Is There A Way Out For Japanese Women'S Wear In China

Compared with European and American fast fashion brands, Japanese clothing brands with geographical advantages entered China earlier.

In the 1990s, Japanese clothing brands began to migrate and take root in China. They once occupied Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and went straight to the streets and alleys of the second and third line.

Glory is short.

When Japanese fashion brands leave the market in a hurry, what they lack is not only the media attention and public enthusiasm, but also the confusion and helplessness of this land.

After this battle, although he was not successful, he was also knowledgeable. After the fierce battle of speed China, the quitters rolled the word "fast" into Japan. A series of fashion brands have launched online, and the Japanese fashion industry has begun a new round of shuffling.

Others are unwilling to make a comeback in China. Everyone wants to be UNIQLO, but there is often only one winner.

Cross the sea, attack in groups

The years when Japanese clothing brands collectively transferred to China were the key to the trade deficit of the local clothing industry.

In 2006, the total import volume of textile and clothing in Japan was 200 billion yen, but the export value was only 30 billion yen. With fierce competition in the local market and difficult to digest inventory, it is the only choice to go to emerging markets.

Neighboring China was the first to enter the eyes of the careerists. The demographic dividend is waiting to break out, the labor logistics price is low, and the aesthetic paradigm of local consumers has not yet taken shape. In addition, China has just entered the WTO, so the policy is not conducive enough.

In the stage of exploration, individual soldiers rarely fight, and the mechanism plays a significant role in promoting. Japan's trade promotion agency, together with the Japanese clothing enterprise association and the Japanese Fashion Association, the consortium legal person, all came to China for a round of rehearsal.

In Beijing in 2005, Yasunari Nakayama, President of the Japan clothing industry association, led a delegation to China for the first time to participate in the clothing Expo. At that time, only women's, men's and children's clothing produced by 36 Japanese fashion enterprises were displayed.

Since then, local organizations such as the ofa Osaka Fashion Federation and the kuya women's and children's clothing industry group have also come across the sea. In 2007, the Japanese Federation of handbag wholesale groups, all Japan hat Association and other institutions have come.

One of the organizers of the exhibition, a company named U.F.O., had about 20 years' experience in garment production cooperation with some factories in China at that time.

Tanizi, the then president of the clothing association, and nakayato, the president of the clothing association, agreed that their Japanese clothing had a bright future in China. Naturally, they took over the early work of Japanese clothing brands entering China, such as market development and staff training.

At the Shanghai Exhibition in 2005, the Japanese Fashion Association mediated from the two sides, and the number of negotiation projects reached 2146, of which 383 were completed (including the intention). This is a stage in which Japanese clothing brands are concentrated in China.

Before these brand groups went abroad, individual Japanese clothing brands had been rooted in China for nearly a decade.

Itokin, which entered China in 1995, is the representative of this group of players. They have their own department stores in Shanghai, Tianjin, Dalian, Qingdao and Harbin, and are mainly engaged in more than 20 clothing brands.

In the 1990s, there was no concept of shopping mall. State owned department stores were almost the only one-stop shopping channel for ordinary people. The "one-stop" here does not mean that the complete collection of entertainment, exhibition, catering and other formats is in the same commercial complex, but refers to the grain, oil and non-staple food, daily chemical cleaning and care products, hardware and small parts, all of which are concentrated together.

At that time, the main clothing business of Itokin (Yidujin) was very prominent in these department stores.

However, from the perspective of urban distribution, it seems that ITO kin at that time could only survive in the absolute first tier cities. The turnover of Tianjin, Dalian and Qingdao is not very good, Harbin's shopping malls have not yet opened, the headquarters withdrew from the Chinese market.

There are two problems. First, at that time, China's clothing industry was in the early stage of the formation of brand concept, and the brands of Itokin (Yidujin) were numerous and mixed, which weakened the overall cognition of consumers. Second, Yidujin clothing department store lacks the necessary cosmetic, catering and other drainage retail formats on the first and second floor.

The flow of people is not enough, it must be a hard injury. A lot of consumption happens inadvertently. Consumers may not have a clear shopping goal or plan before going out one day. They just pass by and buy when they see it.

On August 31, 2007, Shanghai China silk Yidu brocade on Nanjing road was officially closed. The failure of the clothing brand's channel didn't alarm the latecomers. They thought it was just an example.

Past experience does not apply to China

Due to some historical reasons and conventions, the offline expansion of Japanese brands has always been single.

The person in charge of Japan Fashion Association once mentioned that Japanese clothing enterprises mostly use department stores as circulation channels, and 90% of them will choose department stores as a breakthrough point when they go to sea.

To a certain extent, this has resulted in excessive dependence on the department store channel. This is the case with collection point, a clothing collection store under the banner of honeys and adastria. In the early days, they settled in Wanda, Tianhong, Jinying, Bailian and many other department stores.

In its heyday, honeys almost contracted the junior high school wardrobe of the post-90s girls. The number of stores was as high as 600. Collect + point expanded rapidly. The first store was located in Suzhou Yongwang, and then expanded to Shanghai and Beijing, with 40 stores. Meanwhile, the number of stores of Japanese stripe, which owns brands such as Earth Music & Ecology and e hyphen world Gallery, has also exceeded 100.

But China is different from Japan.

A corner of Japanese social consumption has formed a stable purchasing structure for housewives, who have enough time to soak in the physical shopping malls for selection. On the contrary, online business is not as good as offline business. High freight and human distribution costs make e-commerce in Japan lack strong motivation at the beginning.

However, in China, the biggest change in the local life circle born out of the hundred regiment war is the rapid narrowing of the process time of urban express delivery and express delivery, so as to improve the shopping experience. The process of shopping is constantly digitized, from payment to selection, even virtual fitting, to the whole process.

Although the number of stores of honeys and collect + point in their peak period is in the hundreds, when you walk into a shopping mall with complicated streamline, a shop with an area of less than 20 square meters is easy to be submerged in the dazzling brands of the same kind.

This is the defect of no first-line flagship stores and brand image stores.

The relationship between the purchase center and the settled brand complements each other.

When fast fashion brands such as UNIQLO and Zara rise, they will sell stores in the core position of the first-line business district, and introduce some space design aesthetics and high-tech devices to deepen consumers' understanding of brand "fashion". And the purchase center will also increase the number of people and the number of coffee shops in the business circle because of the settlement of these core stores.

In contrast, Japanese brands such as honeys, which are submerged in department stores, can only be linked with keywords such as discount and buy it now prices. There may be consumers who pay for them, but for shopping malls, their historical mission has stayed at 10 years ago. Elimination is sooner or later.

In 2007, Lifu International (yes, the parent company of Jiuguang Department store and Chongguang department store) took over Itokin, and the situation did not improve greatly.

In February 2016, integral, an investment fund, acquired most of the shares of idukin group, but its revenue did not rise. At the end of that year, Yidu brocade, which had changed hands several times, finally withdrew from the Chinese market.

Honeys, collect + point and EME (parent company stripe) will withdraw from the Chinese market in 2018, 2019 and 2020 respectively.

The trend is turning to Europe and America

This seems to imply that China's business is not as good as expected.

In addition to the huge impact of e-commerce, the shift of fashion trend also caught Japanese clothing brands by surprise.

European and American fashion swept, to a certain extent, forced back to comfort, lovely as the main positioning of the Japanese style. The retreat of Mori women's department is a signal, and the rise of cheap fast fashion like UNIQLO is another sign.

This is closely related to the cultural environment.

In the wave of globalization, an important change in culture is the search for commonness among various cultures and ethnic groups, which is also the mainstream topic of comparative culture research in recent years. Western radical cultural scholars even believe that we should let the European and American culture become the mainstream of the world, so as to eliminate cultural differences.

This is obviously not an equal communication gesture, and it is unfair to other cultures, including fashion culture.

But this sweep is already taking shape. BM style is becoming more and more popular. There are a lot of European and American make-up and wear sharing on xiaohongshu and INS, and the sweet Asian baby girl is promoted to the front line.

Not only in China, but also in South Korea, the aesthetic of the younger generation is also being affected. The era created by women's League style and Kop is, to some extent, a combination of the cool trend in Europe and the United States and the white, young and thin Asia.

The decline of Japanese fashion magazines and the evolution of consumers began almost at the same time.

The discourse power of "Mina", "Ruili" and "Xinwei" is gradually occupied by vogue, Elle, fashion bazaar, Jiaren and fashion Cosmo.

And consumers also begin to have a sense of pursuing externality and their own external culture. Scholar Taylor used this to explain why the public are increasingly focusing on cultural communities with great geographical differences, such as European and American trend culture, although this does not mean that European and American fashion is superior to Asia.

In such a trend change, UNIQLO's fast fashion is catching up.

In the past, the Japanese clothing industry relied heavily on factories. Although the factory will subcontract production according to the style and fabric requirements of the brand, the workers and machines are in the hands of the factory, and the brand has no right to speak when cooperating with it.

This is because, at that time, Japan was in a period of extreme labor shortage. During this period, the "overseas graduate" system, which can employ foreign workers, was used to the extreme.

A BBC survey video revealed their poor living conditions. Even in 2018, the number of foreign workers is still at a high level of 1.46 million, of which 390000 are from China.

Factories exploit not only labor, but also brands. If a brand wants to be independent, it needs to set up its own plate making, sewing and splicing team, and employ workers and set up factories, so as to have a real voice in the product.

Liu Jing, the founder of UNIQLO, felt this constraint at that time. In "one win nine losses", he wrote that he went to Hong Kong and the mainland of China to find suitable factories. Since then, Shenzhou International, located in Ningbo, has become its largest supplier, which is another source.

Japan's fast fashion, which has reduced the cost of labor and raw materials, quickly occupied the position of Japanese clothing brands in this issue. UNIQLO faces all the people, regardless of the basic styles of men, women, old and young, and has stabilized a large number of customers.

Most importantly, in China, their digital marketing layout is very early. Tmall flagship stores and offline stores can form a linkage between picking up and returning goods, and stores in wechat apps can also be purchased with one click. Individual flagship stores are not only activities such as offline artist visits and flash shows, but also those that can create a sensation on social media.

In contrast, Yidujin and honeyys failed to do so after they handed over the online operation to a third party. The EME of stripe didn't open its tmall flagship store until 2015, and their digital actions were slightly slow.

Japan's fashion revolution has begun

But the Japanese clothing brands that failed to return to the island learned a lesson this time.

It is an indisputable trend that fashion industry tends to be online, both in China and Japan.

Online fashion sales have grown to more than 10% of the entire Japanese market around 2018, according to Nomura Securities.

Amazon, an e-commerce giant, has launched a fashion campaign in Japan, sponsoring part of Tokyo's fashion shows. The person in charge said that fashion is the fastest growing part in recent years.

UNIQLO has written its performance and goals of e-commerce into the key summary of its quarterly financial report. According to the latest data in the first half of 2021, UNIQLO's e-commerce retail sales increased by 40.5%.

After the transformation of the supply chain and internal process, the original clothing brands began to require themselves with fast fashion standards, and tried their best to keep up with the online speed.

Stripe international, the parent company of the failed EME, suddenly announced its cooperation with Softbank of Japan. They have set up a fashion selling website called stripe department, which allows users to select according to their brands, and distinguish them according to their ladies' and casual clothing styles.

3d-a-porter, a British digital technology provider that does 3D body scanning and virtual fitting, has found that Japanese customers have become one of their largest markets in the world.

Unconsciously, a good time has come for fashion e-commerce websites.

Head player zozozotown has eaten up nearly 20% of Japan's online fashion. They sell nearly 7000 brands in Japan, including not only almost all sub brands of the local fashion group stripe group, but also some high-end brands from France.

Another fashion website, locondo Inc., focuses on selling shoes online. They share inventory with magaseek, another fashion e-commerce company. The collaborative operation reduces unnecessary costs.

These actions have accelerated and pushed down the transformation of Japanese fashion industry like an avalanche. Xiaoyou, who works as a fashion magazine editor in Japan, described to me, "they are also beginning to roll in.".

Return to China

In the past few years when Japanese fast fashion withdrew from China, Chinese consumers' preference and enthusiasm for Japanese style did not decrease.

In a Douban post, girls gather around to discuss what brands can be bought offline after a large number of Japanese brands quit.

According to the data of Japan Tourism Administration, the largest source of tourists visiting Japan in the first half of 2019 is mainland China. The total consumption of 4.5325 million person times in Japan is as high as 895 billion yen (about 56.6 billion yuan), and the per capita consumption is more than 12000 yuan.

Data from Japan's Ministry of economy, industry and industry also prove that it is only a matter of time before Chinese consumers' consumption on Japan's cross-border e-commerce platforms goes up year by year, exceeding 2 trillion yuan.

Zozotown, a fashion e-commerce website, is determined to return to China by the end of 2019. They used to run a Japanese clothing site here briefly from 2011 to 2013, but then it didn't go away.

Now the online Chinese shopping app has 177 new Japanese brands. After the user places an order, it will be delivered to the user within 3-5 days by direct mail from Japan and logistics relying on Jingdong.

The functions of Taobao and xiaohongshu are combined to accommodate in the same window. You can not only see the user's wear diary, but also share your own small trial, as well as the fashion magazine section to give you professional recommendations. Take a fancy to it. Just place an order directly.

The change of the new generation is so fast that the traditional clothing brands are not willing to lose, not to mention they were once the top players.

Before EME came to China, it was also a top 1 national brand in Japan. Although collect + point has completely withdrawn from China, its parent company adastria is also a player standing on the "Podium" all the year round.

But, perhaps because they have no determination to win, the pace of emes returning to China is at best smooth and low-key.

EME keeps the sales window on the I.T. of Hong Kong Fashion e-commerce, and the websites in Taiwan can also be visited normally. The Chinese version of zozozotown can also buy this brand, but it seems that is all.

As for adastria, while signing a contract with Huaihai group, it packed clothes, household goods and coffee shops. Even left behind two Niko and. But even so, few people know what is sacred about Niko and... On the Huaihai Road, which is opposite to Muji.

Obviously, when the news of fast fashion is over, the story of lifestyle retail may be rewritten. But the problem for emes at this stage is that even they don't seem to know how to rehearse the comeback.