This year's Shanghai Fashion Week has just ended, but in addition to the 500 brands showing their new collections, independent buyers were also out in force -- they import foreign branded fashion goods for sale here, where the brands are popular but selling can be very different. Chen Tong asked them about the challenges of the Chinese fashion market.
Ticardo Ferrer has been working in China for ten years, and having seen the country's large population and fast economic growth, he decided two years ago that what it needed was luxury bags and jewelerly from his home country Spain. He now works with Spanish designers and ships their products directly in from Spain.
"People are already looking for things that make their unique and different. Our challenge is to make them know we are here. The market is already there, we just delivering the products to a market that is already demand in these products."Ticardo Ferrer,co-founder of Trustluxe said.
To let China know his products are here, Ferrer did what many local companies do -- he set up a Wechat store, which now handles most of his sales. China has now some 900 million registered Wechat users and 25 percent of them are on the app 30 times a day. The company's store sells about 60 articles a month, which may not seem like much, but the prices are impressive. And those 60 items are four times the volume the shop had wen it opened two years ago. Ferrer's strategy seems to be working in China, but he admits it was a problem at first.
"There are many many challenges.//China has the intellectual property issues. It has the copies issues. It has a 代溝，when a product comes, you don't know if it is OK or not. So what we want to do is also the social media from the west, that's not working in China. So small companies can't now start writing on Wechat in Chinese, on Weibo and make it grow, etc."he said.
At the same time Ferrer began selling Spanish luxury in China, Gu Ruoyang opened a store selling exclusively Italian fashion. The difference was that Gu's company only sells in shopping malls. His hope is that customers will stop by and be impressed by being able to pick up and have a real look at what they are buying. Gu's problem is the falling number of China's shopping malls -- quite a few have recently closed.
"Commercial property operators need high-end luxury brands in their malls to attract customers. But the problem is the sales volume of these brands is not very good now. Traditional shopping malls and department stores need professional buyers but they can't afford them. For example, Japan's Isetan department stores usually send 50 to 80 buyers to a fashion week. But Chinese shopping malls have no way to do this kind of thing, it just costs too much."Gu Ruoyang, CEO ogIGFD Grouppo.
Gu says his biggest challenge now is that Chinese shopping malls are not mature enough to accept his ideas. On line or in the mall, the luxury buyers are sure the market is there -- they're just still searching for the perfect way to reach it.
