Challenges and opportunities | clothing industry: seize the "spring" in the slow awakening

A family of three wear masks while shopping at a women's clothing store in nanjing, capital of east China's jiangsu province, March 22, 2007

Generally speaking, February and march after the Spring Festival are regarded as the "golden period" for production and sales by most people in the garment industry. However, this year, the covid-19 epidemic affected consumers' willingness to change clothes has not recovered with the gradual increase in temperature, and the entire garment industry is facing huge challenges from manufacturing to sales.

However, the reporter recently found from the field interview, with the rapid recovery of China's economic vitality, the clothing industry's "dark moment" may have passed, some of the first "wake up" clothing companies have taken measures to increase the effectiveness of the possible stop losses.

In the post-epidemic era, a new "industry shuffle" seems inevitable.

Inventory backlog, transformation line to speed up the return of funds

"Come up to my warehouse. The stock is piled up. Spring clothes are supposed to be on the market by now, but I haven't sold much of my winter clothes yet and I don't know what to do next." In a brand clothing store in lishui district, nanjing, wang chun, the owner of the store, complained to reporters.

Wang told reporters that she has been in the women's wear business for nearly two decades and is somewhat well-known in the local women's wear community, but that the outbreak has taught her a vivid lesson as a "veteran" in the clothing industry. According to industry experience, the period before and after the Spring Festival is the peak season for women's clothing sales, and most stores will sell off their winter clothing inventory at the same time as the first batch of spring clothes. However, the sudden outbreak led to a large area of winter clothing unsalable. Since women's styles are updated so quickly, if they can't keep up with the fashion trends, they will have to be sold at low prices. In addition, if the winter clothing inventory is not converted into cash flow in time, is also bound to affect the next stage of spring clothing on the new.

"Business has picked up a bit since march, but there have been few orders through February. They are mostly regular customers. Wang chun said with a wry smile.

Compared with wang chun, lu huihua, an operator in changshu garment city, has made up her mind to try her hand at selling on the waterline. On the afternoon of March 16, the fashion and lifestyle store she founded started its first live sale. "In just one hour, we had more than 400 viewers and more than a dozen orders." "As early as two years ago, the store tried to cooperate with web celebrity anchors, and also had the idea of setting up a live broadcasting agency. This time, the store really put the live broadcasting into operation and turned the crisis into an 'opportunity'," lu said.

"In the future, we will cooperate with more online platforms, continue to guide merchants to transform live streaming, and help merchants to expand online sales channels, so as to further facilitate the transformation and upgrading of the garment city." Lu feng, assistant to the general manager of changshu garment city group co., LTD., said that as consumers' shopping habits and preferences have changed, live streaming is helping more and more offline merchants embrace a broader sales platform.

A sharp drop in orders, specialized production as the "cure"

According to the data released by the China apparel association recently, as of March 10, 93.3% of the apparel enterprises surveyed had returned to work, accounting for 80.1% of the labor force under normal production conditions, and the production capacity has been gradually restored. However, 46.0% of the surveyed enterprises reported that they were under great pressure due to sluggish market demand, cancellation or reduction of orders and other reasons. While domestic orders were greatly reduced, export orders declined due to the impact of foreign epidemic, and logistics was blocked, which seriously affected the process of garment enterprises to resume normal production and operation.

"I was worried all day about when I would be able to get back to work, and now I'm back to work. A person in charge of a garment processing company in wujiang district of suzhou city told reporters that although the factory's production capacity has been restored to 70 or 80 percent of the past, the number of orders has dropped by two-thirds compared with previous years. "The recent outbreak of outbreaks abroad has caused many overseas customers to cut orders." He said.

In addition, some industry insiders pointed out that clothing manufacturing is a traditional labor-intensive industry, in addition to the epidemic factors, overcapacity, low technical content and homogenized competition is also an important reason for the industry in recent years into the market contraction dilemma.

"In the future, most small and medium-sized garment manufacturing enterprises are likely to carry out deeper specialized production around a small number of industry leaders and improve their professionalism and competitiveness by forming industrial clusters." Yang zongxian, chairman of suzhou qingtian enterprise development co., LTD., believes that focusing on subdivision of intensive farming, and with the power of science and technology to enable the whole industrial chain "smart" manufacturing, will be the future development of the majority of small and medium-sized garment manufacturing enterprises the main direction. "We started to segment the field of school uniforms as early as around 2005, and the company's atob school uniform brand orders are not affected by the outbreak."

Risk overlay, the whole industry chain is in urgent need of injection of "tonic"

For most people in the traditional clothing industry, the days when you could pick a good location and lay your hands on it are long gone. As of March 19, a total of 48,916 garment enterprises had been written off or revoked since the New Year's day, according to the data provided by qicha. In addition, about 869,800 clothing enterprises were written off in 2019, making it the highest volume of sales in the past 20 years.

"In 2020, if you want to continue to make money in the physical world, you're going to have to be not only offline, but also online, and you're going to have to have fission growth and IP building." A domestic e-commerce platform clothing business unit new retail director huan xiaojun told reporters.

Shen jianmin, secretary general of jiangsu textile industry association, believes that government departments at all levels need to further strengthen coordination and implement some policies as soon as possible, so that industrial resources, channels, as well as the industrial chain and supply chain can form a collaborative interaction in a short time. "The current situation is already quite severe. Multiple risk factors both inside and outside the industry continue to add up and influence each other. This year, the whole clothing industry is worrying.

Shen also suggested that the competent authorities should help enterprises ease the pressure of capital turnover, and reduce the burden on enterprises by cutting taxes and fees, so as to ensure the orderly resumption of work and production. In addition, we need to speed up the study and deployment of domestic consumption, to stabilize the competitiveness of export products policy plan.