Flow Dividend No Longer: Poor Performance Of Clothing Retail Sales At The End Of The Quarter

In 2020, the clothing industry is not really relieved in 2021.

According to the data of the National Bureau of statistics, after a short recovery in the first quarter of 2021, the retail sales of clothing goods began to decline in the second quarter, and a significant decline in the third quarter. Although considering the consumption recovery in the third quarter of 2020, the overall market will shrink in 2021, which is quite shocking to the whole industry.

Some attribute this to the disappearance of traffic dividends in the Internet industry.

In the past two decades, the development dividend of the Internet industry has made e-commerce the growth engine of the clothing industry. Especially around 2010, the rise of Taobao clothing and other e-commerce retail platforms has reshaped the pattern of the clothing industry, allowing a large number of new clothing brands to overtake on the curve.

Nowadays, the dividend of Internet traffic is no longer available, and some businesses who play with traffic methods are at a loss, which to some extent extinguishes the false prosperity of some subdivision tracks and brands in the clothing industry.

But in the eyes of many industry insiders, the reason is not limited to this. Although the epidemic has accelerated the failure of the flow explosion method, more importantly, the epidemic has accelerated the intergenerational migration of consumer groups, especially young consumers. People no longer blindly pursue low-cost hot money, but pay more attention to high-quality products and trends, and industrial upgrading is imminent.

More importantly, with the younger consumer groups playing a more important role in the consumption field, the new demand of the clothing industry is also on the eve of a big explosion. When the fashion style that young people like is more and more small, it means that the clothing industry is breaking away from the link with gender, age, occupation and income, and is replaced by the aesthetic level to divide the consumer.

Demand driven supply, clothing industry will undoubtedly usher in a round of industry reshuffle.

Why can't the brand be sold?

The era of a set of popular fashion may have passed, which is a trend that many clothing brands obviously feel this year.

A clothing wholesaler who has been working in the clothing industry for many years told the reporter that in the past, as long as the manufacturers followed the general trend of that year to make the same style of popular money, as long as the price was low enough, it could sell well. This year, the market was obviously poor, "Now we have a lot of stock in our warehouse. According to our last new cycle, these should be new models, but we can't sell them at any price.".

This situation is more obvious at the retail end. An obvious fact is that as long as the product design of the clothing brands that once relied on the sales volume did not keep up with the trend, even if they were put in the live broadcasting room and called out the slogan of the lowest price of the whole network to let consumers collect wool, they could not support themselves.

The most typical brand is La chapel, whose sales of goods in the live broadcasting room once entered the performance range of "500 million-1 billion", but it still can not avoid the fate of applying for bankruptcy liquidation.

It can be predicted that when the popular logic has been verified and failed, and still adhere to this method, there may be many clothing brands in the future will repeat the mistakes of La chapel.

However, abandoning the logic of popular fashion obviously puts forward higher requirements for clothing brands. Especially in the grasp of trends, today's dramatic changes in trends, once again exacerbated the difficulty of brand grasp trends.

As a matter of fact, some people use "the new style of the first half of the year is over the second half of the year" to describe the rapid change of the trend. Just as we were discussing the sweetness of BM style not long ago, the industry began to pursue the cool of Y2K style immediately.

The deep reason behind this lies in the fact that clothing is becoming the personality expression of young people. Google's fashion keyword in 2020 is still a relatively broad "independent style", but this year, Google's popular search has explored more deeply into the niche market. The top 10 hot keywords include rave style, academic style, cottagecore, 90s clothing and festival clothing, etc.

Cbndata's "2019 women's wear industry trend report" mentioned that young people's clothing choices are becoming more and more diversified, showing a strong long-term demand, and the number of people buying more than 10 different product types has exploded.

The mismatch between supply and demand has caused negative effects on the supply side. A group of industry data compiled by forward looking Industry Research Institute can be compared and proved that: from January to September 2021, the retail sales of clothing goods above the quota in China's clothing industry will reach 782.38 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth of 19.3%, showing a significant increase trend. However, during the same period, there were 12557 enterprises in China's clothing industry, 743 less than that at the end of 2020.

The development status of "clothing industry is facing the pressure of transformation and upgrading, and the growth rate of industrial scale is declining", which is also pointed out in the industry analysis.

Although for many years, grasping the trend can grasp the key to the development of the clothing industry, but now, this problem seems to become more urgent, even not only related to development, but also to the survival of the brand.

How to grasp the trend has become a common problem of the whole industry.

Crisis or business opportunity?

But for more brands, this round of crisis may be a new business opportunity.

According to a group of data released by Taobao, there are more than 200 million post-95s on Taobao and tmall. Among them, more than 60 million clothing pioneers are involved. In terms of growth rate and customer price, the performance is far beyond the average of the market.

In short, who can grasp the needs of this group of people means that there are new business opportunities.

However, when the actual implementation, clothing brand to face more difficulties than imagined. As a non-standard clothing industry, a great challenge for brands is that it is difficult to accurately predict the trend of consumers' interests in different circles, let alone develop products and market at the fastest speed.

After all, the trend of clothing is not a single trend, but a combination of various trends, such as style, color, fabric and so on.

A more realistic difficulty is that many clothing brands, especially for small and medium-sized brands, are unable to support the energy and capital needed for product research and development, and do not have enough strong supply chain capacity to ensure production to keep pace with the pace. This will lead to that if a lot of manpower and material resources have been spent on various researches in the early stage, but if in the stage of putting into production, it does not catch up with the consumption boom to enter the market and quickly get the volume, it means that all the investment will be wasted.

Of course, once a certain style is grasped, the brand can be revitalized and move towards "self enhancement cycle". Tmall data shows that in clothing and other industries driven by new products, the growth rate of new product sales can exceed 200%, and the proportion of transactions driven by new products also reaches 36%.

Therefore, to quantify the trend of different styles of young people as much as possible, to meet the needs of different people to wear different styles of clothes, clothing brands are likely to produce new opportunities from the continuous pains of popular fashion.

This requires clothing brands, in the user end, not only to predict the trend of fashion, but also to insight into consumer demand, and more accurately guide product research and development; On the product side, we should not only reduce the cost and sunk cost, but also increase the success rate and have a successful product running through the R & D logic; In the market, we should not only have the core growth power, but also tamp down the competition barriers, and have a high imagination space.

The difficulty coefficient of "both" and "more" sounds unreachable, but some changes are taking place.

For example, itib, a designer brand that many people may not have heard of, won the first place in tmall double 11 clothing brand list this year; Teenie weenie, who failed to bring fire when the "three pits" clothing went out of the circle, got the ninth best result in women's clothing category sales in this year's tmall double 11; In less than two hours, bosie, a brand of asexual clothing, has achieved a sales volume of more than 100 million yuan, surpassing the sales volume of half a year in 2020

The reason why these brands can grasp the new direction and new trend and quickly come to the market is that they take the lead in embracing digitalization and closely combine the industrial Internet and consumer Internet with the help of platform advantages.

For example, teenie weenie is based on tmall's style recognition and prediction of women's wear on the whole platform, and has carried out trend follow-up and promoted product development and innovation; The high-end single group and pioneer consumers gathered by tmall have matched more accurate consumers to new and cutting-edge brands such as bosie and itib.

For those brands that rely on niche style, to be able to stand out is to accurately grasp the popular trend, and quickly do product R & D iteration, and then form transformation through more accurate recommendation and matching of the platform.

Such a complete link is also the core competitiveness of a brand.

This is also the reason why today, Taobao tmall is still the main position of clothing business. Although multi platform operation has become the norm, it is Taobao tmall that leads fashion and style, and enables new businesses to continuously upgrade from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 100.

In today's social environment, what young people buy clothes is not clothes themselves, but a trend, a style, a personality and an attitude. For a brand that is in "constant hope but constant pain", only by building a full link capability from grasping the trend to quickly pushing new products to spreading the market, can we really get rid of the pain and embrace the opportunity.