Xingcheng, The Largest Bikini City In The World

A five line seaside town, not many people in winter.

If no one told you, it would be hard for you to know that this is the largest in the world.

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According to statistics, there are 723 swimmwear enterprises in Xingcheng and more than 20 thousand Taobao stores. The government has set up industrial parks to attract large swimsuit factories, accounting for 20% of global swimwear sales.

Men and women go to the swimwear factory to work.

This is a swimsuit workshop in Xingcheng.

Pushing the courtyard iron gate is a two man wide aisle.

The aisle was originally a large yard, but because of the increase in the number of factories, more than a half of the yard was built around glass.

The women sat neatly in front of the sewing machine, blue, black, white...

Bundled and well tailored.

Put it in front of the sewing machine.

The hand pressed the cloth, the foot stepped on the sewing machine, the needle stitched two pieces of cloth together, less than ten seconds, the process was completed.

The sprouting of swimsuit industry is closely related to the development of tourism.

Xingcheng is not big. It takes one hour to drive Xingcheng city around. But because of the coastal area, state-owned enterprises and ministries and commissions have set up sanatorium here: Xingcheng forestry sanatorium, Xingcheng Ministry of railways, sanatorium of China ordnance industry group, Xingcheng sanatorium.

At that time, workers who fell down with occupational diseases could regularly come to Xingcheng for recuperation.

Nearly more than 30 sanatorium is the symbol of this city once glorious.

Wang Dan, a sales manager at the biggest swimsuit factory in Xingcheng, used to envy children in sanatorium when he was a child, because only then they could eat fine grains.

Swimsuit Taobao shop owner Yin Le 38 years old, in the eyes of the northeast, still has the honor of being the eldest son of the Republic - the first barrel of new China crude oil was made in Huludao, the first bag of caustic soda in New China was released in Huludao, and the first warship of new China was launched in Huludao.

But the people of Xingcheng have been in this proud periphery.

Because there is no industrial resources, in the most brilliant years of Northeast China as a heavy industrial base in China, Xingcheng has been on the fringe.

In 90s of last century, state-owned enterprises reform and a large number of workers lost their jobs.

Yin Le's parents worked in sanatorium. When they arrived at the sanatorium, they had to go to Beijing every year to keep accounts for second years.

Wu Ying was laid off from the grocery store in 1992. He bought a swimsuit with a 7000 yuan buyout grant in the bungalow in the village of the city. The grocery store had a fixed salary every month, without worrying about production and operation.

Wu Ying said that if she was not laid off, she would not think of swimming suits.

Under the tide of the times, people will be forced to make many choices.

When laid off, a large number of people had to go out of their own way.

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As the number of customers increased, Wu Ying slowly began to hire workers. After graduating from college, her daughter joined the family workshop, which was responsible for the design of swimsuits, and the workers employed more than 20.

Fewer workers, less work, and less money, the new workers are placed in the courtyard of the new glass doors separated from the "workshop".

Life is getting better. Even an ordinary worker in Huludao has a salary of only about two thousand. While working in Xingcheng's swimsuit factory, it can get about four thousand or five thousand of the salary.

The housing prices in the city were fired up, and the most expensive one square meter was sold to 8000 yuan.

Zhao Yang was the first to take Xingcheng.

The first time he went to Guangzhou, he worked in the swimsuit factory in Xingcheng and ran for swimsuit boss in Beijing's providence market. In 2001, he rented a store in Guangzhou, and from 2008 to 2012 was the best time for his wholesale store business, with a sales volume of fifteen million a year.

From 2013, the sales of Zhao Yang's store in Guangzhou began to plummet. He came home in a few years before he felt the crisis, and set up factories to make swimsuits.

At the very beginning, the Korean swimsuit factory was a big customer in Zhao Yang's swimsuit factory. They sold tens of dollars from one of the wholesale bathing suits from Zhao Yang's factory to another set of cards in Korea, and finally sold to the country for a high price of two hundred or three hundred yuan.

Now, the number of Korean customers is getting smaller and fewer, and the online stores in China have become Zhao Yang's new favorites.

After dropping out of high school, Zhou Jia went down to Guangzhou and spent the whole day in Internet cafes. He got to know a bunch of dads. Following them, Zhou Jia learned to apply for QQ and QQ groups with a certain value added to sell and earn money.

In 2003, Taobao went on line. Because of its early Internet sensitivity, QQ opened its first swimwear store in Taobao in 2003 and is also the first online swimwear shop in Xingcheng.

In the first few years of opening online stores, Zhou Jia deeply felt that the Xingcheng people's thinking of net sales is still far from that of Hangzhou.

At one point in Xingcheng, he could not find anyone who could exchange ideas with him. He flew to Hangzhou regularly to chat with the latest brains.

Online rise and decline.

Wu Ying no longer supplies wholesalers. All swimsuits produced are supplied to Taobao sellers.

The sales volume of the online shop was 100 million yuan a year last year.

In the early days, the group of people who opened shop in Xingcheng had received the instructions and guidance from Zhou Jia.

Slowly, the whole Xingcheng online store ecosystem has been established.

The government has also seen the future of combining online and offline formats to start supporting the new swimwear industry.

Since 2012, the Xingcheng municipal government has held a swimwear Expo every year to attract international famous brands to Xingcheng and cooperate with swimsuit factories here.

In order to publicize, in August 19, 2012, 1085 people in bikini held a stroll in Huludao to break the Guinness world record.

Plagiarism is the normal competition of the industry.

In Xingcheng, both the factory and the online store are mostly couples shop models.

Swimsuit designs are all in the hands of female family members.

Zhao Yang's factory spends every year buying.

The magazine's clothes cost about 150 thousand yuan, and Zhao Yang's wife relies on the latest fashion of women's clothing to design swimsuits' colors and styles.

At present, most swimsuit designs in Xingcheng are still in the stage of plagiarism.

"Koreans copied from Europe and America, we copied South Korea, the level of all of them is quite similar, our counterparts may take pictures higher than us, and everything is produced by a factory."

One industry insider said.

The competition is fierce, Yin Le can always feel the feeling of bursts brought by his colleagues, because his family's shop sells well, and has many characteristics. His colleagues are always copying his family's swimsuit and the design of his shop. As long as there are pictures of swimsuits, he can directly play the edition.

This is the normal competition in this industry.

In 2017, a colleague patented all swimsuits on his own in order to prevent plagiarism. A patent was more than five thousand yuan, and some swimsuits sold hundreds of pieces, which became a slow-moving fund and could not earn the patent money.

A swimsuit costs an average of more than 100 yuan and cannot afford the cost of originality.

In the online shop of Yin Le, the best seller is always the conjoined style.

Yin Le analysis is mainly because Chinese girls are more willing to choose conjoined swimsuits than women who are conservative, poorly built and caesarean section.

Foreigners and Chinese have different demands. Foreigners pay more attention to the comfort of dressing. Sometimes she doesn't wear underwear, so the swimsuit of foreigners doesn't have a bra.

"The swimsuits made in Europe and the United States are very provincial, girls are hot, they are bikini, and the colors of African countries like the big red flowers are very bold and unrestrained. The girls in South Korea are of the same size. Basically they only need a L code, and all kinds of Chinese codes are there. We need to make a big difference, but in general, they sell well."

stay

After many years of work, Yin Le summed up the different needs of women in different countries for swimsuits. This also represents the cultural traditions and women's character of a country and a region.

In business, we often encounter wonderful customers.

A little girl bought twenty swimsuits and tried out one of them most satisfied. The other nineteen pieces returned.

The address of a certain photo studio in Shanghai, Beijing, is the last customer they want to see, because they will return their clothes when they finish shooting.

Swimsuits are no longer functional clothes for swimming. Girls are demanding enough beauty and fashion. They can take the most beautiful pictures on the beach and send them to friends circle.

Yin's wife said that each girl went to the beach to play with an average of two bathing suits, and the average life span of each swimsuit was a trip time.

With the improvement of quality of life, girls' requirements for swimsuits are becoming more and more sophisticated. Embroidery, which represents exquisite craft of dress and craft, has gradually appeared in swimsuits since 2017.

Xingcheng also has its own swimsuit brand, opened a line store in Beijing's old Buddha's department store, and has a swimsuit of more than two thousand yuan.

Compared to workmanship and products, Taobao shop is still the most important picture.

Every time the new products are invested in the pictures, they are a lot of expenses. The swimwear shop owners like to take pictures of the costumes in the seaside of Thailand, because the sea is clear enough and the effect is very touching. Yin Le recently spent 500 thousand years competing for a model's right to use for a year, and his competitors were his high school classmates.

According to the contract, each model can only take a picture of a shop, so as to ensure the uniqueness of the picture.

The era of price war is in the past.

Xingcheng is more than 300 kilometers from Beijing and is also called the back garden of Beijing.

In summer, tourists in Beijing like to come here on vacation with private cars. The sale of the real estate business directly opens the sales to Beijing, and the newly built property on the seaside is bought by many guests from Beijing.

Because of the more comfortable climate, many Heilongjiang people have come here to buy houses and settle down. Like other cities in China, the real estate industry has been booming in recent ten years.

In the 2017 municipal government work report,

As one of the provincial economic development zones, the swimwear industry cluster has been selected as the "innovation demonstration cluster of China's textile industry".

Xingcheng has entered the list of the first batch of national tourism demonstration zones, and has been selected as the country's integrated e-commerce model.

But the government is also aware of the plight of industrial development. The swimwear industry is still a traditional labor-intensive industry.

In the government work report, we should speed up the construction of swimsuit Industrial Park and promote the large-scale and standardized development of swimsuit enterprises.

The implementation of the swimsuit industry upgrading project, strengthening brand building, extending the industrial chain, supporting enterprises' independent innovation, promoting the standardization and high-end design and research, and continuously improving the added value and competitiveness of products have become the new pursuit of Xingcheng swimsuit industry.

Swimwear with a retail price of more than one hundred yuan is doing business of quantity, and innovation and brand are not the most important things at present.

Wu Ying found that recruitment is becoming more and more difficult. The skilled workers on the machine are not good at recruiting. The swimsuit enterprises are too much pressure to work, and the per capita wages are not going up. How to find the right people has always been her heart disease.

In the long term development, with the rising cost of labor and the need for upgrading consumption, the swimsuit industry, which only pursues quantity and price war, will eventually be eliminated.

Students in the university town will also work in the Taobao Industrial Park during the summer vacation. But after graduation, few people choose to stay in Xingcheng.

Over the past 35 years, the proportion of total economic output in the Northeast has decreased from 13.2% to 8.6%.

In 2016, Liaoning became the only province with negative GDP growth.

Like other cities in Northeast China, Xingcheng is also faced with the predicament of brain drain. The core team of Xiao Tao swimsuit is still the first group of brothers to drum up QQ, and the low education level of staff is also a problem.

Xiao Tao swimsuit interviewed 10 college students, but in the end only one stayed.

Yin wants to let his relatives design children stay in his studio to design swimsuits, but the children chose to go to Beijing after graduation.

The charm of big cities is more than that of small cities.

Factory owners are worried that the average age of workers in the factory is over 40 years old. Young people are unwilling to do monotonous sewing day after day. Young people who stay at home choose to work in a Taobao shop or serve as a waiter.

Zhao Chunlai is forty years old, doing sewing work in Wu Ying's factory. The white chest lining is made to black cloth. The black swimwear with white dots on the black cloth she is producing is one of the girls in the factory, but everyone has no chance to wear it. The hot season in winter and the busy season in summer travel are their busiest hours.

Compared with bathing suits, the winter red big vest is the fashion that they keep warm.