show show, trade show, theme event and fashion weekend. Its MODE, LABELHOOD, ONTIMESHOW and so on are full of vigor and vitality.

A professional fashion show in addition to the appearance, the atmosphere created by details is also very important for controlling, professional display services, perfect derivative services and promotional value-added output of fashion culture symbols. These are the key components of buyer experience.

In fact, doing fashion business is a dream of many fashionable people. If you can't be a designer, you can at least sell your feelings and creativity. Many people have become a fashion trader with this mentality.

However, the uneven threshold of China's fashion industry and part of the showroom and exhibition that do not fully understand the whole industry have problems of similar style and poor service, which makes buyers' favor and dependence on showroom and Exhibition plummet.

There are still many problems in the process of local showroom counterattack and upgrading. In order for showroom to have more long-term vitality, we still need to polish our style carefully and constantly improve our business models.

With the rapid growth of consumers who pursue the taste of life, the demand for personalized and fashion products will continue to rise, and the potential of designer brands to split up the market will be huge.

According to OC&C strategy consulting, China's clothing market has a total value of about $300 billion.

Since 2010, the opening speed of Chinese buyer shops can be described by "boom". Taking Shanghai as an example, there are about more than 70 buyers in Shanghai in 2014, and in 2016, about 80 new brand stores are in Shanghai in a year, and the total number of buyers is close to 300.

In addition to the first tier cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing, Nanjing and other cities have opened 20 to 50 buyer stores, and many three line cities have added 1 to 10 buyers.

Very conservative estimates of the number of buyers nationwide have reached 3000.

However, China's designer brand clothing market is still complex and changeable. When trade shows, showroom and buyers store together to increase their volume and connotation, they also need to continuously explore their market value and core competitiveness to make "niche business" bigger.