Yu Xiaodan: Where Is The Underwear Store?

According to the World Clothing, Shoes and Hats Network, one day in the first ten days of October, several long messages with a rather urgent tone suddenly appeared in my microblog and email. In a hurry, I saw that an investment company wanted to communicate with me by phone. I know very little about the investment circle. In the investment performance profile sent by this company, I saw several names with considerable weight. One of the names that particularly attracted me was a underwear company. In the field of underwear, I have noticed that several reports about this company have appeared on the Internet recently, all claiming that its profits have declined. Some article titles even boast that "bra and underwear suddenly can't be sold", and the underwear industry has "suffered a cold winter".

This investment company found me and should be independent of me brand emily Yu entered China last year market of This spring, as a designer, I started to cooperate with the domestic APP mode "Oxygen" underwear company, and had the opportunity to contact the mainland sales platform and industrial chain, which was considered as a more practical entry into the Chinese underwear market.

After talking with the investment company for 120 minutes, I didn't know whether the other party was too cautious or I was too slow. After hanging up, I realized that they wanted me to answer, "How should the underwear industry go in the future?"

　 Where is the underwear store?

Not long ago, I worked with Underwear Huijie, a friend of the dealer, talked on the phone and heard her dejected mood as soon as she came up.

Huijie and I got to know each other in 2011, when she had been selling underwear for ten years. There were retail outlets in Beijing's Xinguang Tiandi, Lufthansa, Saite and other high-end shopping malls and the underwear area of shopping centers to sell Italian high-end underwear brand DANA. Later, she processed and produced underwear of relatively low price by herself, and sold it in several outlets. She followed the route of matching high and low end brands of the same brand that had been quite mature in Europe and the United States, and supported each other by quality and quantity. In the first few years, I would go to her shop every year when I returned home, but I was always happy to see her busy. This year, she lost her enthusiasm obviously. To her, the statement of "cold winter" does not seem exaggerated.

However, she said loudly, "Not only underwear, but also all ready to wear stores!"

Previously, the annual turnover of the merchants who settled in Beijing Lufthansa Store must increase by 10%, or they will be dismissed by the property; Now it has been reduced by 10 points, and few can complete the task. Most of the profits or growth of stores that have not been closed are almost zero. It can be seen that the retail of shopping centers is no longer a problem of expensive or too strong property, but a problem of how property and businesses should overcome difficulties. "How many years can it last?" Sister Hui sighed in confusion.

However, it seems that the cold winter of physical stores is not just in China. This year, I went to the Global Underwear Exhibition in Lyon one after another. I went to Tokyo twice and stayed in New York for half a year. Apart from Tokyo, these places also gave me continuous surprises. Underwear in other cities is likely to turn dark. The previous underwear exhibition in Lyon was the highest standard exhibition in the world's underwear industry, with the largest scale and the best appearance. This year, there are only a few brands participating in the exhibition, and there are few unforgettable ones. The only high-end underwear buyer's shop that I would visit every time I went to Lyon ten years ago is no longer on the shopping guide of Lyon this year.

The physical underwear stores in New York have also undergone significant changes at various levels, with frequent store closures and area reductions. Italian high-end underwear brand la Perla left Queerxi District at the beginning of this year, and now there are only two stores in Manhattan. My favorite Kiki de Montpanasse withdrew from Soho District in the first half of the year and moved to Tribeca District, where the rent was relatively cheap, which deeply distressed me. The most famous private lingerie buyer's shop in New York, "Tiny Flirt", has also cut down the shop from two big rooms to one small room. Now, when passing by, it is hard to see Rebecca, the owner who used to be arrogant and rude and refused designers to enter. Barney's, known as "the cradle of young designers" New The underwear area of York Department Store once occupied a whole area on the west end of the sixth floor, which was my favorite part. Two years ago, the area has shrunk by two-thirds. This year, it has further reduced its brands and categories, becoming the most pleasant corner of Barney's. London luxury underwear brand Agent with the United States as the largest sales market Provocateur， In November this year, it was also announced that the Group decided to close 30% of its retail stores due to strategic mistakes caused by excessive and blind global expansion. Although the "Victoria's Secret" holiday season this year is still full of joy, many of the series are rough and cheap. In the holiday season the year before last, my friend Julia's design occupied the best window positions in all stores, and she was dismissed at the end of last year. We joked that it was no wonder that the "Victoria Secrets" of this holiday season had no highlights.

Leave a street to visit

"Why are these changes taking place in the American market?" I asked Julia. She replied that the consumer's consumption direction has shifted. The money originally spent on clothes is now more spent on tourism, sports and other life contents. Even she has worked for the sports brand Champion - I'm sorry for her, but I can't help it. She said that only Champion can give her the salary she needs.

Several traditional business districts in New York have indeed made rapid response to this transfer. Back last month, I saw a sudden increase in sports stores. The iron iron business district is still DKNY Black and Shops of ready to wear brands such as White have quietly turned into sports brand Sweaty in October Betty and Athleta. Only Suhe District has 36 sports brand stores listed on Google, including Addidas, Northface, etc. The new one is Lululemon, Athleta, Under Armour, Nike, Sweaty Betty, etc. (but my favorite VPL with the highest price was closed). Nike used to have only one small experience store in Soho District. In the second half of the year, it replaced a coffee shop at the corner of Broadway and Spring Street to build a five storey building, no less than the flagship store on 57th Street. Nike, which now has two stores in New York Town， It's no exaggeration to say that now it should be the busiest shop in New York. On the contrary, by the end of November this year, the clothing brand DKNY had only left one store on West Broadway in Manhattan, and all the rest were closed, even the flagship store on Madison Avenue calculated by the feng shui master was not spared.

Many clothing brand stores that have not been cut have added "resort" categories, such as Ralph Lauren, Micheal Kors， Even coaches. When I first arrived in New York 20 years ago, the underwear brand la perla was a small shop specializing in swimwear. This season, the "leisure vacation underwear" series that returned to the starting point also appeared on the shelf.

The Western style underwear industry in China has only started for 30 years. It has not yet matured as the European and American markets, and many categories are not perfect; However, it is a pity that physical stores have not yet had the opportunity to fully develop, so they have been overwhelmed by online stores and micro stores coming from behind.

The impact of e-commerce on physical stores is certainly not only in the underwear industry, but also not only in the fashion industry, which has been discussed many times for a long time. Like the Italian brand that Huijie sells, everything is really good, of course, the price is also really expensive, and occasionally tens of thousands of dollars, her consumers can not buy from the Internet. If the physical stores disappear, this part of good things will lose the opportunity to meet the market, and fewer people will have seen good things. I'm afraid even designers who want to copy will not be able to copy. As the saying goes, if there is no discerning consumer, there will be no discerning products and stores. We all know what kind of consumers Taobao stores can cultivate and what kind of brands they can nurture.

For online shopping, after the initial blind enthusiasm, American brand operators seem to be conservative in recent years. Apart from some consumer goods that do not need to keep physical stores at all, such as health care drug brand stores, which are highly active online, fashion physical stores do not seem to be affected by online stores, and they are often protected. At least the brand itself will protect its physical stores and will not let the online stores of the same brand become too developed to compete with itself. The online shopping in the United States is far from that in China. Many high-end brands do not even have online shopping functions on their official websites. For these big brands with abundant capital, it is certainly not a matter of funds, but to a large extent, they deliberately do it.

I have also noticed many times that the prices of some brands online and in the store are slightly different, or the retention time is different. For example, in the same season of price reduction, Polo stores usually cut prices a little more than the website, or lower prices earlier than the store. Only in this way can I have the motivation to go to the store to consume, and the store can also maintain the turnover. From the perspective of the city as a whole, such protection measures are very necessary, otherwise, like Beijing today, there will be no decent street to visit; If not protected, the Fifth Avenue, which has already lost many high-quality stores, will lose more and be flooded with more fast fashion stores that make money quickly. If the high-quality Fifth Avenue is gone, New York will lose a landmark. Although it is a market economy, the interests of the New York government and shrewd businessmen should be the same on this point, and neither would like to see this happen.

　　Minimum! Difficulties and dilemmas of new designers

In July this year, I met Tina, a famous designer in American underwear industry in Lyon Wilson， Later, she was invited to do a series of Christmas designs for Oxygen. She designs and we produce. Tina was excited along the way, because this was the first time that the independent design with her name systematically entered the production process and finally entered the hands of consumers. I regard this as an innovation of the buying system, which is more flexible than the buying system of the old-fashioned American department stores, and more reasonable for mutual benefit of resources. Looking back at the beginning of the year, the reason why I decided to agree to the invitation of "Oxygen" after seven or eight years of "rest" was that I liked him as a buyer, a rare role in China, and admired him for his courage to support me, a newly independent designer. After all, the ecology of willing to share risks in China has almost disappeared. However, it is obvious that just being a buyer is less beneficial. Therefore, most American department stores that adhere to the buyer system also have their own private brands label)。 "Oxygen" is now also on this path, making the old system used in the new form, and also adhering to the old in innovation. However, not all roses are encountered on this road, and there seem to be more thorns.

One advantage of online stores is to lower the threshold for entry. So now many young people are creating underwear brands or preparing to create brands, but it is not so easy for them to adhere to maturity. I just finished a "underwear class" for young people like this in China last week, and found that many people actually do not know where to get design inspiration. All libraries and art colleges do not have archives that provide underwear design reference materials. All our clothing colleges do not have underwear majors. Young designers want to be original from the beginning, The reserves are very thin. The design is not easy, but even more difficult is the later production.

Back in New York last month, Tina and I finally had a chance to sit down and chat over tea. In fact, we used to work for K, the largest private underwear company in New York. We talked about the biggest change of the company in the last decade when I was in the company and this decade when she was in the company. Tina said that the price was pushed lower - the sales price was pushed lower, and the cost price was also pushed lower. The company executives seem to think that when the price is low, people will buy underwear in department stores. The result may be the opposite. Now go to Macy's, Lord and Compared with mid-range department stores, Taylor's products of K Company, which still occupy most of the underwear area, are much more boring than before. At least I have no desire to buy. Tina said that the biggest disadvantage of the American underwear industry in the past few years was the monopoly of large companies, which caused problems to creativity.

From 1999 to 2009, my ten years of full-time underwear in New York witnessed the process of big capital annexing small capital to form a monopoly in the American underwear industry. Almost every day, I heard the news of merger and reorganization; It also witnessed the process of these big companies controlling the trend of the underwear industry and making it possible to lower prices. It is a common demand of large American companies after they monopolize the market to lower prices and "take volume". When I worked for K Company 12 years ago, the company held a monthly sales summary meeting. If the order for a certain style was less than 1200 pieces, the boss would throw the style into the wastebasket directly. According to another post colleague of mine, this is still one of the company's systems. In that decade, the production of underwear in large quantities gradually moved from the United States to China, and a large number of workshops and factories in the New York clothing district closed down. It is also because of the large number of OEM in China that large American companies can achieve breakthroughs in quantity again and again.

At present, the impact of this big order system on Chinese factories is gradually emerging, huge and far-reaching. On the positive side, it is to cultivate a large number of qualified factories for China, understand professional norms, have excellent technical standards, and can even communicate in English; The negative side is that with China's accession to the WTO and rising labor costs, many orders from Europe and the United States have shifted to Southeast Asia, South Asia, and even cheaper regions such as Africa and South America, or simply returned to China after cost accounting, China has begun to see a large number of idle productive forces. It can make these idle productive forces change their thinking and production mode to adapt to the Chinese mainland market, especially to the emerging small brand companies. It is extremely difficult both psychologically and technically.

For example, it is said that Nanchang has the productivity of more than 400000 people, and now only a few dollars a day to make T-shirts. This summer, some enterprises invited me to Nanchang for activities. They asked me if I could do something about it? I said I would do it, but they may not. Because they are used to large orders from the United States, most of these factories will shake their heads when they hear that young designers have fewer products to process. Recently, too many young people who want to be a lingerie brand came to me and asked me what to do, hoping that I could introduce the manufacturer to them, but I couldn't give them a pleasant answer.

This is almost an insurmountable threshold for every young designer. I have met too many factory owners in China in the past few months. Although we all know clearly that we need each other, we will eventually lose cooperation due to one problem: minimum! Minimum order quantity. This is the word that I don't want to hear at this time, but I hear it the most. Every time I hear it, I feel tingling! This means that your design is not only subject to things other than design, but also may lose the possibility of realization.

Why is the factory unwilling to do it? For example, to make a bucket cloth with a bra steel ring, you must first debug the machine. Debugging is not easy. Therefore, after debugging once, the manufacturer would like to make 150000 pieces and 150 pieces. Of course, the manufacturer would prefer the former to the latter. The same is true for suppliers of cloth and accessories. For example, I like a beautiful lace. After making the sample clothes, the supplier found that the lace was out of stock and the production quantity was too small when the machine was started. At this time, I have to bear the pain to find alternatives, which is a huge psychological torture. From lace and rubber band to back hook and zero button, all suppliers will ask: What's your quantity? As the dyeing factory is used to large orders, large vats are standard, and the manufacturer often tells me with embarrassment that it will charge extra fees for small vats. All these costs will be reflected in the final pricing of products, which is also the reason why new small brands are often more expensive than big brands. To be honest, in the first three months of entering China's industrial chain, I spent a lot of time every day dealing with various problems that broke out due to "quantity".

The feeling of manufacturers is the same as that of our designers. As a result, factory closures occur from time to time. Sister Hui said that many people who owned factories around her simply sold them instead of staying in a hotel or even renting them. They were absolutely pessimistic about the future of the industry.

When chatting with Tina, she was optimistic that the monopoly situation of large companies in the United States has changed. Like China, a large number of small creative companies have emerged, bringing fresh power to industry. "But how can small creative companies and independent designers survive?" I asked her. She sighed and replied, "Some suppliers have realized that small enterprises can become large enterprises one day, so they can often negotiate and compromise on small orders." Such an answer does not seem to solve my question. Small enterprises become large enterprises, so what's the point of the emergence of these innovative small enterprises now? Can't small enterprises continue to be small enterprises? Does it really have to be measured to have a way out?

With the same problem, I went to Tokyo on a business trip this summer and specifically met with Tomoko, the design director of the Japanese high-end underwear brand l'Angelique, to see if they also faced the same problem as me, because the Japanese market seems to follow a different path from the United States, with a steady stream of originality and richness. Tomoko listened to my question and said, "You are a designer, why do you care about this?" I asked her, what do you care about? She replied, "I just need to care about what kind of design is the most beautiful." I asked again, you selected a lace, and when you entered the production process, you found that the lace was replaced by someone who did cost statistics in the company, and another cheaper lace was used. Have you ever encountered such a situation? She was very surprised, with an expression of "how could this be possible", as if we were not on the same channel at all.

Although indirect, Tomoko's answer also gave some explanation to the Japanese market - hungry pursuit of design, positive identification with uniqueness, appreciation and cooperation of creativity, and customer terminals willing to pay for uniqueness - all these links are indispensable. I often buy cloth in Japan, and I do see that many cloth and material stores do "small" businesses. Whether it's a high-end cloth shop in Fibre Street or Jixiang Temple, I buy a piece of cloth. When I want to buy it again a month later, I often find that it is out of stock. And if it's gone, it's gone. It won't be produced again. Japanese businesses do not do long-term business, do not do large orders, and the renewal rate is high. At first, I was envious and slightly uncomfortable. Later, I learned how to cope: quickly stock up on the materials I like.

Tina agrees with this. She said, "When you focus on and sincerely believe in your brand, you can finally use all the fabric you ordered." This is actually a process of cultivating and testing the vision and determination of designers, which will make designers less hesitant and have more courage to complete. After all, completion in a sense means that our game with life has a temporary result. But all these things must be done by people who are willing to help me achieve production. Otherwise, my completion will be impossible.

More possibilities in fragmentation

My designer friend Cilia in the United States cooperated with her friend in the infant and child clothing company. When we met in New York in October, she anxiously told me that the company's order volume had dropped a lot this year. I thought that the number of customers who placed orders decreased, but she said that the number of customers actually increased. In other words, although there are more customers, the number of orders per customer is less, and the market becomes fragmented. Lian T J. Discount supermarkets like Maxx used to order from their existing designs, but now they also require exclusive design. This is consistent with my recent observation that smaller, better targeted products will be the future direction.

Many underwear boutiques in the United States are already very sophisticated, such as le petite However, I came back this year and found that they are all better without exception. Although we used to sell sexy products, we usually used to match with several special basic styles, but this time we saw that many basic styles were off the shelves. The boutique has fewer categories, smaller price span and narrower customer base.

The fragmentation of the market must be a response to consumer demand.

A few days ago, my assistant Fancy and I passed by Pudong Town and saw two familiar stores not far from the road. They were underwear brands founded in Guangzhou in 1998, and were also urban beauties who settled in commercial streets and pedestrian streets earlier and had 8609 stores across the country. The little assistant sighed that her mother in Nanchang, Jiangxi would never go to such a store because she had already bought underwear worth 1000 yuan ten years ago. What is such a shop? At least in our eyes, its display content lacks international language regardless of style or color, and its chain operation mode is also old. The more chains, the less attractive they are.

Fashion is the most loving thing. Fast fashion has developed rapidly in Europe and the United States in the past two decades, and the trend of fast imitation brought by it has become tired. Although the price is cheap, consumers still have aesthetic fatigue on "large-scale" things. Fast fashion chain brands themselves have long been aware of the bottleneck before consumers. H&M, ZARA and others have begun to transform into new directions, actively looking for niche products, and regularly launching designer brand cooperation models. Small batch, exclusive models can be sold out in a day; Or some studio limited edition edition, limited edition)， Try to attract customers with a small amount of "hungry sales". We are tired of wearing similar cheap clothes. When things get extreme, they will turn against each other. Instead, we pursue small and refined clothes. Especially nowadays, every woman's personality is getting stronger and stronger, so she is more and more taboo from "matching clothes" with others. Although underwear is "inside" clothes, it may not be so important for most people to hit their shirts, but when feminism has taken the body as a weapon, underwear is not just "inside" clothes.

In my opinion, oriental people's aesthetics are more exquisite. In addition, when we were young, most of us had the experience of sewing clothes by our mothers. Their sewing must be unique. Therefore, we were educated early to wear different clothes from others. In this sense, Taobao has its roots and enthusiasm, at least its rich and colorful make the world envy. To be honest, what can't be found on Taobao now? Even if Taobao can't find it, today's various APP platforms, such as Xiaohongshu, Yitiao, Yaqu, will make more efforts to help us find it. Therefore, if fragmentation can make us have more choices in life, it will not lose a kind of beauty. Now some domestic APP platforms come here to order, and they will directly say that we want to be different from others. This should be the sensitivity and progress of business. So, does the manufacturer also put down the inherent illusion, find a reasonable configuration as soon as possible, make necessary preparations for the design force, as in Japan, and help China's underwear truly emerge as an original high-quality brand?

Perhaps underwear has received more and more attention, and I have received more interviews this year. Most interviewers will ask: What is your ideal brand in the end? My answer is mostly to manage my own brand, which is a small number of people. I can successfully produce a group of designs that I am satisfied with every quarter, so that those who like me can continue to like me. Although it is not easy to realize, it is also an ideal.

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