Sentence / 初见泉
Four machines that make suppliers sweat
In the dimly lit glass cubicle, there is a machine that makes all fabric manufacturers sweat: an imported light fastness testing machine worth more than 400,000 yuan.
Every quarter planning time, the world's high-end fabrics will line up for testing, just to prove whether the fabrics they supply will change color under the ultra-intense ultraviolet rays that are almost close to the Himalayan region and more than 20-40 hours of continuous exposure.
This is the first test of high-quality fabrics in the garment industry: color fastness to sunlight testing.
Internationally, most of them use the ISO 105-B02 standard, which is divided into 10 or 20 hours of continuous exposure according to the time. China is a powerhouse in the garment industry, and the standards are usually higher than international standards, and the duration of exposure to the sun is generally 16 to 25 hours. In some luxury industries, the intensity of the inspection is even more stringent.
Unfortunately, under the torture of this machine, nearly sixty percent of the fabric suppliers have returned home
And that's just the beginning. There are three key industry tests ahead for suppliers.
The first scene is the appearance inspection of washing. For special processes such as printing, glue pressing, hot drilling, hot painting, etc., the washing machine is simulated to repeatedly rub and roll to investigate whether the fabric changes color, deformation, wrinkles, loss of elasticity, and falls off after washing.
The second field is the color fastness test of storage resistance. For some spliced fabrics, high temperature and high humidity conditions are used to simulate long-term storage of clothes to test whether there are quality problems such as color staining.
The third game is the fluffing test. A metal medal-shaped fabric is rubbed repeatedly on the standard abrasive according to the trajectory, and the pilling performance and abrasion resistance of the fabric are tested.
Pilling test
After these tests, there are few survivors left, and the frustrated retreat. This is the norm in China's apparel industry, and the place they left – Beyin Löfen's Innovation Lab – has given them the courage to push the limits of their own fabrics.
In the eyes of the public, Biyin Levin is a low-key, mysterious high-end clothing brand, but in the Chinese fabric industry, everyone knows it, because it has moved the test standards that are several times higher than the national standard and comparable to luxury goods to screen out excellent fabric manufacturers.
400,000 tanning machine, imported BINDER oven, 2500 rpm Martindale pilling instrument...... All this is just to realize a "obsession" of Xie Bingzheng, the founder of Biyin Leving: to use the best fabric to make a high-end T-shirt of the Chinese.
Misunderstood T-shirts
The core and most attractive part of business lies in "insight". Even if it is a small demand point, a micro-innovation that can exponentially improve the experience at a very low cost, as long as you find it and immediately drill into it, it becomes the so-called opportunity and outlet - even if it is an ordinary T-shirt.
T-shirts are imported to China in the 1970s. In the nearly 50 years that followed, China became the largest consumer of T-shirts at a rate of more than 3 billion pieces a year, amid the roar of textile machines and the neat and dense rows of industrial electric sewing machines. However, for such a basic clothing for everyone, people have all kinds of misconceptions.
What exactly is a T-shirt? The first association is usually a white crewneck with short sleeves, which is ready to wear and go. However, there are many subdivided styles of T-shirts, Jobs's logo black half-high-neck long-sleeved shirt is considered a T-shirt, and the polo shirt with a collar often worn by the "red-clothed leader" Zhou Hongyi is also a T-shirt. Long-sleeved, lapel-lait, and even round-necked ones with buttons are all part of the T-shirt family.
However, in the Chinese market, perhaps due to the deliberate segmentation strategy (USP) of apparel brands, the final result of this "poor perception" is that consumers' understanding of T-shirts is vague and stereotyped, and there is no brand in the market that can unify the T-shirt category, or redefine a T-shirt.
Xie Bingzheng was keenly aware of this hidden cognitive gap. Since 2003, Xie Bingzheng founded Biyin Levin and has been deeply involved in the field of golf, putting forward the concept of "life golf", targeting political and business elites. In the past decade, the market share has rapidly occupied the first place in the pan-golf apparel category.
Golf
With the spread of word of mouth, the core customers of Biyin Levin have gradually gathered in the economically developed East China, South China and Southwest China.
There are many hot days and humid climates in these areas, especially in Guangdong, where T-shirts are worn for more than half of the year, whether it is for business meetings or sports and leisure, T-shirts are always indispensable. Therefore, T-shirts have become an entrance to break through the limitations of subdivided categories. It just so happens that the patents accumulated by Biyin Levin when making casual golf suits, such as anti-ultraviolet rays, hot sweat and heat dissipation, and long-term washing, can be "seamlessly connected" to the T-shirt.
The 20 years of long-term contact with political and business customers have made Xie Bingzheng realize that it is difficult for Chinese to imagine what a top-quality T-shirt looks like.
The biggest sense of experience lies in the fabric, if someone asks him what is his biggest competitive advantage over Yinlöfen, he always says "fabric".
Prior to founding Biyin Leving, Xie Bingzheng worked as an agent for luxury brands such as Yves Saint Laurent. This experience gave him an almost perverted pursuit of high-end fabrics. Now the "horror machines" in the Beyin Levin Innovation Lab serve this obsession.
If you experience the T-shirt fabric of Büyin Leving, you will generally feel like this: as soft and gentle as a baby's skin, as light and silky as silk, and at the same time straight and elastic. The secret to such a multi-sensory process is the textile raw material.
According to the employees of Biyin Leving, the company has put a lot of effort into talking about the supplier of Lingdisi's very fine wool. Only about 15,000 sheep in the world can produce this wool, which is less than 0.01% of the world's total wool production every year, and can only produce 40,000 ready-to-wear pieces, which is one of the rarest natural fibers in the world.
Similarly, Biyin Leving's long-staple cotton is a rare Egyptian island cotton known as the "Hermès of cotton". According to an industry review, the fabric of the general high-end brand T-shirt is only 50% long-staple cotton, while the data of Biyin Levin is 100%.
Some of the top-of-the-line fabrics and craftsmanship that Chinese apparel brands typically use on a more formal suit, coat and business shirt, but it's rare to "bet" these fabrics on a regular T-shirt. Perhaps this kind of misunderstanding based on "fabric" and "category misunderstanding" constitutes the confidence of Biyin Levin to create a high-end T-shirt.
Symbolized T-shirts
The law of fashion is always top-down, and the same is true for T-shirts.
The global popularity of the crewneck short-sleeved T-shirt is attributed to the portrayal of American movie stars Marlon Brando and James Dylan in the movies in the 1950s.
American movie star Marlon Brando
Source: Internet
Another important branch of T-shirts, polo shirts, because of comfort and convenience, gradually replaced polo uniforms and became the iconic clothing of aristocratic sports, and later became popular in golf circles and tennis circles, and thus gave birth to two high-end sports and leisure brands of French crocodile and American Ralph Lauren.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Jobs wore a black half-high-neck long-sleeved T-shirt and released a cross-era product iPhone. T-shirts began to be associated with technology business, freeing entrepreneurs from the traditional suit-tie constraints.
From aristocrats, celebrities to business figures, T-shirts have gradually been "symbolized", which has its own elite cultural attributes from the very beginning, and then has been endowed with the characteristics of ideological emancipation and rebellion against tradition - not confined to the status quo, to change and subvert an industry, a world.
This symbol of rebellion and freedom gave birth to entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma, Zhou Hongyi, Robin Li, and Lei Jun, who wore a variety of T-shirts and shuttled through the changing China.
But the only regret and "sense of disobedience" may be related to the design of the T-shirt itself (the plate shape is more suitable for Westerners) and the Western cultural traditions behind it, such as gentleman culture, cowboy culture, elite fitness culture, and so on.
In a sense, T-shirts have never really been localized in the high-end market as an imported product. In contrast, the cultural roots of China's elite are the "spirit of scholars" and the "interaction between government and business".
This gives the group a basic character: low-key, reserved, stoic, yet confident.
And this group of "very busy" people, bear the dual pressure of society and family, but also to meet their own personal hobbies, so a multi-functional T-shirt has also become "busy": not only to meet the needs of government affairs and business, but also to meet private meetings, but also to adapt to fishing, golf, tennis and other leisure sports scenes, temperament, comfort and durability have become the biggest pain points.
Xie Bingzheng accurately grasped this tonality and incorporated it into the design of Biyin Levin T-shirts:
Biyin Löven's fist product "Small Collar T" is almost all monochrome and does not have a variety of designs. The so-called "small collar" is the patent of Biyin Levin - micro eight small collar type, 5cm collar leaf, 75-degree collar angle, and long placket, which can make Asians' necks appear straight and slender. At the same time, it shows the restraint and calmness of the Chinese.
Such details that greatly improve temperament, Biyin Levin has hidden "scheming" in many places. For example, the clothing near the stomach is made of more shrinkable materials, and consumers will feel lighter when wearing them;
The high-end of the brand is a difficult thing, and countless brands have failed in the process of climbing. But once the product is endowed with cultural attributes, is truly symbolized, and is recognized by people at the top of the pyramid, it can release great energy.
A "slow company"
From the pan-golf circuit to the high-end T-shirt circuit, the characteristics of this mysterious company have been studied by the market.
In 2004, the first store of Biyin Levin opened in the most prosperous Xinjiekou Golden Eagle International Shopping Center in Nanjing, and 20 years later, in 2024, more than 1,000 stores will be located all over the country - complexes, high-end shopping malls, airports, high-speed rail stations......
Biyin Leving
The headquarters building in Biyin Levin was also completed in this year. When you go inside, you can always feel a sense of relaxation, just like the soft and skin-friendly fabrics of Büyin Löfen, lacking the indifference and distance of traditional luxury. The new employees were placed "casually" in the garment exhibition center for training, and the atmosphere of the preaching was not like that of most garment companies, and they were followed by visitors who came to visit one after another.
The company has two words that the founder often puts on his lips: one is "there is a product first, then there is a brand", and the other is "to be a brand is a marathon".
Xie Bingzheng has always believed that the brand power is virtual, and the only thing that can make the company go on is a good product that can speak. There is a detail that for 20 years, Xie Bingzheng has held regular meetings every month, put the clothes returned by customers one by one, put them on the table, and investigate the problems with the heads of various departments one by one.
Biyin Levin was once jokingly called "Moutai in Yizhong" by researchers, and their biggest common denominator is that they are both "slow companies".
Under the influence of Xie Bingzheng, Biyin Levin became a company that does not make quick money, clothes are hardly discounted, and 80% of its customers come from members. In the past two years, under the noisy e-commerce and live broadcast, the operation has also maintained a certain degree of restraint. This is an "alternative" in today's fashion industry.
As Mu Xin's poem depicts, in the days when it was very slow before, the lock was exquisite, and there was only enough to love one person in a lifetime.
Perhaps, the track of Biyin Levin has nothing to do with popularity: a brand has rebelled much in the era of consumerism, and it has become a fashion in itself.