On this day in Sijiqing, I saw its ups and downs.
It was not the beauty of West Lake that attracted me to stay in Hangzhou for the first time, but the wholesale market of Sijiqing at the end of Laos, and the mysterious organization with black plastic bags in everyone's hands.
The annual turnover is over 100 billion, the revenue is 10 million, and the paction volume is tens of billions. These startling data begin from half past four in the morning in Sijiqing.
Morning and wholesale are crazy
In Hangzhou, where a large number of industry giants are gathered in Zhejiang Province, it is nothing new, but the wholesale market in Sijiqing (hereinafter referred to as Sijiqing) is indeed an exception.
The place name of Sijiqing is derived from the nickname "Chinese holly leaf". The Compendium of Materia Medica uses its three words, bitter, astringent and cool, to summarize its medicinal properties. If it sums up the history of entrepreneurship in Sijiqing, it is equally appropriate.
In 1989, the Hangzhou people wished Hao Chun's "Sijiqing clothing market" officially opened.
Next, the hang Pai boutique dress city, founded by Wu Wenhong, was put into operation, when more than 1 billion 200 million garments were sold in Sijiqing.
Since then, there are more and more shopping centers sprouting up in this area. Until Taobao officially launched, attracting a large number of merchants to enter the Sijiqing market to get goods started. A network wholesale mode relying on Sijiqing physical stalls to reduce merchant inventory has started to become popular among Sijiqing stalls.
When the Internet was hot, Sijiqing also became popular. The net red dress swept the whole country. The red net store in Hangzhou accounted for more than 7 of the national proportion, and 90% of its shopkeepers and owners came from Sijiqing.
Strictly speaking, Sijiqing is not a market, but a "V shaped" business circle consisting of women's clothing market and a dozen wholesale markets.
The whole market is made up of women's clothing market, men's wear market, children's wear market, electricity supplier market and shoe bag market. It is a complete and unified wholesale chain of clothing. This is the place that dominates the wholesale trade of domestic clothing.
At four a.m., there are already a large number of people doing business here. If you haven't been to this place, many people will think that this is the spot before the Spring Festival.
In the night of trading, you can see countless wholesale businessmen, Taobao businessmen and entrepreneurs.
These people seem to have relied on this street from nothing to get rich. The proper names of "God shop", "explosive money", "net red" and "net batch" can be found here from all the businessmen in Taobao's history. Even today's new business concept of S2B can be found from the Internet based stalls, and it will start to batch copy all over the country.
To say that Sijiqing is bound to be separated from the "electricity supplier capital" aura, but in fact, before the birth of Taobao, Sijiqing has become the largest clothing wholesale base in China in 2001.
In the era of no electricity supplier, if not the wholesale market, many small businesses hardly have other channels for sale.
Therefore, Sijiqing played the role of Taobao today.
Whether Taobao chose Sijiqing or did Sijiqing speed up Taobao's growth?
It has been said that the wholesale and retail industry will sooner or later be destroyed by the Internet. But at present, data from the Internet show that the total volume of clothing wholesale business in Sijiqing is more than 600 billion yuan in 2016, which is much ahead of the thirteen lines of Guangdong and Shenzhen South oil, which are concentrated in the wholesale clothing business.
For Sijiqing, the sun has just risen.
Midday multi faceted Sijiqing
Near noon, trading from "dark" to "bright" seems to have changed scenes, but invariable, it is still a low price.
Most of the people who came shopping in Sijiqing came from other places, and the wholesale volume was very large. When this wave of people disappeared in the early hours of the morning, another group of people came here, mostly personal and small self-employed.
For example, an ordinary trousers, the idle wandering intermittently heard that the boss's purchase price for the dealer was 60 yuan, and the price of the single item was 148 yuan when the same commodity went back to work.
For casual customers, this price is also very cheap, although the number of individual customers is small, but the profit is very high.
In the clothing city, the crowds crowded and bumped into excitement. Still, the landlady and the little girls who had taken the goods were strong, strong and strong in fashion and shipping. Suddenly, they found that the masculine and feminine clothes of the clothing industry were all gathered in these two streets. Men's wear, women's wear and children's wear had their own special areas.
Entering a building, the logistics personnel are busy and the shop assistants of each shop are unpacking, packing, shipping and selling.
Or say it casually, "choose your own, and look at the wholesale price for you."
No matter where the people who buy the goods come from and what the demand is, apart from the consumers, the shops and shopkeepers in Sijiqing are the protagonists here.
Talking about the prosperity here, Lao Zhao has something to say.
"At that time, I was able to fight and fight. I had too many goods. I even thought the elevator was too slow to climb 20 floors and 10 times a day. Now it's different. I've hired several big boys and girls to worry about it."
Lao Zhao was born in Sijiqing. He has witnessed a stage of Sijiqing's development.
When the Taobao came into being, because of the large volume of goods, the elevator in the mall fell down several times because of the long overloaded load. Lao Zhao said he had met at least 4 times.
"In the morning, we have made the order, and the Taobao store is rushing to deliver the goods in the afternoon. And in the early years, all the goods are taken by the bosses themselves. If they take less than one, they will earn less than a dozen dollars. If the other party snatches more than 100 pieces of me, then I will go all in to fight."
In the early years, the prosperity of Sijiqing market was also reflected in the frequent conflicts. There were many examples of "picking up" in front of the stalls.
Among the many legends in Sijiqing, the most sacred one is the "Qing Tai Nanyuan" District, which is an old district backed by Sijiqing. All the protagonists of the previous Taobao sellers conference can gather together in this district.
In only one building, the neighbors included Lao Zhao, the first daily sales of Taobao ladies, the founder of Zheng Xiaofeng, and the Taobao shopkeeper, sherry Zhu Chenhui, ALU Fang Jing, at MOMO.
However, what is unknown to outsiders is.
Behind the anecdotes and legends of these shopkeepers, there is a lot of truth.
Because Zhejiang's real estate fabrics, there are many large and small garment processing factories in Xiaoshan District, so shops will directly cooperate with manufacturers to reduce costs, and even some shops have their own processing plants, besides supplying their own shops, they will also supply others.
Another part of the shop is to cooperate with the garment processing enterprises in the field.
In order to meet the changing market demand, shops will collect more popular styles, provide them with processing plants, and shops will design their own products, and many shops have developed their own brands.
The cost of the back end is almost the lowest.
The front end also needs to be multiflush.
It is undeniable that the shops in Sijiqing are very precise about the trend of the front outlet.
When the Internet develops faster, they keep up with the context of the times and no longer operate in a single way to store consumption.
In the early days, the business platform, small video, and red belt led to the rise of the store, so that the store changed its business strategy.
Small shops are stacked with all kinds of goods. Young and beautiful girls keep changing their clothes in front of the camera. Before the corner computers, special staff members communicate with customers on Taobao. When business is good, they can get tens of thousands of income a day.
Later, the market changed. In 2017, Ali chief of staff Ceng Ming put forward the concept of B2b on the basis of the business model innovation of Sijiqing merchants.
Based on this concept, some shops in Sijiqing choose to maintain e-commerce business and gradually move towards the role of supply chain service providers.
On the one hand: from factories to Sijiqing lines and offline shops directly to consumers; on the other hand: from factories to shops in Sijiqing, and then to all other parts of the country's online and offline stores, a considerable part of them are bought and sold on spot to make the difference.
Undoubtedly, Sijiqing has been flying faster because of the spread of the Internet.
No matter how the market is changing, the demand for clothing is bigger and bigger.
The hot Sijiqing market has also spawned several unique peripheral occupations: the wearing crew (who is responsible for wearing new clothes, attracting customers), the packing staff (full time loading and packing according to the order), and the invoicing Clerk (writing the invoice sent to all places).
In these large and small stalls, they perform their duties and are busy at their own expense.
Even the local express industry is more prosperous than elsewhere.
From the point of view of shipping addresses, all of them are sent to the whole country. In addition to issuing personal, wholesalers, and foreign market stalls in Sijiqing, Sijiqing has nearly 100 professional markets across the country, covering 70% of the country's online and offline stores, and cargo throughput is evident.
Late article opportunity or crisis
The people who work in Sijiqing leave work at half past four p.m., and after that, large and small logistics vehicles are ready to sail to all parts of the country.
Unlike the nine to five, they are facing four nights four.
"Yes, sooner or later, I don't know how long Sijiqing will live in the future," said a shopkeeper in Sijiqing.
Although the wholesale market in Sijiqing has made great contributions to Hangzhou, the low-end format of the wholesale market has finally blocked the progress of urban civilization. Where should Sijiqing go under the conflict and conflict?
Before the four seasons, there are two major problems: pformation and relocation.
No one dared to give an accurate answer whether the new mode brought by the Internet is suitable for unsuitable combination with wholesale market.
"Retail thinking is hard to make wholesale business."
Sijiqing garment Agel Ecommerce Ltd CEO Ni Shui Quan once said, "wholesale is driven by value, and retail is based on experience and service."
In the wholesale market, some merchants do not have factories and earn a living by roasting, which is to buy goods from a cheaper wholesaler and sell them to the wholesalers at home.
In Sijiqing, the number of roasted traders coming back from Guangzhou is still considerable.
Let everyone put the commodity and price pparency on the Internet, no doubt is to smash their business.
Even for wholesalers who own their own garment factories, there will be risks in thoroughly conducting them.
In Sijiqing, you will find that many shopkeepers are very cautious about taking photos. They are worried that their own designs will be copied by their competitors.
This phenomenon is very serious on Taobao. You can easily find many shops selling identical explosive products.
As consumers, it can not be judged at all. It seems that they do not care about which is original. If the price is right, it will not have much impact.
But for the original shop that designed and exploded, the sales volume may not be as good as that of other large stores, or even lose money.
Therefore, in the face of pformation problems, stall owners will describe the embarrassment of pformation: "do business to death, do not do electricity providers and so on."
Sijiqing's own pformation and other problems brought about by relocation alone are enough to touch the fragile nerves of the huge interest related parties, assuming only one daily average of one billion yuan of turnover in Taobao.
Needless to say, for hundreds of thousands of wholesalers who live on this land and dozens or even hundreds of business sellers, this is absolutely a major event.
Walking around, I didn't know the first few corners until I saw a stall of a dozen square meters without customers. After showing the intention, the shopkeeper sat down and began to talk intermittently as we often had customers coming in and out.
"Every day from four in the morning to more than five o'clock in the evening, the news of Sijiqing's pformation and relocation has long been heard, and now some people have passed, but there is no time to think about what to do in the future."
The old man who looks for the electricity supplier next door seems to be looking longer.
"In fact, I have prepared myself for the pformation. I think we should consider it if we move it. I heard that the old Sijiqing might be upgraded to the exhibition hall. When it comes to both sides, we will display the money and take the logistics."
Clothing bosses of different sex, experience and age have the same status. They only care about how to earn more money under the premise of guaranteeing their existing income.
The thought and the state of numbness, which are all day after day, bind them tightly enough to escape from the predicament.
Perhaps it is because of busy or limited cognition, being content with the present situation and following the trend of the flow to become the choice of most people.
"Will the wholesale clothing market die?"
Some people are aware of the pformation of the clothing market in the future, but they are afraid that the pformation is too difficult and too dangerous. They are reluctant to take this step. Lack of initiative is the biggest weakness of these small bosses.
The number of more than 10 thousand stalls, nearly 50 thousand employees, is alarming.
If we really enter the tide of pformation, a large number of people will be faced with the choice of leaving and leaving.
No matter when Sijiqing will be able to usher in a tidal wave of tidal wave, or if old Sijiqing moves to new places or other plans, without geographical advantages and without a proactive change of mindset, it will inevitably make people feel that Lu Yuanxin is farther away.
The old Sijiqing with unknown future pformation, the problem of relocation, plus the small boss who is content with the present situation, the centrifugal travellers, and the future Sijiqing want to be evergreen all the year round, really need to take a long view.
