How Can Traditional Clothing Enterprises Seek New Opportunities For Development By Controlling Costs And Expanding Channels?

How does a traditional clothing category conform to the trend and constantly open the market space?

How can a traditional enterprise seek new opportunities for development by controlling costs and expanding channels?

Henan Xinxiang Xinke (XINKE) Protection Technology Co., Ltd. is a foreign trade enterprise specializing in the production and sale of labor insurance clothing. It has maintained more than 20 years of traditional B2B business. Now, it has begun to explore the export business channel.

Perhaps many traditional enterprises can learn one or two from its pformation and upgrading process.

The rising cost of exports is a common problem of export enterprises, which is more prominent in the traditional clothing industry.

Compared with the traditional clothing, because the fabric of the labor protection clothing is more functional and highly technical, all production lines and fabrics need to be certified, so the cost is difficult to control.

On the other hand, labor costs are also rising. According to Lu Zhaowei, XINKE sales manager, Henan had a certain manpower cost advantage over the southern cities. But in recent years, this advantage is also shrinking. At present, the average workers in Xinxiang are paying at least 3000 yuan a month.

Cost problems need to be tackled. Meanwhile, some overseas competitive forces with relatively low manufacturing costs are also growing.

Lu Zhaowei told Hugo net that even some India and Pakistan manufacturers have "blatantly" robbed customers and robbed orders, and they have more competitive advantages in terms of price, delivery and national policies.

In addition, Lu Zhaowei disclosed that, in the second half of 2018, many American and British customers had pushed their orders ahead of schedule in the second half of 2018, due to the external environment such as Sino US trade war and Britain's de Europe. The order volume in 2018 increased by nearly 20% over the previous years.

From the above part, we can see several difficult problems facing the traditional clothing industry: including rising costs, intensifying overseas competition and unstable policy environment.

In further talks with Lu Zhaowei, Hugo network learned about the traditional industry's "struggle" and "Metamorphosis" process.

First of all, facing the rise of fabric and labor costs in garment industry, many domestic factories began to pfer production lines to countries with lower labor costs, such as Southeast Asia.

"Professional pfer" is not easy. XINKE has taken some relatively conservative measures: XINKE will save some raw materials and store some goods, so as to reduce the delivery time and control costs, and slowly accumulate its loyal customers.

Second, in the face of intensified competition from overseas counterparts, XINKE also tries to meet the requirements of overseas markets in product certification as far as possible on cost control.

According to him, every country in the world has different inspection standards for labor protective clothing, which requires enterprises to apply for certificates of multiple countries at the same time, such as China's LA certification, European CE certification, American UL certification and so on, while XINKE will spend nearly 2 million of these certificates on average every year.

On the other hand, it also makes efforts in product design, quality and technology, and forms differential competition with low-end products, which greatly improves the trust of customers and accelerates the signing of orders.

For example, when it comes to focusing on product design, Lu Zhaowei mentioned a very important concept of "tooling fashion", that is, the design version will be more fashionable. Besides the protection function, the labor protection clothing will also add some more rational design: for example, the place where mobile phones or tools are used, or the "splicing" technology, the key parts are relatively rigid materials, and the rest can use soft materials such as knitting, so that the workers can wear more comfortable.

Finally, the policy instability in the European and American markets is mainly due to the fact that XINKE used to focus mainly on the European and American markets. Now, orders in South America, Africa and the Middle East have also increased.

At the same time, in order to disperse the risk of the main market, XINKE has been trying to develop new markets such as Asia, Africa and Latin America, and produce some labor insurance products that meet the local market demand.

At the same time, XINKE also began to increase the development of e-commerce channels.

But Lu Zhaowei also pointed out that although overseas market demand for this functional clothing is large, such clothing generally takes the form of "quantity", and because of functional clothing, the requirements for human protection are high. Most customers still like to talk about cooperation offline and field visits to factories.