The Industry Is Transformed Into The Digital Aggregation Of Deepwater Area, Enabling The Traditional Footwear Industry

At present, digital means and tools have become the only choice for high-quality development of the traditional footwear industry. After entering the deep water area of digital transformation, with the digital empowerment of SaaS (software operation) service providers such as Weimeng, many footwear and clothing enterprises have ushered in greater and more profit space and development opportunities.

　　 The digitalization of footwear and clothing industry is accelerating

In recent years, with the deepening of the integration of digital technology and the real economy, the footwear and clothing industry is also accelerating its digital transformation.

Recently, Luo Zheng, the chief customer operation officer of Belle Fashion Group (hereinafter referred to as "Belle Fashion"), said in an interview with reporters that through in-depth cooperation with the well-known domestic SaaS service provider Microalliance, Belle Fashion has taken retail digitalization as the starting point, actively promoted the cloud launch of stores, and realized the integration of real-time digitalization of stores and online and offline operations.

It is understood that Belle Fashion has been deeply rooted in the footwear industry for more than 30 years. It is a "carrier class" fashion footwear enterprise with more than 20 brands and nearly 10000 direct sales physical stores.

In the past, traditional footwear and clothing enterprises mainly relied on department stores to conduct one-way output to a large number of consumers through price, advertising and other ways. Because they could not interact with users, it was difficult to reach users accurately. Now, the market has entered an era where consumers are the king. How to accurately find users through more ways and scenes has become the key to business development of footwear and clothing enterprises, and retail digitalization is undoubtedly the most important part.

Based on this, Belle Fashion began to layout the direct marketing mode very early, and established a vertically integrated market layout, enabling enterprises to fully understand and adapt to market trends, so as to more directly face the consumer market and quickly respond.

At the same time, Belle Fashion is also constantly exploring retail channels and acutely transforming market demand into products: on the one hand, Belle Fashion is based on existing stores, focusing on customer demand changes and consumption trends, and quickly digitizing existing customers; On the other hand, in order to tap more emerging traffic, Belle Fashion quickly launched the live broadcast matrix of "video number+applet" nationwide, which greatly enriched the marketing scene and injected new consumption increment into the terminal channel.

Luo Zheng said that the essence of retail digitalization is to effectively connect all marketing opportunities, customer needs, organizational behaviors and products to provide customers with the most valuable products and services, But "shoes are non-standard products. At the retail end, customers' personalized demand for products will become higher and higher, and our service and touch to customers will also need to become more efficient and accurate. At this time, the value of cloud stores will gradually release."

Like Belle Fashion, women's fashion enterprise Masefield Group (hereinafter referred to as "Masefield") attaches importance to retail digitalization. At present, more than 400 stores under Masefield have been launched into the cloud.

According to Masefield, since February 2022, Masefield has cooperated with Microleague to open the road of enterprise digital transformation. At first, the two sides tested the online high-end women's clothing live broadcast with goods business, creating a performance increase of 9 million yuan. Since then, from April to June 2022, six fashion clothing brands under Masefield have successively promoted the cloud plan of stores, and the online performance has climbed accordingly. As of December 2022, the monthly performance of Masefield's digital retail business has reached 10 million yuan.

Meng Qingxin, director of digital retail of Masefield, said that Masefield built the cloud store on the micro mall applet, and one cloud store corresponds to one store. "It is like the 'second floor' of a store, which solves the problems of 'extending business hours' and' extending shelves'."

For the future, Masefield has a clear plan. Meng Qingxin said that Masefield will start the construction of digital content middle platform (CMS system), and will embed the ability of fitting door-to-door service into the cloud store in the future to meet the needs of members for door-to-door service; At the same time, we will work together with the supply chain to achieve the goal of zero inventory and flexible production to meet the customized needs of consumers.

　　 Industry transformation into deepwater area

At present, digital transformation has become the only way for major enterprises to obtain core competitiveness, and the footwear industry is no exception.

As an enterprise that started digital transformation earlier in the industry, in addition to cloud stores, Belle Fashion's digital transformation has entered the deep water area.

At the R&D end, Belle Fashion has a proprietary footwear development platform, which, together with visualization tools and 3D printing technology, can enable designers to convert ideas into designs in a short time, thus bringing faster market response. At the same time, Belle Fashion, on the basis of a certain system, gathers a large number of demands, explores the large-scale customization of products, and solves the problem that many customers cannot buy suitable shoes.

On the production side, Belle Fashion takes the "ordering, replenishment, iterative research and development" mode as the core, and uses digital drive to continuously upgrade the flexible supply chain, which greatly improves the forecasting ability of commodity planning and the flexibility of the supply chain, thus improving product quality and production efficiency.

On the retail side, Belle Fashion connects all stores and online and offline data, realizing "real-time management" and "omni channel one inventory" of goods. For example, when a store or cloud store is out of stock, the store manager can quickly query and retrieve the goods from other stores nearby, so that the products can reach the customer with the optimal path.

Obviously, Belle Fashion has digitized every step of its entire value chain, and has embarked on a representative long-term growth and innovative development path of "customer-centric and digital driven".

Slightly different from Belle Fashion, Masefield, focusing on the high decision-making cost of high-end women's clothing consumers, and the pain point that online channels are difficult to show the texture of clothing fabrics and convey brand ideas, has jointly created a digital retail model centered on "members and shopping guides" with WeUnion: on one hand, both sides start from the experience of consumers, We have jointly created a brand exclusive membership system and membership operation mechanism, actively held membership festivals and other activities, and promoted member growth and performance transformation; On the other hand, based on the advantages of many existing offline stores and shopping guides, various digital tools are used to empower shopping guides. While reducing costs and improving efficiency, they build trust through interaction with more online and offline consumers, and turn shopping guides into practitioners of brand ideas, so as to implicitly convey brand ideas and build long-term trust in brands.

Meng Qingxin said, "Our digitalization is divided into three steps: the first stage is to create an online and offline integrated consumer experience; the second stage is how to create a digital shopping guide benchmark; and the third stage is how cloud stores can better bring sales growth to stores."

In addition, through the feedback from multiple digital carriers such as shopping guide, app and applet, Masefield has realized that consumers are increasingly pursuing personalized customized fashion.

In this regard, Meng Qingxin said that every clothing brand in the future should consider "matching people and goods" and "production on demand". Therefore, future clothing brands should also have flexible supply chain capabilities to achieve production on demand. He said: "The digital content middle platform we are about to launch is to achieve the best match between people and goods, and label the content at the same time, so as to provide accurate services for members through the match between people and content labels."

Today, Masefield has gradually formed a virtuous circle of business ecosystem, and found a path suitable for its own sustainable development in the new competitive model of the digital era.

　　 The future development direction is becoming clearer

In the era of digital economy, the essence of business is digitalization. For a long time in the past, the footwear and clothing industry has been a labor-intensive, high cost and inefficient industry. With the in-depth application of Internet, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other technologies, the footwear and clothing industry has also ushered in a critical period of digital transformation and upgrading.

The industry believes that there are still many pain points in the development of China's footwear and clothing industry, such as huge inventory, serious homogenization, redundant middle channels in the industrial chain, lack of professionals, etc. The solutions to these problems ultimately point to one direction, namely, digital transformation.

However, although the direction has been further clarified, it is not easy to promote digital transformation. This is mainly reflected in that promoting digitalization is a self revolution of enterprises, which requires enterprises to make all-round breakthroughs from the industry level and the organizational level. It is difficult to transform, and needs to solve a series of problems such as the shortage of comprehensive talents, digital thinking adjustment and digital operation, which are inseparable from the support of digital service providers.

The relevant person in charge of Weimeng said that the current digitalization process of enterprises has put forward upgrading requirements for the products and technical systems that support their progress, which are specifically reflected in the improvement of granularity at the data collaboration level, breaking data islands and making the system efficient and holistic, rapid technical response to business requests Improve the bearing capacity and scalability of the system architecture. To this end, MicroUnion has prospectively launched a decentralized business operating system - MicroUnion WOS, which can provide enterprises of different sizes with integrated digital infrastructure suitable for sustainable business development.

It is reported that WOS is independent, connected and unified, which can help group merchants connect the data of their brands and products, and connect the needs of platforms, brands and merchants. In addition, WOS can also provide merchants with a unified commodity middle platform and data platform, help merchants achieve overall business management, and help enterprises create "additional value".

From the practice of Belle Fashion and Masefield, although the stage, path and team structure of digital transformation are different, with the help of Microalliance, digitalization has become their own key projects and achieved good results.

Among them, the core services provided by Weimeng to Belle Fashion include three aspects: marketing services, live broadcast operations, and SaaS business. In addition to standard products, Weimeng will also provide personalized services to Belle Fashion to help enterprises form a business closed loop and achieve performance growth. The cooperation between WeUnion and Masefield covers the full range of digital business links from traffic to SaaS products to operations.

Meng Qingxin said: "Microleague has penetrated the field of enabling digital transformation for many years, not only has developed many SaaS products, but also many mature models are worthy of reference for enterprises, and even can be directly applied. The reason why Masefield's digital transformation is so fast has a lot to do with the firm use of SaaS services."

When analyzing the reasons behind the rapid growth of Belle Fashion's performance, Luo Zheng believes that this is mainly due to the fact that Belle Fashion has always aimed at the value anchor of "customer experience" and built a systematic and refined customer operation system through digitalization on the basis of the original core competitiveness.

"Both now and in the future, the market is constantly changing, and challenges are emerging one after another. Enterprises should not only actively embrace change, but also adhere to the original intention - only 'closer to customers, more frequent, better service' can we have the opportunity to achieve sustainable growth through the cycle," Luo Zheng said. (Reporter Fu Yong)

(Source: Economic Information Daily)