What Is The Lack Of Independent Designers In China?

In just five years, the design environment in China witnessed a drastic change.

Chinese designers with overseas educational backgrounds have made their mark on the international stage. The designers who grew up in the soil in China have taken a place in the market by means of increasingly active e-commerce platforms. The increasingly fashionable domestic fashion week system has also provided a diversified display platform for designers.

This is also the five year of consumers' cognitive change.

As consumers gradually extricate themselves from the obsession of luxury brands and the burden of fast fashion, they reflect themselves from the false satisfaction of mass reproduction, return to the product itself, turn to the pursuit of "individuality" and recognize the works of independent designers.

China's independent designers undoubtedly usher in the best times to date, but people still feel vaguely that this fragile force needs stronger commercial support to cope with more challenges.

The next step of cognitive pformation is to turn cognition into consumption.

The climate of independent designers in China is not only related to market perception, but also depends on whether they can find a strong business logic.

There have been many explorations on the market.

Whether it is the avant-garde fashion display platform derived from the fashion week system, or the hatching and nurturing system of designers from showroom logic, it is an attempt to provide solutions for independent designers to survive from different nodes of the industrial chain. Apart from providing designers with a display and sales platform, most of them also participate in the formulation of the designer's brand strategy and provide advisory services for them.

Looking for leverage to turn niche design into mass business

In addition to various platforms launched by the fashion industry, an entrepreneurial company with an internet background is also involved in this exploration.

Founded in 2017, ICY, the global designer business platform, has put forward a new business model of "designer crowdsourcing + intelligent flexible supply chain +KOL community", aiming to provide designers with high performance price ratio for young white collar workers in 20-35 tier cities.

In recent days, ICY has launched a revival of traditional dress culture, called "regurgence of clothes", in collaboration with the Imperial Palace affiliated enterprises and the Imperial Palace palace culture development Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as the Imperial Palace palace culture development Co., Ltd.) in Beijing.

The five series of Chinese designer brands participated in the design of the "regurgiant" series, AWAYLEE Li Wei, fan fan's 100 drama Bureau, MENG HUITING, QDO and 5MIN.

Designers draw inspiration from about 1800000 collections of artifacts in the the Imperial Palace Museum, extract elements with auspicious meaning, and integrate them into the brand unique design language, bringing five limited fashion series including "flower building flourishing age", "Aya embroidery and Ruyi", "Shanghe Anfu", "sea wrong auspicious" and "wine song Changle".

In the collision and interweaving of traditional culture and modern design, the culture of "auspicious clothes" has been revived, bringing about the revival of the masses and the modernization of clothing.

The first sale of the series was sold out on the first day.

As soon as the series is released, it can reach the sound penetration from social media to sales platform in a very short time.

The "ICY" Baidu index increased 31%, an increase of 26% over the same period, and the "ICY global designer platform" Baidu index grew by 382%.

In terms of WeChat index, the term "Ji Fu" has a 90 day peak in the March 2nd series, which is 178 times higher than usual.

As of press release, the total reading volume of micro-blog was over 47 million 480 thousand, which exceeded the #ICY global blogger punch card data.

After the first wave of information release, the platform launched a spontaneous two spread, and more than 200 public articles WeChat articles spontaneously discussed and reprinted the theme articles of Regal clothing, which covered marketing, advertising, design and so on.

It is noteworthy that CCTV's English Channel CGTV and Shanghai news have reported this cooperation, which is relatively rare for today's new media oriented marketing campaign, especially CGTV's coverage of Kyrgyzstan culture to overseas audiences.

This is a typical cross-border IP activity.

Although all kinds of cross-border IP and designer capsule series emerge in an endless stream, the cooperation between the Imperial Palace palace culture and ICY has become a typical case worthy of anatomy due to the special attributes of both sides.

The palace culture of the Imperial Palace has been paying much attention to fashion culture since long ago, and launched a limited series.

For example, Zhong Hua, Tanya Wang, Liu Fei and many other jewellery designers signed a contract, launched a series of products of the Imperial Palace culture jewelry, and jointly launched with Li Bingbing the "Jin Rui Ling" complete public bag.

At the same time, ICY invited five designers to create new ideas for traditional costume culture through multiple perspectives.

For example, Min Wu, the designer of the exploding skirt, once selected three paintings and calligraphy, such as the song, cursive script, Taibai Liquor song axis and so on. Based on his life experience in China and England and his understanding of wine culture, he painted a picture of drinking poetry and wantonly blended Chinese Calligraphy into clothes.

In order to embody the ancient spirit of marine objects, the designer Dido selected the yarn as a material to embroider the design elements of fish and biology in the sleeves, collar and so on.

When people put on this dress, the objects on the top become flexible with the body. This is a modern 3D expansion of Chinese traditional plane aesthetics.

In addition to the interpretation of the designer, ICY invited Mr. Yuan Hongqi, vice president of the palace culture at the press conference of the Regal court, and the deputy director of the Palace Museum, the deputy director of the Palace Museum at the press conference of the the Imperial Palace Museum, to give a deep interpretation of the culture of Ji Fu at the professional level, providing a perspective of the orthodox authority of the the Imperial Palace.

With the influence of the Imperial Palace palace culture in the wider population and cross topic IP cooperation, ICY has extended the influence of niche design to a wider population.

According to the data provided by ICY, the overall search volume of "Ji Fu regain" and its related derivatives is more than ICY, which means that ICY has attracted new users through the palace culture of the Imperial Palace, and has successfully broken the circle of the original audience.

Previously, they could only get the analysis data from the small flow pools with brand contacts, and the result might be to expand their influence only in the fashionable consumer groups.

More importantly, such social influence can soon be turned into sales.

The target group of the Imperial Palace palace culture creation is independent personality, self-education, good education and superior life, paying attention to price performance of young people, and pursuing the quality of life, life style and consumption power of the 70 and 80 generation middle class.

The price range of its products coincides with the positioning of ICY platform designers.

Therefore, the crowd exposed by the cross border cooperation of the palace culture in the Imperial Palace may not have paid attention to the fashion culture, but they are very interested in the concept of creativity and one of the most active participants in the emerging consumption field.

Internet thinking catalyzes new species of clothing industry

The cross border cooperation between the Imperial Palace palace culture and ICY has broken through the traditional working mode of the fashion industry, which is also mainly due to the unique background and business mode of ICY.

Through the cooperation of designers and designers at home and abroad, the 2000+ global bloggers' self marketing system built on the platform is personalized, deductive, instant and explosive. The purpose of ICY is to create brand influence for young designers, and to build sales channels and improve product system.

ICY platform crowdsourcing designers are responsible for design pactions, production to ICY integrated flexible supply chain, the first order of 30 to 300 pieces, and then through the AI intelligent replenishment system, purchase system, sales forecasting system into the selected products and online sales, push to ICY responsible.

From the perspective of the whole industry chain, ICY has undertaken the work of front-end and back-end for designers, making up for the lack of marketing ability of most independent designers, and becoming the "butt" between designers, supply chain manufacturers, consumers and fashion bloggers. The idea of connecting the whole link embodies the typical flat thinking in the Internet age.

In such a mode, the pain point in ICY cut is the designer brand "selling expensive" problem.

Through stable cooperation with about twenty factories in the production and supply chain, ICY can replenish production by multiple replenishment and shorten the replenishment time to 15-20 days, so as to solve the problem of high cost caused by the lack of orders, deviations, or pressure.

ICY's existing mature channel capabilities and marketing resources have saved the cost of traditional designer brands, so it is possible for designers to launch parity series.

By helping designer clothing reduce prices, ICY finally hopes to solve the problem of designer's product consumption.

Designer brand has the attributes of young people, but excessive pricing hinders the purchase of products by young consumers, resulting in the fact that the actual population is over 35-40 years old with economic strength.

In the past year and a half, the platform has integrated GMV in APP, Tmall, Jingdong, Xiaohong book and other channels, and the total GMV of the platform has exceeded 150 million, with an annual growth rate of over 300% and a total of more than 800 thousand users in 150 million.

In September 2018, ICY completed nearly 100 million yuan A round of financing, led by revival capital and 36 krypton fund.

Unlike the original intention of many industries to support China's independent designers, ICY, as a start-up company, may be less interested in the industry. Instead, it starts from the starting point, focusing more on feasibility and business prospects, and explores more about the chances of this business model in the market.

ICY's special business background determines that it will aim at a public business.

It liberates independent designers from minority property and expands into a mature business that can scale returns. This idea is particularly reflected in this the Imperial Palace palace cultural cooperation.

Quality content is natural speaker.

Despite the excellent performance of the cross-border cooperation series, ICY's vision for the cooperation is actually higher than the commercial return, which stems from the strategic layout of ICY's emphasis on content production.

Earlier, ICY has launched the concept of product content.

As an interconnected company, ICY has spent 6-7 preparatory projects on the premise of being quick and fast, and has reached an agreement in many IP cooperation, hoping to help together with the revival of traditional industrialization.

On line promotion, ICY takes the theme of "four seasons kit service" as the theme, and filmed a set of twelve product promotional photos in the palace.

At the same time, the promotion of fashion blogger KOL, as an important part of the business logic of ICY platform, has also played a role of amplifying sound in this cooperation.

Cooperation invited Ouyang Nana, Meng Meiqi and other stars to deduce the "regurgitations" series, and has established in-depth cooperation with more than 150 bloggers, including the whole platform bloggers, fashion and other diversified lifestyle bloggers, head and Chinese bloggers, etc., and asked them to act as ambassadors for the resurgence of the "lucky clothes".

All participants have tried to disseminate the culture and traditional culture, and some co owners have been able to wear their clothes to the foreign countries. The petal bloggers have gone through 4 volumes of "Hai Hai Tu" in interpreting the culture of Jibao, hoping to understand the specific sources and stories behind each design material.

The effect of successful cross-border cooperation is not a simple addition, but a multiple amplification.

They bring their own traffic and absorb new traffic. The bloggers' collective creation revitalize the vitality of a marketing campaign, and also covers the already fragmented Chinese market.

In addition, ICY has designed a WeChat mini game for the cooperation so that everyone can own a gown shop in the palace. This greatly reduces the difficulty of consumers to disseminate gown culture, and accelerates the speed of communication by means of the fission mode of the game, so that consumers can also become the pushers of Jilin culture.

From online to offline, from academic perspective to creative perspective, and from the multi-level perspective of fashion blogger modeling, the cooperation between ICY and the Imperial Palace palace culture has greatly mobilized the public participation and sharing rate, created more users' spontaneous production of UGC content, and covered more potential consumers.

In the upstream of content production, such a marketing activity also benefits designers.

Under the new theme of regurgence, designers can mobilize rich historical and cultural resources as creative materials, create in a wide context, and not limited to their own limited experience. In fact, they have exercised the ability of designers to interpret new materials. At the same time, they have exercised designers' ability to efficiently output and adapt to market rhythm in the fast operation system in the form of short-term cooperation.

In addition, the choice of oriental aesthetics is also a special occasion.

As more and more designers with overseas backgrounds are active at home and abroad, the exchange of fashion industry at home and abroad is becoming more frequent. The problem of "self identity" is gradually emerging.

The origin of Oriental culture and Chinese history has naturally become the solution of many designers, and even the trend of returning to national identity of domestic commercial clothing brands has triggered a new round of national fashion.

In an unknown market, this practice is an important opportunity for all the subjects to readjust their self cognition.

When the independent designer of the minority attribute IP, through the palace culture of the Imperial Palace, paying attention to the interests of the masses of consumers and the culture of a broad range, it will naturally achieve self correction and repositioning.

ICY, as a platform side, has accumulated more data for accurate analysis of consumers, especially those who are not interested in designer fashion. These are incremental markets.

More importantly, such data is extremely rare for platform vendors, especially ICY, which relies on AI for decision making.

Gu Yingying once said to fashion headlines that the data is very important and the data represent the future technology.

How to make data scattered in various industries and play a role in all aspects is very important.

Good content has become a new currency, which is why ICY regards bloggers as a key part of business models.

Whether IP cooperation or blogger marketing, the ultimate goal is to disseminate the content, affect the minds of consumers, and ultimately turn cognition into consumption behavior. At this point, ICY has also completed the mission of the whole link.

The mission of the platform is to co-ordinate the needs of designers, consumers, platforms and bloggers.

At least in this cooperation, ICY has achieved win-win results from all levels.

Of course, the perfect business model needs to be tested by the market, especially the complex and changeable clothing market.

ICY is building an almost all-around platform, and the challenge is self-evident.

It involves both the "hard" infrastructure of the supply chain and the relative "soft" market promotion. The middle part of the electronic commerce sale involves operation and maintenance capabilities, and the intermediate link with the designer also needs the platform to have enough load-bearing capacity for the communication cost.

But in any case, when people begin to realize that the design industry is a complete ecosystem composed of creativity, content and commerce, the way out for Chinese independent designers is not only the enhancement of creativity, but also the deep-rooted system problems. The process of subverting innovation has gone further from the core of the problem.

In the future, independent designers in China may not be in the form of consumer groups and high quality designs, but rather reasonable prices and communication modes, behind which is the innovation of business mode and communication mode.