China’s change from a Apparel Manufacturer to an emerging design nation

Sarah Ahmed
Get Ecommerce Right!
4 min readNov 5, 2020
Photo by Kate Hliznitsova on Unsplash

Clothing manufacturers for startups China are turning to fashion brands and are zealously working on their very own designs and collections. Well in parallel a slowdown in growth in the world’s leading retail market interprets that spreading their business in the international market can bring great fortune.

Though;

How a Chinese clothing brand with global appeal can looks like?

“Let’s talk about Chinese fashion this time. Is it going to look like this or this?”

The video trailer of the newly created competition of the Chinese sporting goods companies asks a question that many people in and outside of China are wondering about.. The country’s apparel manufacturers are looking for customers amid slower growth in the fashion market.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

The greatest challenge in a hundred years

Between January and July, sales in the Chinese clothing market grew by 2.6 percent, in the same period last year it was up to 6 percent, National Garment Association.

The slowdown in the fashion market is a result of the slowdown in economic growth in China, which is affecting private consumption. At the same time, consumer behavior in China is changing rapidly — an upheaval that textile producers have to face when they move from producing clothing for other, often foreign, companies to developing their own brands.

Uncertain times: The Chinese fashion market is puzzling over its millennials

How is the digitization of China changing the production of fashion?

Automation of production and the use of artificial intelligence to reach consumers will help producers adapt. The predominantly small and medium-sized clothing manufacturers in the country also have to improve design and brand communication and prove that they act in a socially responsible manner. According to the head of the association of clothing manufacturers, the focus on quality will be decisive for the future.

Chinese designers on the rise

The ongoing pursuit of a new “Made in China” stems from the fact that production is being relocated abroad with rising wage costs and suppliers are trying to generate more value along the supply chain.

“Just being the processing component is increasingly depreciating — every season buyers ask for discounts and after many years there comes a point where every low-hanging fruit has already been picked,” said Edwin Keh, executive director of the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles Apparel, in Shanghai. “Moving up the supply chain and offering services, becoming importers and ultimately brand owners seems like a natural evolutionary process.”

A huge number of clothing brands still rely on manufacturing for other while creating their own clothing brands, though private label wholesale clothing manufacturers are also rapidly entering the new fashion markets

With traditional elements the clothes are not worn that are usually in the daily lifestyle, however, if a designer can create a feeling with their dresses that resonate with people, they will buy them since they find it related

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

International ambitions

Despite the renewed interest in traditional clothing as embodied, it remains to be seen whether young consumers will buy clothing with a distinctly Chinese flavor. As elsewhere, Chinese millennials are drawn to everyday life by hyped streetwear brands like Supreme or international fast fashion retailers like Zara and Uniqlo.

Bosideng, one of the best-known Chinese down jacket brands with more than 7,000 mono-brand stores in China, closed its store in London in 2017, only to reopen it a year later. The brand is expanding through its Italian subsidiary in Europe and is already being sold in 550 multi-brand stores from Italy to Russia.

One of the most important questions for the future remains to what extent Chinese companies will succeed in establishing their brands with consumers worldwide.

“How can a brand arise? It has to be done through accumulation. The product has to be well made and from here a brand can be developed. Then we can talk about things like taste or craftsmanship,” said Chen Dapeng.

For the time being, the trend continues to acquire international brands in order to penetrate further markets and to learn more about soft skills, especially how customers can be attracted. At least that’s an option for conglomerates with deep pockets.

Acquisitions will remain a means of learning and engaging, but it is also likely that a Chinese brand with international reach will emerge within the next ten years, Keh said. The same could be true of a new “Made in China” style. After flipping through catwalk pictures, photos of typical Chinese streets and a coat with the packaging design of a cult coconut drink, the trailer of the first Li-Ning competition sums up:

The Take Away

“A trend is not created overnight, but, hey, we started! One day there will be no more Chinese fashion trend, just a trendy style. And everyone in the world will know about it, because then you will be very trendy .

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Sarah Ahmed
Get Ecommerce Right!

Digital Marketing and Social Media Savvy/ Writer love to write about current affairs and economic affairs/ Commerce graduate