Why Consumers No Longer Favor Explosive Clothing?

In October 4th, the fast fashion brand UNIQLO hosted the "global brand ambassador Roger Federer China meeting" at the global flagship store in Huaihai Road, Shanghai. It released the brand new products of men's wear in 2019, autumn and winter, and launched the same competition clothing and fans special series Limited sales to attract Chinese consumers.

While new products are emerging, new technologies and technologies are also worth looking forward to.

Fast fashion brand H&M, general manager of Greater China, recently said that the brand is investing in artificial intelligence models and building databases to improve production efficiency. Coincidentally, there is news that ZARA and other brands are also digitalized and intelligent in layout. Under the fierce market competition of online stores and the strong impact of online sales, the fast fashion brands who once occupied half of the domestic clothing consumption market are trying to reverse the slowdown of their performance through new actions and new technologies. They also reflect the need for transformation and upgrading of garment enterprises and enhancing their performance.

According to statistics from the National Bureau of statistics, sales of clothing and cloth fell in varying degrees from the fourth quarter of 2017. Among them, sales of clothing decreased from 71 billion 910 million in 2017 to 54 billion 60 million in 2018, a decrease of 17 billion 850 million in one year and a decrease of 24.8%. As clothing consumption growth slows down, consumers no longer favour explosions, and are no longer willing to crash shirts with others. Do people really like to buy clothes?

Sales fell, but consumption increased.

"Since two years ago, I have been controlling the number of clothes I buy and the quality and brand of clothes when I buy new clothes." After opening the wardrobe, Miss Sun, who was born after 90, showed her few clothes that she had bought in recent two years. According to MS sun, a few years ago, ZARA, H&M and other fast fashion brands were popular fans of these brands when they were popular. "Fashionable fashion and low price, it is not heartache to lose one or two times, especially in the spring and summer seasons and the eve of new year's Eve. These brands have a very high discount rate."

Ms. Sun told reporters that after a time of fascination with fast fashion brands, she found that the wardrobe was soon filled. "Many clothes don't want to be worn once again, which is actually a waste." Now, she said, she prefers to save some money to buy expensive, better textured brands. "Low prices and discounts are actually whirlpools. Reducing quantity ensures quality."

Reporters interviewed found that, like Ms. sun, many 80, 90 "wardrobe consumption" upgrade demand is strong, "buy less buy good" is becoming their new consumption concept, which to a certain extent also led to the decline in the frequency of consumer clothing purchase.

The price rise of some clothing categories has also become an important factor in the decline of clothing purchases.

According to the relevant statistics of the China National Business Information Center, in 2018, clothing consumer prices rose 1.4%, or slightly faster. In 2018, the unit price of clothing in major national retail enterprises increased by 5.3%, up 4.1 percentage points from 2017. Among them, men's clothing sales unit price rose 4.6%, or 2.4 percentage points faster than in 2017; the sales price of women's clothing rose 7.1%, or 7.7 percentage points higher than that in 2017; the sales price of children's wear increased 10.5%, or 2.1 percentage points lower than that in 2017.

At the same time, with the improvement of residents' consumption level and the continuous optimization of clothing business operators, there are more and more ways for residents to buy clothes. According to the National Bureau of statistics, in 2018, the per capita clothing consumption expenditure of the whole country was 1289 yuan, an increase of 4.1% over the same period last year, and the growth rate was 1.2 percentage points faster than that of the same period last year. In the same period, the per capita consumption expenditure of the residents increased by 6.2% in real terms, and the growth of daily necessities and services, transportation and communications, education, culture and entertainment, health care and so on was much higher than that of clothing consumption. In 2018, the proportion of clothing consumption per capita in the national consumption expenditure was 6.5%, down 0.3 percentage points from the previous year.

Fast fashion into slow lane

Recently, Wang Yuqian, a post-80s white collar worker in Beijing, discovered that several H&M and ZARA stores she visited in Dongzhimen and Zhongguancun often did not know when to close.

Since last year, sales of many fast fashion brands continued to slump, and many garment companies chose to withdraw from the Chinese market. In May of this year, the Forever 21, which was once popular, announced that it had withdrawn from the Chinese market.

The fast fashion brands abroad have become cold spell in China, but La Natsu Bell, who is known as "China ZARA", is suffering from declining trend. In September 19th, La Natsu Bell clothing company of Shanghai released the 2019 interim report of H-share. According to the financial report, during the reporting period, La Natsu Bell's revenue was 3 billion 951 million yuan, a decrease of about 23.2% compared with the same period last year, and net profit of -5.65 billion yuan, down 333.9% from the same period last year. As of June 30th, data showed that the number of retail outlets in La Natsu Bell decreased from 9269 at the beginning of the year to 6799.

Faced with a sharp decline in performance, La Natsu Bell said that the initiative was mainly due to the implementation of the group network under the contraction strategy and online revenue decline.

User demand is changing and market trend is changing. When "buy less buy good" become a new choice of clothing purchase, the cooling of consumers' pursuit of fast fashion brands and the change of fashion idea directly affect the consumption behavior of the clothing market.

"H&M, ZARA and other clothes are not only different in style, but also because these brands are almost turned into" rotten Street "brand. Wang Yuqian told reporters, "friends around us are buying fewer brands, and we are increasingly pursuing personalization and differentiation. They are more willing to buy smaller designer brands recommended by the bloggers, and some brands that are recommended in the jitter."

Domestic clothing brand meets new crossroads

"I have to admit that the clothing business is really hard to do this year." A clothing industry practitioner told reporters that more and more consumers are reluctant to buy the usual explosive clothing, and are unwilling to "bump into shirts" with others.

China Garment Association said that due to the continuous growth of cost, such as employment, financing, taxation, raw materials, energy and so on, the comprehensive operation cost of enterprises has been increasing. From the change of the proportion of cost to main business income, the average level of Industrial Enterprises above designated size has been decreasing year by year, while the proportion of garment industry has been increasing. The rapid rise of cost has further squeezed the profit margins of garment enterprises.

In addition to the cost increase, fashion change has accelerated the industry segmentation. That is to say, in the process of the rise of new consumer groups, enterprises can not label the 70 and the Post-80's consumer groups as they used to label the post-90s and 00 consumer groups. This means that the new round of consumption upgrading is more changeable and diverse.

It is noteworthy that in recent years, clothing customization has been a hot topic in China's clothing industry. Clothing customization is not only a handful of high-end consumers' patents, including Ali, Jingdong, Mito, vip.com and other Internet Co have tested the water clothing custom market. The private custom of clothing is stepping into more families with the help of the Internet platform.

Some research institutes predict that the potential market capacity of domestic private custom garments will exceed 200 billion yuan by 2020.

According to the analysis of the industry, consumption upgrading has accelerated the rapid growth of personalized demand. Customized production will become the trend of the future development of the garment industry. This is also an opportunity and a challenge to the domestic clothing brand at the new crossroads.