How to change the garment industry chain under "Industry 4.0"

Industry 4.0 is a manufacturing strategy first proposed by Germany: when an organization is in a leading position in an industry, the best strategy is to let all competitors copy their own strategies and follow their own footsteps; then as long as all things are equal, the leader is always ahead.

The United States and China are also big industrial powers, and they have been recruited by Germany. They also talked about the "fourth industrial revolution" and "manufacturing 2025" later to echo Germany's Industry 4.0.

I don't like Industry 4.0. Today is the era of mobile Internet and Internet of Things. We are still talking about industry. If there is no product, where will the manufacturing and industry come from?

Industry 4.0 is actually very simple. It is to extend the original advanced manufacturing environment of CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) and FMS (Flexible Manufacturing System) to the front-end sales link through the Internet; Based on the big data analysis, we can obtain the market and consumer demand for personalization and customization, and then connect to the factory's flexible manufacturing system through the Internet to achieve a small amount of diverse production models.

Therefore, the premise of Industry 4.0, the production factory must be able to achieve CIM and FMS; otherwise, even if there is demand from the sales link, the factory may not be able to produce. If the factory has achieved CIM and FMS, the next challenge is how to create a new front-end sales model in the Internet era and the era of socialization to meet consumers' needs for personalization and fashion.

The Internet celebrity clothing store is a big success

Here is an example of the traditional clothing industry that consumers are most familiar with.

On July 26, 2016, the well-known fashion blogger and designer Lin's physical store LIN EDITION LIMIT opened on Changle Road, Shanghai. This is LIN's first physical store, and Li Chen was also invited on the same day. , Chen Bike, Ding Chuncheng and other stars came to help out and jointly attended the opening ribbon-cutting event. Lin is an original designer brand. It took four years to develop from a small team of several people to having its own studio. The opening of the physical store heralds the transformation of LIN from an online store to an offline store.

Zhang Yu, who founded the "LIN Edition Limit" brand in 2012, was born in 1988 and is from Pinghu, Zhejiang. It has been a family business in clothing since grandfather’s generation. It was once ranked among the top 100 private enterprises in China, and it is a foundry for international brands such as Uniqlo.

When Zhang Yu was still wearing open-crotch pants, he stayed in the meeting room of the family business all day and listened to the elders. Prepare for family business. After returning to China in 2010, Zhang Yu directly entered the family business. At that time, the company's business model was traditional and stable, and it had a considerable number of long-term customers, so Zhang Yu actually only needed to drink tea in the office and take foreign trade orders from customers. It's pretty decent.

Zhang Yu's wife Zhang Linchao returned from studying in London with him. This beautiful girl is already well-known in the Chinese student circle in London, with nearly one million followers on her personal Weibo account. After returning to China, she opened a women's clothing online store LIN, and the target customer was positioned as "Turtle White Fumei".

Like most women's clothing store owners when they started, Lin's first batch of goods was the final foreign trade order from the factory, but the factory belonged to Zhang Yu's family; Lin was a professional buyer and a designer with good taste , and stubborn but brilliant managers and decision makers, then models, internet celebrities.

Zhang Yu, who has never paid much attention to online shopping, was surprised to find that in just a few years, his wife, an online shop that started from scratch, now has an annual sales of tens of millions of RMB. In 2012 they registered their own brand "LIN Edition Limit".

LIN launched a new women's clothing product in April this year, and tens of thousands of people rushed into the store to buy it. In just one minute, 15 new products were sold out, and the average unit price exceeded RMB 1,000.

At 8 o'clock that night, Zhang Dayi, another celebrity shop, started to release new products, and one dress sold 5,000 that night. Zhang Dayi is the head model of Ruili's brokerage in mainland China. After opening an online store for a year and a half, he reached the five crown store, with 320,000 transactions and monthly sales of several million yuan.

Two models change the garment industry chain

As we all know, the buyer model of Zara in Spain is to place orders for the best selling clothes in fashion weeks, famous brand stores, hypermarkets, etc. Production, 10 days for delivery. Allow consumers to wear clothing similar to brand names at low prices. This is a marketing strategy model that analyzes consumers' needs through big data, and distributes goods quickly, in large quantities, and at low prices. To be honest, this copycat model often gets Zara involved in copyright lawsuits.

The celebrity fashion clothing online store adopts a different model; they use the Internet community platform to build a community on blogs and Weibo to attract fans for continuous and high-frequency interaction; Consumers' trend and demand for fashion clothing, and then design products, and then do product marketing through the effect of Internet celebrities.

Both are assisted by big data. I call Zara's big data model "After the Fact Data" and LIN "Before the Fact Data". data before occurrence). From the name, you can know that the data of LIN is more timely and accurate.

If Zara is "fast fashion in the era of industrial economy", then LIN is the Internet celebrity economic model of "fast fashion in the era of community"; in short, it is social media, e-commerce platform plus Internet celebrity economy , resulting in such a state-of-the-art model, but this online celebrity store model has just begun and is evolving at a high speed.

The Xinchengda Group, founded by Zhang Yu's family, has four factories and thousands of workers. The annual order of clothing reaches millions of pieces, and it has a mature supply chain and mass production capacity; however, traditional supply The large-scale assembly line with dozens of people and one production line in the chain cannot adapt to the small batch production of rapid iteration of Internet sales.

So he simply selected senior technical backbones from the original production line, abandoned and dismantled the traditional large-scale assembly line, changed it to a team system of three or four people, and flexibly adjusted the production plan to adapt to the small amount of Internet sales. Production.

The problem that is more painful than rebuilding the production line is the fabric. A navy skirt sells 2,000 pieces a day; but in addition to the 300 pieces in stock, the factory only has 300 pieces of fabric, which needs to be negotiated with upstream fabric manufacturers to order at a premium. But it takes seven days for custom-made fabrics to be sent to the garment-making assembly line.

E-commerce has been subverting the retail side for so many years, so that the production of garments has gradually changed and gradually become Internet-based; it will take some time for upstream fabric suppliers to keep up with this pace.

The transformation of the traditional garment industry is starting from the retail side, marketing through social media, selling through e-commerce, and obtaining trends and market demand through fan interaction. Leading the trend through Internet celebrities has led to pre-sale mainly, very little inventory, and data-driven business, and then forced traditional garment factories and supply chains to transform.