The rise of Cao County: 500 million was sold in two months, and a bigger outbreak is still to come
Cao County once again returned to the "center of the universe",
During the Spring Festival, the horse face skirt became popular all over the Internet.
According to CCTV Finance and Economics, in the first two months of this year,
The sales volume of Caoxian horse face skirt is close to 550 million yuan,
Last year's annual sales of Hanfu exceeded 7 billion yuan.
There are 2,282 Hanfu enterprises in this Shandong county,
Nearly 100,000 people are engaged in the hanfu industry.
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Cao County's horse face skirt production workshop
Because of the high tolerance of daily wear,
The horse-faced skirt has become a popular Hanfu item in recent years.
The production areas are concentrated in Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Cao County,
Unlike the first two as the center of the traditional textile industry,
Cao County has the meaning of being born out of thin air and growing wildly.
The price band is concentrated in 100-200 yuan,
Take the route of small profits and quick turnover,
Despite the encouraging sales figures,
But occasionally it will fall into the controversy of "plagiarism and playing board".
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"Center of the Universe" Cao County
On the Hanfu street in Cao County,
Journalists and bloggers from other places can be seen everywhere,
The live broadcast room is lit up from morning to night.
From costumes to coffins exported to Japan to horse-faced skirts,
Locals talk about the myth of wealth created by hanfu and coffins:
Another wise man has returned home,
The boss who makes headphones and hardware has changed his career to sell Hanfu......
We visited a few townships,
Find the person in charge of the largest local Hanfu live broadcast base.
Statement: Yao Chixing
Editor: Hong Bingchan
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Yao Chixing and a clothing manager, Tiff, try on a horse-faced skirt
My name is Yao Chixing, I married to Cao County in 2012, and I am the daughter-in-law of Cao County. My husband is a local who has been working in e-commerce for 10 years and doesn't want to be in the family's traditional industry, so he brought me in.
What is the traditional industry? Holding up the coffin with one hand and Hanfu with the other, it is our family.
The explosion of the horse-faced skirt this time has kept me busy since I entered the wax moon. Originally, it was planned to stock up more before the Spring Festival holiday, but before the twenty-ninth of the year, the fabric had already been done, and the horse face skirt was sold out on the Internet, so we thought that it would be an early holiday. It didn't take long for the phone to blow up. Because of the holiday, everyone will brush Douyin, and the horse-faced skirt will explode again and again.
There is no way to open the door on the first day of the Lunar New Year, and if the employees don't go to work, I will come first, and give the employees double overtime wages, and we don't eat lunch or breakfast, so we don't have time to eat at all. The guests who came to try on the clothes were all families, some were holding children, and some were pregnant, just like rushing to the big set.
Now when you come to Cao County, you can see that five or six towns and villages are making Hanfu, and a street is full of Hanfu workshops, some sewing and some ironing, and we will purchase them and sell them on the platform.
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Yao Chixing in the Hanfu exhibition hall
The post-00s and post-90s generations who were rumored on the Internet gave up Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and returned to their hometown Cao County, which is not a lie.
I myself am an example, I used to work for an airline in Beijing, but then I felt that I had nothing to break through in my work, and after I got married, I followed my husband's family to do wood carving business. Originally, we had already left Cao County and settled in a big city, but because we anticipated the market prospects of Hanfu, we moved back with our family and our children went back to school.
We do front-line production and are very sensitive to the craze of Hanfu culture.
Two years ago, I was saying that the horse face skirt was going to be popular. My son wore it at the flag-raising ceremony when he went to school, and all of them wore it. In some special scenes, such as scenic spots, seven or eight out of ten people may be wearing them, but the proportion in daily life is not so large.
The demand in the market has skyrocketed, but the production has not kept up. Taking us as an example, the production capacity has increased from 100 a day at the beginning to 1,000 now, and the sales volume of the live broadcast room has been maintained at more than 100,000 per day. Because we expected this year to be better than usual, we expanded the size of the production line. Even so, now we have to say that the demand is 100, and we are only 20.
The main difficulty now is that there is a shortage of fabrics, and the output of weaving cloth cannot keep up.
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Tiff, the owner of a costume, tries on a horse-faced skirt
The reason why the horse face skirt is popular is that it is integrated into life. The shape, wearing habits, and inclusiveness of this item are all suitable for daily life. For the same size, a 100-pound girl can wear it, and a 125-pound girl can also wear it, so you don't have to worry about your figure. Gender inclusiveness is also very strong, not only girls, but also some boys find that they look good in wear.
The second is to wear a more exquisite, weaving gold imitation makeup process, shining in the sun, if you encounter a more rare fabric, plus intangible cultural heritage skills, such as Suzhou embroidery, silk embroidery, as well as traditional Chinese colors and patterns, everyone will like it more.
Another point is the rise of cultural self-confidence, in recent years, the new Chinese style has become popular, because young people want to wear a little bit of their own national traditional clothes, and they can't always think about it, only the Northeast big flower jacket, the horse face skirt is just pushed to this juncture.
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Hanfu exhibition hall
The horse-faced skirts on the market are cheap one or two hundred, and the expensive ones are tens of thousands. Cao County is mainly in more than 100 pieces, and there are more prints. For two or three hundred yuan, there is a gold weaving makeup process, with high color saturation, which is more suitable for taking pictures.
Being able to achieve low prices has something to do with the fact that we are a small city. The operating cost here is not high, and there are preferential policies for land acquisition and taxation. Cao County is a county with a large population, and labor is cheap. The same horse-faced skirt, put in Hangzhou and Guangzhou, the cost will be doubled. We make e-commerce a warehouse-style live broadcast, I design, I manufacture, I stockpile, I sell, I don't need dealers, I rely on my own broadcasting, which also saves the cost of middlemen.
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The post-00s are responsible for designing, and the aunts are responsible for sewing
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The live broadcast base is next door to the production car
What's particularly interesting is that our employees range from the post-00s to the aunts in their 50s.
The post-00s are responsible for design and computer operation. Forty or fifty-year-old aunts send their children to school and work in factories to make piecework, with an average monthly salary of six or seven thousand.
Cao County has a slogan called "It's better to go home to Taobao when you run around", some children come back from abroad or big cities, and want to see the changes in their hometown, an Internet celebrity city, for so many years, they really give up Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. They may not feel the value of their existence in the big city, but when you go back to your hometown, you can be a chicken head.
Cao County is at the junction of Shandong and Henan, on the ancient road of the Yellow River. When I first came, I felt that this was a place where there were no mountains and no water, and the water in the saline-alkali land was salty and salty, which was very unsuitable.
Although there are not many unique advantages, the people of this place have suffered hardships. Shandong people are simple, practical, righteous, very hard-working and pragmatic, either farming or working.
Therefore, although Cao County is not big, from east to west, it takes two hours to drive and 70 or 80 kilometers away, but many industries are famous far and wide. For example, in the wood processing in Zhuangzhai Town, most of the red wine boxes you use are produced in Cao County. There is also the coffin of Sun Lao's hometown that made Cao County famous, and Cao County's coffins occupy 60% of the Japanese market.
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Another pillar industry in Cao County: coffins
There is also a reason why Cao County can overtake in the corner of Hanfu. It is the hometown of calligraphy and painting, the earliest is to make photo studio wall cloth, that is, when I was a child, I went to the photo studio to take pictures, and those background cloths printed with various landscapes. Because of this business, it is exposed to more needs of customers.
For example, can you make clothes for children when they take pictures? They are all wall coverings, and who aunts can't do manual work? Gradually, it has developed into performance costumes, such as performance costumes in large scenic spots, and costumes for square dances. If you open Taobao, you will find that many of the costumes of the first few are made by Cao County.
From processing factories to foreign trade to e-commerce, from a wall cloth, to the costumes of the national square dance, to the horse face skirt. The formation of the Hanfu industry chain is interlocking, and a stage can not be less incremental, it is not an outbreak, we are fully prepared for overtaking in corners.
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A street of performance costumes in the big market town
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A wood carving factory in Sun's hometown
As for our family, in the early days, my husband's mother was a woodcarver and my father was a carpenter, and they made some furniture, which slowly developed from the family workshop. In the 90s, a Japanese businessman approached them to make decorative wood carvings. As Japan's population is aging seriously and the coffin market is getting bigger, businessmen ask if they can make coffins? They make them according to the shape given by the Japanese, and the quality is high and the output is guaranteed.
These two industries, one is the export manufacturing industry and the other is the domestic cultural industry, which seems to be incompatible. It's our vision that's important. In the process of dealing with others, we see how the outside is developing, and we will think about how to develop our careers, and we can quickly integrate into the global market.
People say that we Cao County has preserved the last dignity of the Japanese, and when we make coffins, we study the cultural needs of the other country, and when we make Hanfu, we are also studying our own traditions.
Everything is down-to-earth, up and down 5,000 years of culture, enough for me to sell for several lifetimes.