Network Marketing: "Hualiu" Set Off, Domestic Fast Fashion Overseas

While the market is calling out "young people abandon fast fashion" and "fast fashion is in great rout", many domestic enterprises are quietly laying out on this track.

Recently, byte skipping has been revealed that if YOOOU, an independent cross-border e-commerce station with "low-cost route and high-quality service", has been officially put into operation.

According to the website, if YOOOU currently specializes in fast fashion women's wear, with prices ranging from 5-30 pounds. Its business is mainly concentrated in Europe, covering the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, Finland and other countries.

It is also revealed that a new cross-border e-commerce independent station will be opened after 8 months after byte skipping closed the overseas independent station dmonstudio.

According to the official website of dmonstudio, its sales category overlaps with sheen, a cross-border fast fashion platform. Its business covers more than 100 countries in the world.

Although dmonstudio didn't explain the reason for the closure in the announcement of closing the station, it made a comeback in less than a year and entered the fast fashion field again, which shows the attraction of this track.

It is worth mentioning that in addition to Internet enterprises, local fast fashion brands such as independent designer women's wear brand amii and fast fashion black horse zaful have taken the lead in the sea going tide, and women's wear brands such as Evely and urban revivo are all "ready to move".

A number of forces have formed a "sea army" to try to gain incremental growth in emerging markets. Among them, the most amazing achievement is sheen, whose daily sales exceed 70 million US dollars (calculated by latepost).

On the contrary, the Chinese and American brands such as forever and 21 have been eliminated.

Why are Chinese and foreign brands so different? How many opportunities for Chinese brands in the second half of fast fashion?

The word "fast fashion" originated from Europe in the 20th century, which is called "fast fashion". In the United States, it is called "speed to make", which is a simple term for "fast and fashionable".

Usually, fast fashion is used to describe the fashion design of fashion show made by clothing enterprises to follow the trend of products. Its core characteristics are "new and fast", "follow the trend" and "good price". In short, "what is popular is what you produce and what you sell".

Amii, which was born in 2008, is one of the Internet brands of women's clothing with original design in China. It has stepped on the wave of fast fashion by focusing on the minimalist style of women's wear.

Based on the innate sensitivity and love of clothing, Amy, the founder and art director, started the fashion design work with the help of science and engineering learning experience and spatial deconstruction ability without any professional training.

Emphasizing minimalism, the company introduced that "we hope to pay homage to modern women through fashion, so that women can find a comfortable way to dress themselves. We can show the beauty of silence without deliberate.".

In March of this year, "sister 3" invited the amii design team to design clothes for the sisters of "group night". This is undoubtedly a kind of affirmation to the clothing design ability of amii.

But for Amy, its bigger goal is to go abroad and push the amii brand into the global market.

In mid-2017, amaii organized a small static art exhibition in Paris, which attracted many local fashion circles. Some buyers even found Amy and invited amii to enter the European market.

It is this opportunity that makes amii have the idea of going out to sea.

For domestic brands, going out to sea has never been easy. And choose which channel to sell is the first problem to be solved.

"At that time, offline buyers found us, and there were third-party platforms to choose from, such as Amazon and express. We also had independent stations." According to Amy's recollection, five years ago, amii's cross-border e-commerce team had only more than 10 people, and they were responsible for the channel construction of multiple platforms, "not only the task is heavy, but also it is difficult to be effective."

On the other hand, it is not conducive to the accumulation of independent services in the overseas market when amii just started

Only three months after the launch, amii caught up with the double 11 activities of express sales, and achieved good sales results; It has been online for one year and has become the top 60 player of the platform.

Amy told all weather science and technology that in the past two years, due to the rapid rise of domestic brands, brand competition has accelerated the improvement of comprehensive strength of all parties. In addition to product design and manufacturing, they have accumulated capabilities in channel construction and brand marketing. At present, the company's sales basically maintain a growth level of 100% - 200%. Even though the growth may slow down due to the external environment this year, it is still increasing year on year.

If it is said that the settlement of Express link has opened a window for cross-border e-commerce for amii, the current situation of multi platform development has really opened the door of amii to the sea.

Amii is also concerned about opportunities for more new cross-border platforms, including tiktok and Temu. In the past September, the company has held a meeting to plan to re operate its own independent station in the future. "The growth potential of overseas market is certainly great. We should be confident that made in China can sweep the world." Amy said.

Xiang Wenqian, chief analyst of Oriental Securities media industry, also believes that "the e-commerce industry has a strong network effect. At present, there are relatively leading enterprises in all regions of the world. However, different from China, due to the relatively lagging development of overseas e-commerce market, the head has not formed absolute monopoly. At this stage, the competition pattern is good, and there are still opportunities for new players."

But how to seize the opportunity?

In the face of completely different consumer groups, consumption habits and e-commerce development level from the domestic market, overseas brands need to start from 0.

Amii found that most of the new brands will encounter the same problems in the initial stage: the operation cost of the store is high at the beginning (personnel cost, goods cost, etc.), but the front-end sales volume can not keep up with it; Overseas consumers have a relatively low awareness of brands, and cross-border business departments are under great pressure.

"Everything is difficult at the beginning. That period was the investment period, and we would be worried every time we spent a sum of money. We don't know whether this investment has paid off." In Amy's opinion, this is the most difficult stage.

A consensus is that the competitive advantage of Chinese products in the international market is "cost performance". As long as the quality of the products is high, the enterprises will be able to make a good profit.

In fact, commodity profit and brand building are not the same logic. Amy believes that building a brand is a process of integrating customer experience, cost performance, product design and other capabilities. Amii also needs to find users who are more in line with the brand's tone and quality in the international market.

With this in mind, the amii team finally found that the demand for clothing in different scenarios in foreign countries was more subdivided based on the operation experience and data analysis ability of the previous ten years. Based on this, amii re designs clothes according to four kinds of subdivision scenes: workplace suits, leisure clothes, vacation travel and basic styles.

In terms of marketing means, amii also draws lessons from the domestic "discount promotion" method.

At that time, with a try mentality, amii sold a suit of four pieces with a profit of almost half price. "At that time, the sales data were very good, the drainage effect was far beyond the normal level, and the team specially applied for the promotion extension strategy." Amy said with a smile that she did not expect this way to help amii open up the international market.

After that, the same clothing company also produced a variety of colors, sales results are good. Amy pointed out that low-cost knock-out products are only one of the sales methods of the brand in the early stage, and it is not even a strategy. However, the advantage it brings is that it can find consumers who are suitable for the brand positioning of amii, so as to generate joint sales.

Miow, a clothing brand founded at the end of the last century, is not a new recruit in the industry, but it shows the temperament of a new brand everywhere in the way of going out to sea, and actively uses the local play method overseas.

In 2020, "some international fast fashion brands have gradually shrunk the market in China, but most of the battlefield these brands put into are offline, and the proportion of online is not high; on the contrary, the online development of domestic fast fashion brands is basically mature, and the domestic market has been established," said Zhou Mi, senior vice president of Maoren group, Catman began to try to expand the overseas market, the first station chose express.

In the domestic market, especially in the underwear field, cat man has been in a leading position. Looking at the international market, cat man is still an "industry white".

At the beginning of the store, fastsell marked the identity of "good seller in China" for the cat man, helping the latter grow rapidly. However, it is not easy to establish a new cross-border brand with high popularity, and necessary product marketing and user drainage are essential.

According to the characteristics of the products, the platform helps to contact the experts in French and other overseas markets to bring goods for the brand. "For the first time, we cooperated with foreign online celebrities, and more than 100 orders were completed in one hour, and the conversion rate was nearly 30%. This data gives us great confidence." Say it carefully.

In only half a year, catman has entered the top 100 underwear industry, with a rapid growth rate. In addition, in order to improve the turnover speed of logistics, Maoren has also established overseas cloud warehouses and settled in the preferred warehouses of the platform. On the one hand, it improves the shopping experience, on the other hand, it can obtain traffic support.

With the development of the company's business, this year, Maoren has also adjusted its organizational structure from platform management mode to category division mode.

Before the adjustment, the company was mainly divided into tmall, Jingdong and other business divisions, which were platform oriented; After the adjustment, the company is divided into business divisions according to bra, socks, warm home and other categories, so as to be commodity oriented and realize brand development driven by commodities.

With the strategy adjustment and brand going out to sea, catman will achieve a 70% year-on-year increase in sales in 2020, reaching 6.9 billion yuan; Zhou Mi disclosed to all-weather technology that the company's goal this year is to achieve 10 billion yuan of transaction, "such a growth trend is unique in the underwear industry at present, and from the current data, 10 billion yuan has been reached."

Amii and catman are just the tip of the iceberg for local fast fashion brands to go out to sea, and many brands may fall on the way to the sea.

Ma Gang, an analyst in the clothing industry, points out that sheen is totally different from the brand model of the first wave overseas. It is exported in the mode of "Internet + supply chain". In essence, it enjoys the accumulated dividends of China's Internet for decades, as well as the dividends of made in China and China's supply chain.

"It is an indisputable fact that China's consumer brands are in a relatively weak position as a whole. We need to strengthen brand building, and the core is to strengthen cultural leadership." Ma Gang believes that the enterprise brand can no longer point to manufacturing advantages, but should focus on the development of brand advantages with higher premium and create new materials for clothing production.

Fortunately, China's clothing industry is in the period of transformation and upgrading, toward digital, high-end, functional and technical upgrading.

In July this year, China Textile Industry Federation issued the three-year action plan for digital transformation of textile industry (2022-2024), which aims to promote the digital transformation of textile industry and accelerate the application of mature and applicable intelligent manufacturing technology, equipment and software in the whole industry, especially small and medium-sized enterprises.

In recent years, catman has been taking "technology underwear" as the goal, vigorously promoting the development of enterprises and products towards high-end.

In terms of fabrics, it cooperates with Japan's Mitsubishi, Toray, Itochu, DuPont of the United States, Xiaoxing of South Korea, Lanjing of Austria and other textile giants to seek materials that can absorb sweat, keep warm, stretch and touch skin; In terms of management, the company uses 5g network, artificial intelligence image and big data system to build the Internet of things system, so that managers can complete the real-time view and control of each station, order and equipment through the large screen of the office area.

Data shows that the global sales of cat man technology underwear has exceeded 1 billion pieces; In the first half of 2022, the sales volume of Gmv was 55% higher than that of the whole industry.

In order to make the concept of "technology underwear" deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, in addition to signing the spokesperson of delireba this year, catman will spare no effort to enhance consumer awareness through comprehensive marketing strategies in the future. According to Zhou Mi, catman's goal is to reach 30 billion yuan in sales by 2025 and become a global underwear group by 2030.

Comparing the differences between Chinese and foreign fast fashion brands, Cheng Weixiong, founder of Shanghai Liangqi Brand Management Co., Ltd. and an expert in textile and garment brand management, points out that local brands have stronger online operation capabilities and manufacturing advantages, while international brands are more concentrated in offline development. Only a few brands like UNIQLO have mastered the upstream auxiliary materials and have manufacturing advantages, Therefore, the situation of "international fast fashion brand collapse in recent years" appears.

"But there is no future for the very low-cost enterprises." Cheng Weixiong believes that Chinese enterprises must upgrade to the middle and high-end, take the technical and functional routes, strengthen the technical threshold and do brand premium.

From processing overseas brands to directly facing consumers, this round of fast fashion brands is a transfer from b-end sales to C-end sales, which is a comprehensive test of brand building ability and consumer touch.

For new local players, in addition to the channel side can rely on platform development, supply chain and marketing side need to establish a strong supporting service system, in order to continue to master the initiative in the process of going out to sea.