Women's wear industry: the pain of fabric growth

"A lot of women's fabric companies in China are doing what they can to make money," complained Shaoxing, a fabric trader specializing in export. This sentence, just touched the pain of domestic fabric companies, that is, long-term dependence on low-cost price competition.

"There are no fabrics that can't be made. There's only a price that can't be done."

The past 20 years have been the overall improvement of China's textile industry for 20 years. The performance of Chinese women's fabrics is also particularly eye-catching. Chinese fabric companies, like garment enterprises, started out in the early days of reform and opening up, and most of them have foundry backgrounds for sample processing. The development of decades has accumulated the experience of fabric processing. The experience of foreign trade has improved the overall quality of domestic women's fabrics, enriched the product variety, and established a systematic management model, especially in respect of technical equipment and other hardware facilities. There are more and more enterprises adopting international advanced textile equipment, and the gap between their production capacity and the international advanced level is getting smaller and smaller.

Some domestic fabric processing companies even said that “there are no fabrics that can't be done. Only the prices that cannot be done”. Although this statement is somewhat exaggerated, it reflects that through many years of foundry, domestic fabric companies have made considerable progress, and have accumulated the ability to produce fabrics for processing in the world.

He Zhaokang, chief engineer of Shanghai Haixin Long Plush Co., Ltd., said: “Domestic fabric companies do have the business idea of ​​what to make and what to do. It should be admitted that there is a reasonable side to it because a product can make money and show that the market has a certain amount of it. The demand, even these products are very popular in the market, but this situation is time-consuming, may be a large number of customers in a certain year or season, but after this time, it may not be popular, the market With its weakness, fabric companies should, based on their own strengths and weaknesses, aim at the market's needs and customers' characteristics, and make a more practical and practical orientation for their products in the short, medium, and long term, and must avoid weaknesses, and development and production meet market demands. It can also bring profitable products to the company.”

"No way, only another way out"

“Price is a lever, relying on existing equipment in the country can produce good products, but due to price competition, even if good prices can not buy good materials, a good factory cannot be found. There is no future for competing products, and in the past few years, some companies have realized the importance of product development and increased product development efforts, but will soon be copied by their peers, developers will not receive orders, and imitators will rely on prices. Many orders, foreign guests to China to buy is to buy cheap goods, the same product South Korea to sell a hand can be higher than 20%. A company does a good job, relying on the entire industry to do a good job Caixing.” Hangzhou New Printing and Dyeing Shen Xuefeng, Ltd. said.

It is not difficult to see that the mode of development of enterprises relying on low-price competition has long been criticized in the industry. However, due to the limitations of their own development and the risks that may exist in the transformation and upgrading, companies still maintain this low-price competition model. However, with the rise in domestic labor costs in recent years and the market environment where prices of raw materials have risen, the advantages of prices have been compressed and become unbearable. In the interview, companies bluntly stated that many times there was no shortage of orders, but they did not dare to answer because prices had already lost all their profits, and the more orders were, the more losses they suffered. "No way, only another way out."

With the transformation of women's brand perceptions and differentiated positioning awareness, fabric companies are increasingly aware that only by developing differentiated products can they grasp the initiative in price, thereby maintaining the business life's business ideas and abandoning the low end of the past. Counterfeiting and selling only the "road goods" business ideas began to focus on differentiated product development. Whether it is to deal with the challenges of market survival or for the development of corporate branding, the development of women's fabrics is becoming more and more important. In order to obtain individualized fabric products that fully embody the brand's design style, women's clothing companies and fabric companies have begun to try to develop cooperatively fabric products. Women's designers participate in the fabric development stage and fully communicate their ideas to fabric designers. In this way, from the selection of raw materials, processes, patterns, colors, feel, and other aspects to create the products needed by women's designers, not only meet the fabric company's fabric needs, but also reduce the development costs of fabric companies, reduce R & D Production risk.

"Homogeneous competition is a dead end"

At present, the domestic women's fabrics are basically able to meet the purchasing needs of women's enterprises, but for some women's brands positioned in the high-end market, most of the high-end fabrics need to be purchased internationally. In the face of international high-end women's fabrics, domestic women's fabrics appear to be Can not mention gas. In addition to poor color fastness, color deviations, and after finishing links, the gaps with the developed markets have been exposed. The most questionable one is the lack of domestic women's fabric original design capabilities.

One problem that must be faced is that compared to developed countries, women's fabrics in China have almost no product characteristics. The weakest link in the women's fabric production chain is the lack of featured fabric designers. From the perspective of industry, we must create conditions as far as possible to cultivate fabric designers with Chinese characteristics; from the perspective of enterprises, we must change our thinking, know the importance of fabric designers, and provide all opportunities to create corporate brand designers.

The backwardness of original design is not only the problem of human resources, but also the lack of an overall original environment. In the current situation of lack of protection for original designs, the reality is that enterprises that invest a lot of human and material resources in designing R&D often find it difficult to receive market returns corresponding to inputs. Once a new product is recognized by the market, it will appear in the market. The wave of follow-up imitation has squeezed the market share of R&D companies. This has created a vicious cycle, and R&D and design are in a predicament. Therefore, if you want to catch up with the design process, you must first cultivate excellent environmental soil. Only by respecting originality, respecting originality, and supporting the original design atmosphere will more companies be able to invest in it and begin a benign cycle.

Zhu Zhengting, general manager of Hangzhou Minghe Textile Co., Ltd., told reporters: “Some people say that domestic fabric companies are now 'no fabrics that cannot be done. Only the prices that cannot be made' are, I think, 'we should be able to do more fabrics and sell them.' Less than the price '. Domestic fabric companies have a strong ability to imitate, but when it comes to innovative design capabilities and the ability to exquisite workmanship is very scarce, so we can only rely on price competition. Homogenization competition is destined to be a dead end, we must strive to avoid Open price competition, strive to achieve specialization, and make differentiated products."

In the three-party game with raw material suppliers and brand owners, fabric companies have always been in the sandwich role. Along with the growth of domestic women's brands, higher demands have been placed on women's fabrics, in addition to traditional quality, service, and process technology. In addition to quality requirements, women's clothing brand style and market popularity, in order to fabric personality, style, innovation, research and development, rapid response and supply capacity have put forward new requirements. Especially in the current high cost, fabrics have become the most sensitive part. The process of achieving differentiation is actually a process of cooperation with garment enterprises and helps fabric companies to create special appeal points from the field of fabrics. Differentiation contributes to the connotation of the fabric, attracts customers with its own strength, and ultimately gets rid of the disadvantages of price vicious competition.