Changshu: Transformation And Upgrading Of 100 Billion Level Textile And Garment Industry Cluster

With the wide penetration of new economic forms such as scene economy, platform economy, sharing economy and online Red economy, new models and services of textile and garment industry are emerging constantly, which brings changes in channels, supply chain and value chain. However, in the face of new opportunities and challenges, it is not easy for some huge textile and garment industrial clusters to achieve transformation and upgrading. Then, Changshu, which has hundreds of billion textile and garment industrial clusters, how to achieve transformation and upgrading? Here, the author makes a retrospective analysis.

Changshu is one of the three largest textile and garment bases in Jiangsu Province

Changshu is an important textile and clothing cluster base in China, and also one of the three hundred billion level textile and garment bases in Jiangsu Province. Changshu has the titles of "China textile industry base city", "China leisure clothing city" and "China cashmere products city".

(1) complete industrial chain. After years of development, Changshu has gathered more than 5000 textile and garment enterprises such as bosden, longdafei and redwood, forming an industrial chain integrating raw materials, accessories, design, printing and dyeing, knitting, textile, logistics, wholesale, retail and export.

(2) one town, one feature. According to the decision on confirming 197 areas including Haicheng City in Liaoning Province as pilot areas of textile industry cluster issued by China Textile Industry Federation in December 2019, 7 towns of Changshu City, including Haiyu Town, Zhitang Town, Bixi street, Shajiabang Town, Xinzhuang Town, Guli town and Meili Town, are listed in the list of famous towns with textile industry characteristics.

(3) strong professional market. In addition to the famous town of textile industry, Changshu is also a clothing city which has been ranked the first in "China's top ten garment professional markets" for many years. Changshu clothing city, in the leading position in the field of textile and clothing circulation in China, is not only an important foreign trade window for the local textile and garment industry, but also a pioneer in leading the transformation and upgrading of the local textile and clothing industry. According to statistics, the trade volume of Changshu clothing city market in 2018 reached 156.3 billion yuan.

Even though Changshu has a solid foundation and obvious advantages, with the changes of consumption market and circulation channels, the existing textile and garment industry is also facing many development deficiencies, such as obvious shortcomings in creative design, brand service, etc.

So, around the existing problems of the industry, Changshu how to play its own advantages, step by step to achieve transformation and upgrading? Here, the author analyzes and summarizes from the perspective of industrial value chain.

02. From channel innovation to strengthening of design and production links

The key measures are as follows: firstly, starting from the professional market advantages of Changshu clothing city, the trade pattern is completely opened through channel innovation; secondly, while maintaining the trade advantage, the clothing design elements are gathered to enhance the added value and competitiveness of products; finally, the advantages of existing production links are integrated, and the front and rear end are matched for technological innovation to realize the optimization of production links.

From the perspective of the industrial value chain, Changshu has carried out progressive promotion in three aspects: channel innovation, design strengthening and production optimization. However, in actual operation, the three aspects will cross and promote each other, and the promotion order is also changing dynamically.

(1) channel innovation: build a new trade pattern based on existing advantages

Changshu clothing city has the great advantage of offline wholesale in the industrial market, gathering wholesalers from all over the country. However, due to the impact of e-commerce on physical sales, the homogenization competition of textile and clothing professional market is increasingly fierce, which affects and diverts the commercial and consumer resources of Changshu clothing city, and the offline wholesale transaction is greatly affected.

Therefore, in terms of channel innovation, Changshu clothing city restructures its positioning, expands the original professional market trade situation, and further constructs a new trade pattern supported by cross-border trade, primary source areas and online goods market.

First, cross-border trade. In terms of cross-border trade, Changshu has become the key carrier of cross-border trade, and has been approved as a pilot city for cross-border trade in terms of cross-border trade and service upgrading Service body, overseas warehouse, etc.

After more than one year's development, Changshu's regional market procurement trade exports exceeded 1.2 billion US dollars in 2017, driving the market turnover growth by nearly 5 percentage points, contributing about 8% to the city's foreign trade exports. Since then, Changshu clothing city has also explored a more mature mode, opening up the cross-border trade situation comprehensively through the cross-border trade procurement docking meeting and special promotion meeting with the theme of "clothing world often comes to Changshu", large-scale group exhibition, establishment of foreign trade workstation, introduction of cross-border e-commerce platforms or service institutions such as express, wish and woking A-plus.

The second is the primary source of goods and online goods market. Due to the impact of intense homogenization competition and profit space compression, the whole textile and clothing industry has entered a low ebb, and many offline wholesalers have begun to switch to online e-commerce. Moreover, the rise of online Red economy in recent two years has made channels further innovative.

Therefore, in order to further strengthen the positioning of Changshu clothing city's first-class source and online goods market, and comply with the new model, Changshu clothing City Management Committee immediately contacted Taobao live broadcast and companies specialized in live marketing in Zhejiang Province, and proposed the concept of "industrial belt + live broadcast". On October 18, 2018, Changshu clothing city signed the "Alibaba Changshu clothing industry belt live broadcast cooperation" with Taobao After that, excellent live broadcasting organizations were introduced from Hangzhou, Zhejiang and other places to vigorously promote the docking with local businesses, hold theme live broadcast activities, and cultivate Taobao anchors suitable for Changshu clothing city.

On October 18, 2018, the first large-scale industrial belt live broadcast activity was held on the day of signing the agreement, with a sales volume of more than 31 million. Since then, Changshu's live broadcasting institutions, supply chain, anchor and other live activity institutions have developed rapidly, rapidly expanding to nearly 40. It is estimated that the sales of Changshu clothing city live broadcast activities will reach 5 billion in 2019.

Through channel innovation, it not only maintains the advantages of Changshu clothing city as a professional market, but also establishes and strengthens the image of "primary source and online goods market" under the new economy.

(2) strengthen design: gather design resources and cultivate numerous star formats

In Changshu, it is inevitable that the problem of talent competition between clothing industry and garment industry will be more prominent after the construction of clothing industry. Therefore, in the design link to strengthen the development, has also become Changshu in recent years the focus of measures, in general, the author summed up in two aspects: "Introduction" and "education".

"Introduction" -- supplement by introducing external design resources.

In addition to bosden, long Dafei, Sequoia and other local leading clothing enterprises have separated their creative design resources and established a design sharing service platform, Changshu focuses on introducing external design resources to supplement, such as establishing a long-term cooperation and exchange mechanism with well-known universities at home and abroad, cooperating with neighboring universities (Changshu University of science and technology, Donghua University) and improving designer talents Introduce strategies to attract outside design teams and talents.

In May 2019, the work of "introducing" ushered in a breakthrough: Changshu clothing city and Shanghai Fashion Industry Development Center signed a strategic agreement on the integration of fashion industry between the two places. For Changshu, the signing of the agreement can not only give full play to its own strengths in supply chain, service and marketing, but also make full use of the advantages of Shanghai design talents, fashion resources and Zhejiang e-commerce resources, so as to complement and complement each other.

"Education" -- support some potential design teams and original design brands, cultivate star industry, and better connect with the existing industrial system.

Changshu strongly supports the establishment of designer integrated stores, studios and showrooms. By making designers' works directly connected with a large number of offline shops in the clothing city, Changshu can effectively improve the fashion degree of the products of local enterprises' merchants. Although these star formats are small in scale and scattered in distribution, they represent the direction of innovation and development of textile and garment industry as a whole, and will become the main force to promote the product design, R & D and process innovation of garment enterprises in the future. Up to now, dozens of independent designer brands have entered the Jiangnan fashion creative industrial park in yunshang town.

(3) production optimization: establish "small sample workshop" to accelerate flexible supply

In recent years, the market of clothing industry presents the demand of "small batch, multi batch, multi variety, quick response", and the demand of small and medium-sized original design brands mentioned above is more obvious, but the existing production lines and production equipment of many traditional textile and garment enterprises are difficult to adapt, so flexible production has become a major focus of Changshu's production optimization.

In addition to Changshu clothing city as a pioneer of transformation and upgrading, Changshu has built Yunchang town in the south of the clothing city, comprehensively implemented flexible production, built a demonstration base of flexible production, and built a supporting company to undertake small single production. Generally speaking, the flexible production base is more like a "sample workshop". Compared with the traditional clothing production line, the degree of intelligence and transfer efficiency will be higher, and the requirements for workers will be higher.

03. Expand the extension of Changshu clothing city and help the industry upgrade

As Changshu clothing city is limited by the existing area, it is difficult to realize many functions. Therefore, to build yunshang town in the south of Changshu clothing city will promote Changshu clothing city and yunshang town to become two engines of Changshu textile and garment industry transformation and upgrading, and interact with the surrounding textile industry characteristic towns to jointly promote the industrial development.

In terms of function, yunshang town and Changshu clothing city complement each other. As a comprehensive industrial service platform leading industry, serving the city and linking the market, Changshu garment city has built an "Oriental fast fashion center" integrating five major centers of trade and trade, brand cultivation, design and development, modern logistics and industrial data. Yunchang town is more complementary to Changshu Garment City, and its development orientation is the well-known fashion design center in China, the Yangtze River Delta clothing Clothing brand operation, e-commerce, flexible manufacturing integration demonstration base, Changshu clothing industry transformation and innovation development engine.

Yunchang town will continuously improve and extend the upstream and downstream industrial chain by using four major industries (fashion design, e-commerce, brand operation and flexible manufacturing) and four platforms (photographer platform, Changshu intelligent logistics platform, Changshu textile and clothing industry collaborative center and textile and garment creative designer maker platform) to continuously improve and extend the upstream and downstream industrial chain, and cultivate a number of high-end brand clothing enterprises with benchmarking in the industry , leading the intelligent and customized production of clothing.

In terms of volume and upgrading, it is obvious that the development of large-scale and forward-looking strategies for the textile industry need to be more comprehensive and forward-looking.

In the future, with the continuous emergence of new technologies and new models, there will be a variety of changes in the industry, which puts forward higher requirements for the formulation of transformation and upgrading strategies.