"The designer's new version is here, you can proof" "This batch of new models sells well in the Tiger Hill store, and the online store can push more". Shen Keming completed an inspection of the Xiuhe Garment Factory in Lu'an, Anhui Province, while her husband Wang Yongsheng was on the side, and he was concerned about whether the inventory management was reasonable and the order data in the background.
Wang Yongsheng and Shen Keming have opened two online stores on Pinduoduo, and a store in Suzhou's Tiger Hill Wedding City, selling Xiuhe clothes. It is a "sweet industry", but the husband and wife have very different personalities, and when they meet together, it is "Mars hits the earth". So the husband and wife had a clear division of labor, Shen Keming was responsible for the management of the Tiger Hill store, the design and production control of Xiuhe clothing, and Wang Yongsheng was responsible for the management of the factory and the online store.
From the opening of the first online store in 2015, to the integrated operation of online and offline, from Suzhou Tiger Hill to Anhui Lu'an, from 50,000 yuan of capital to 50 million assets now, the couple has experienced the development and changes of the wedding dress industry, and also caught up with the opportunities of e-commerce development. Today, Wang Yongsheng and Shen Keming are facing a new test, the decline in the number of marriages directly affects the business of wedding dresses and Xiuhe, how to transform the "sweet industry"?
In Tiger Hill Wedding City, a couple communicating with customers.
Careers grow wildly, and success comes unexpectedly
The beginning of a sweet story is not necessarily perfect.
"Naked marriage. 2,000 rings, I bought them myself; The bride price of 10,000 yuan was taken from my salary card. Nothing else. In 2011, when Shen Keming and Wang Yongsheng got married, it was winter. She was ushered into a rural earthen house, three bungalows, the door creaking, the wind coming in, cold to death, and warmed by a little charcoal. All new additions to the house were a sofa, a wardrobe and a bed, not even a television. The wedding dress on her body was still given when she took wedding photos, which was "very cheap".
Shen Keming (left) and Wang Yongsheng in life
The marriage was a bit chilly, just like their lives at the time.
Shen Keming and Wang Yongsheng are both from Lu'an, Anhui Province, and high school classmates. After graduating from high school, there is little intersection. After graduating from Fuyang Normal University in 2006, Wang Yongsheng taught computer science in colleges and universities, and the work content remained the same from month to year, and he resigned two years later. In 2008, the boom in foreign language learning set off, and Wang Yongsheng started foreign language training, but he lost money. The tables and chairs of the training institution were bought by a company that trades in U.S. stocks, and he followed suit. In the US stock trading company, he had a good life, "In 2009, affected by the US subprime mortgage crisis, the US stock market fluctuated greatly, which was a good thing for us traders, earning more than 10,000 a month." The good times did not last long, the overall US stock market stabilized, the money that could be earned by trading was getting less and less, coupled with the sharp decline in vision turned upside down day and night, Wang Yongsheng began to look for new opportunities.
Shen Keming's path is wilder. "I have set up a stall, sold antiques, worked in a foreign trade company, worked as a scalper, and contracted express delivery, and there are more than a dozen jobs."
In 2009, the nascent e-commerce "blowed" two young people who could not find direction. Wang Yongsheng chatted with a friend and accidentally heard that e-commerce can make money. "At that time, online shopping was not popular, and we wanted to do business without a big capital, so we wanted to try e-commerce." They go to the wholesale market to find leather goods dealers to buy goods, and then buy them online. I don't understand the operation of online stores, so I rely on myself to figure it out, and I take care of the goods, operation, delivery, and after-sales. "Because we did it early, the store couldn't do us."
Slowly, the leather goods industry became more and more difficult to do, they took the hundreds of thousands of dollars they earned to open a factory with friends, and in less than a year, the factory was shut down, and the investment money was put in. This is 2011, the year Shen Keming and Wang Yongsheng got married.
After getting married, the couple's desire to change their lives is more urgent, and they are most familiar with e-commerce, but what to sell? "My family knows that we are in difficulty, and a relative said that he knew a duvet factory in Lu'an, but he had to buy 400,000 yuan at one time." The couple made a desperate bet and cobbled together to borrow more than 400,000 yuan. I don't want to, the duvet is sold crazy on the e-commerce platform, and I paid off the loan in half a year.
Wang Yongsheng felt that he had finally found a business where he could settle down, and he just wanted to concentrate on running a duvet online store. But Shen Keming feels that life lies in tossing endlessly, she heard that her cousin who sells Xiuhe in Suzhou Tiger Hill has a good business, and wants to sell Xiuhe on the e-commerce platform. Wang Yongsheng was very opposed. "What is Xiuhe? It looks like a costume, even if someone wears it when you get married, how big can this demand be? There will be no repurchase, and it will certainly not be a big deal. ”
Shen Keming did not back down. "You give me 50,000 yuan as capital, and I admit that I lost it." In this way, Shen Keming opened two Xiuhe online stores. Later stories proved that she had a unique vision.
Shen Keming, who is good at communicating with customers
Tiger Hill is changing, and Ding Jidou is changing stars
Shen Keming's Xiuhe online store was launched in June 2015.
In order to control costs, he went to his cousin to get the goods when he had an order, and Shen Keming, who was so strong, was not willing to ask Wang Yongsheng for help. "Operations, art and art are all for the duvet shop, and Lao Wang still refuses to give me the best, he just doesn't look favorably on me." According to Shen Keming's recollection, "At the beginning, there were really not many orders, and I sold ten pieces and eight pieces a day. ”
But good luck always comes. In October of that year, Huang Xiaoming and Yang Ying (Angelababy) had a century wedding, which made the Xiuhe dress worn by Angelababy popular all over the Internet. "The wedding bride wanted the same style she wore, and there were few stores selling Xiuhe on the market at that time, and there were less than 10 offline stores and online stores combined."
Shen Keming, who was smashed by good luck, "Versailles" got up, "every day I worry that there are too many orders, I go everywhere to find the source of goods, and I have run all the stores that Tiger Hill can find."
Xiuhe's short supply also made Shen Keming start to consider solving the problem from the source. "Do it yourself. At that time, a boss in my hometown of Lu'an gave me 700,000 yuan to invest in us. I took 700,000 and went to buy 4 embroidery machines. I didn't discuss this with Lao Wang, and the deposit was paid. Shen Keming said, "I'm just going to do it." ”
The Xiuhe production factory in Lu'an is very busy
Where to put the machine? Where is the plant? Where do workers go? Wang Yongsheng couldn't believe that these 4 giant-like embroidery machines were placed in front of him like this. "At that time, I could only bite the bullet and find people everywhere to find a factory and slowly explore it. We were the first batch to engage in embroidery machines, and at that time the courage was really big, but looking back, only by daring to think and dare to do it can we make money. It is no exaggeration to say that at that time, the embroidery machine was like a money printing machine, and it was returned in two or three months. Wang Yongsheng said.
"Xiuhe's real fire is because of Huang Xiaoming and baby, and as a result, they divorced, and I am still eating their dividends. 90% of the people in our industry are stained with the light of the two of them and open up the Xiuhe industry. Wang Yongsheng said. The development of e-commerce has also allowed the couple to catch up with opportunities. "It was impossible to open a store with the initial principal of 50,000, and the online store gave us the opportunity to enter the bridal industry. We are also one of the first to sell Xiuhe on the platform, and we settled in Pinduoduo in 2017, and we have many years of experience in operating online stores, but Pinduoduo is really friendly to merchants to settle in, and the procedures for opening stores are very simple, which is especially obvious for merchants new to the e-commerce industry. We were pleasantly surprised by the good number of orders in the first month. And we didn't put much effort into the operation. Because we settled early, we also enjoyed the dividends of the platform. ”
If it is said that the star wedding has blown Xiuhe clothes into the wind, then the wedding dress industry chain has been transferred from Suzhou Tiger Hill to Lu'an Dingji to Wang Yongsheng and Shen Keming to pursue the east wind with victory.
When it comes to the wedding dress industry, Suzhou Tiger Hill is a topic that cannot be avoided. As early as the eighties and nineties of the last century, the wedding dress street of Tiger Hill was spontaneously formed, and the output accounted for about 70% of the national total, and it was the largest production and marketing base in the country and even Southeast Asia. In 2010, Tiger Hill Wedding City took over the wedding street and became the world's largest wedding dress distribution center and procurement center.
Tiger Hill Wedding City
The wedding dress industry in Suzhou Tiger Hill is closely related to Lu'an Dingji, 500 kilometers away. Most of the workers who did wedding dress production in Tiger Hill in the early days came from Lu'an Ding Market Town, and more and more Ding Ji people worked in Tiger Hill, opened factories, and sold wedding dresses... Until 2018, the wedding street of Tiger Hill was renovated, and the small workshop-style factory was closed. Lu'an, hundreds of kilometers away, saw the opportunity of Suzhou's wedding dress industry transfer, opened a series of investment promotion policies, and created a wedding dress characteristic town in Dingji, and more and more Dingji people returned to their hometowns to start businesses.
Thousands of wedding dress shops, wedding dress manufacturing enterprises and e-commerce companies have created a wedding dress industry with an annual output value of more than 2 billion yuan in Lu'an.
Life is noisy, days bump
Lu'an is close to Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, and Maotanchang Middle School, known as the "college entrance examination factory", is located here. But few people know that there is also a "sweet factory" here. Wang Yongsheng and Shen Keming were the first batch of entrepreneurs in the Lu'an wedding dress industry.
"At that time, we also floated, and we kept producing orders, selling 100 pieces today, 200 pieces tomorrow, 200 pieces sold tomorrow, and 400 pieces the day after tomorrow." Wang Yongsheng recalled that in 2017, more and more clothes were sold, but cash flow became more and more tight, and the finance department always said that there was no money. He began to think about what was wrong. "It turned out that the warehouse was seriously backlogged, and the original management could not reflect the sales rate of the products at all, nor could it see which products had high profit margins. 100,000 pieces of inventory, the backlog can only be sold at a discount in the end, and tens of millions of clothes are only worth millions in the end. This made Wang Yongsheng realize the importance of management, "When the scale is large, you can't use an extensive model." ”
Wang Yongsheng who sorted out inventory
Wang Yongsheng began to retire into the background, mainly focusing on the management of the company, and the design and production were all handed over to his wife Shen Keming. "The two of us have achieved each other, and he manages the company more steadily, thoughtfully and organized. I'm impatient, and I'll dump him when I'm done, and I don't care. I rushed in front and handed my back to him. One rushes forward a little, and the other walks steadily. Shen Keming described their combination this way.
But the seemingly perfect "perfect partner" can't hide from the noise. "We have different views, I think everything should be based on competition, what must be done, he thinks it's about the same. But I think that this year of business is not almost the same, either go up or go down, the age of struggle should not choose comfort. ”
Just like behind the gorgeous show clothes, in addition to sweetness, there are also hardships and bitterness. There was a client who had cancer, was in his early twenties, had no boyfriend, and wanted to wear a wedding dress before he died. Another customer was a dwarfism patient, only 1.3 meters tall, but wanted to wear a Xiuhe uniform and wanted to make the size shorter, Shen Keming cut it for her, and asked the factory director to make her a piece and send it, only symbolically collecting some wages.
Shen Keming in communication with customers
According to the research and analysis of some institutions, the market size of China's wedding dress industry is already "hundreds of billions". But for Wang Yongsheng and Shen Keming, the pressure and challenges are never far away.
"Wedding Xiuhe has no repeat customers. The second marriage will not come to your house to buy it, it is unlucky. So this industry has no capital to look at, that is, silently earn money. Shen Keming said.
More pressure comes from the number of marriages among young people. "When we first made Xiuhe, the number of marriages every year was about 20 million, and now it is 6 million." In Wang Yongsheng's view, this is a downward trending business. "Now young people are very conservative about marriage, they don't want to get married, and they are especially worried about encountering all kinds of problems."
But whether it is life or business, there are no problems, no matter how many troubles do not have to be faced.
Shen Keming and employees discuss the new Xiuhe style
"It's okay if it's good, I don't think it's okay if it's not good, it's very comfortable." Wang Yongsheng said.
Shen Keming's mentality has also changed several times, "I used to think that doing business is the law of the jungle, and if you are not strong, you can't do it; The happiness index is also not high, and he always has to quarrel with Lao Wang. The two almost broke up, "For a period of time last year, we all negotiated how to divide the property, how to divide the car, how to divide the house, how to divide the children."
I didn't want to, Shen Keming was found to have thyroid cancer, "I was still very afraid, Lao Wang comforted me, accompanied me to go for examinations, surgery, rehabilitation or something, and I was relieved." She used to think that no matter who she married was wrong, now "I am still quite happy, I have a career, a house and a car, I have children and daughters, I have someone to go with, and I want everything." For transformation, Wang Yongsheng and Shen Keming also have their own considerations. On the one hand, Pinduoduo is still the main force in their Xiuhe clothing sales. On the other hand, Shen Keming opened a store in Tiger Hill this year, hoping to reach out more directly to the needs of customers. "The unit price of the platform is now about 600 yuan, and our daily orders are about 300 orders, and the store on the other side of Tiger Hill makes a dozen or twenty orders a day." Recently, we are also considering restarting live streaming on Pinduoduo to make more attempts. ”
And the data from the e-commerce platform also gave Wang Yongsheng and Shen Keming confidence. Pinduoduo data shows that wedding dresses have maintained a state of rapid growth this year, with browsing users in April (before the wedding season in May) increasing by nearly 50% year-on-year, the transaction scale is nearly three times that of the same period last year, and the average transaction volume of stores is also 2.5 times higher than that of the same period last year.
In addition, wedding Xiuhe is still in short supply in Pinduoduo, and the per capita consumption amount of consumers buying wedding Xiuhe has increased by nearly 30% year-on-year this year. In this regard, Pinduoduo also gives corresponding support for businesses of different sizes. "For some factory-type businesses that meet the conditions, the platform will give additional resource support. For ordinary types of merchants, the platform will give the cultivation and incubation of new merchants, give guidance on trends under recent categories, search hot words and explosive product guidance, etc. Pinduoduo related staff said. It is reported that the platform also plans to open a rental business for the wedding dress category in the near future to increase the frequency of consumption and meet the consumption needs of more users.
Wang Yongsheng (left) and Shen Keming have a new feeling for the relationship between husband and wife