The Flower of Art: The Dance of Transformation

In the early spring of the sheep, the first fashion week detonated the whole city of Shenzhen. Echoing the main venue, the Yizhihui Creative Industrial Park, dozens of kilometers away, staged "two shows and one exhibition": the EACHWAY brand show with the theme of "New Breath", the HUI brand show with the theme of "My Love", and the "New Oriental" brand show. "Spirit" as the theme, an art exhibition of dialogue between fashion and ceramics.

"HUI is a fashion that is watered with love, which you will never forget. It is as dazzling and exclusive as Cinderella's pumpkin cart. I especially want to know if it is a particularly happy thing to design with love in this way. Things, at least we feel..." a HUI VIP customer wrote after the launch.

Nevertheless, whether the newly released fashion design can be accepted by target customers still needs to be tested by the market. However, in the view of Zhao Huizhou, founder and chief designer of Yizhihui Fashion Group, the two shows, which have devoted the efforts of the team, have made a good start for the "year of change" for the company and the brand.

"This (referring to the year of change) is also the driving force for why we do three activities in one go - as a designer brand that has been established for 18 years, it has been continuously in the past two years. In the trial and gratifying performance, we have become more and more firm in our direction, and try to present it to everyone in our own way - from brand concept to product details." The company wrote in a letter to the media.

The year of change coincides with the rite of passage. During the company's growth process, "platform" and "transformation" appeared frequently in Zhao Huizhou's conversations, becoming the key words for the company's innovation and upgrading. "Every time you go to the next step, you have to think about how to innovate and how to transform." She told "CEConline".

Platformization

Zhao Huizhou knows the value of the platform. When she founded the EACHWAY brand as an independent designer 18 years ago, she realized that she needed a corporate platform to realize her career aspirations. She registered her own company again the following year.

The company platform allows Zhao Huizhou to increase the height and depth of the contact surface, and expand the breadth and breadth of the consumer group. "(If there is no platform) you will not be able to realize your dreams of being an independent designer," she said. "I think being a business can make the designer's ideal more long-term."

In the emphasis of Premier Li Keqiang In today's "mass entrepreneurship, mass innovation", those start-ups that have obtained venture capital investment often clearly put forward their corporate vision, business mission, development strategy and profit model in accordance with the standard format of business plans, and instantly create a "high-end" business model. platform.

In Zhao Huizhou's view, the reason why the company has come to this day is "not because of the height of enterprise definition, but because you want to improve every detail and every product and do it better."

While adhering to the details, Yizhihui has carried out various explorations and layouts on the road of platformization. Today, the three-pronged business framework of apparel, modern media, and creative culture has initially taken shape; the creative industry park with incubator functions has been operating, providing a physical platform for integrating the fashion industry chain; the Internet + model combining O2O online and offline is about to emerge. Everything looks so good.

Zhao Huizhou has a core idea: to spread the true fashion and beauty of life to more people through the carrier of clothing. This explains why Yizhihui entered the modern media industry.

"When you have a beautiful system and a beautiful philosophy, you find that you still need to know how to spread it. If you don't know how to spread it, other people won't perceive what you do, and it won't resonate with him. It means that your consumer group cannot perceive it, so culture and art need to be spread," she said.

If it is said that brand communication needs to join hands with Internet technology from the inside out, so that Yizhihui's business portfolio is included in the media industry, which is in line with business logic, then the inclusion of creative and cultural industries into its business portfolio is an industrial policy The inevitable result of turbulent cultural precipitation from outside to inside.

The global economic turmoil caused by the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States is still vivid in the world's eyes. In response, my country's economic policy makers, drawing on the historical experience of Western developed countries to boost domestic demand, promulgated and implemented industrial policies aimed at vigorously developing creative culture. The "creative industry park fever" has begun to rise nationwide.

In this context, Yizhihui received the support of Shenzhen governments at all levels to build and finally launch a creative industry park with a construction area of nearly 50,000 square meters. According to the analysis, the company has received government support mainly because it is a leader in Shenzhen's garment industry, especially because it has a relatively deep cultural precipitation.

"We have been taking our own unique cultural line, and we are not taking the cultural line because today's popular talk about culture, we will do culture, or tomorrow's popular talk about art, we will do art. In fact, from this brand From the beginning, we have been doing culture, and we have been doing it until now." Zhao Huizhou said.

The main reason for insisting on culture is Zhao Huizhou himself. In her opinion, the original designer brand is firmly bonded with the designer. "You have to do what you are good at, not to do culture for the sake of culture, but how to express yourself completely. I always feel that cultural and artistic accomplishments are the most important things for designers to have, so I have been learning and improving in the field of cultural cultivation.”

Enterprises set up creative industry parks, which is unique in Shenzhen's garment industry. As a brand incubator, Yizhihui Creative Industrial Park has a corresponding industrial supporting and service system, forming an international fashion industry chain integrating production, learning and research. The industrial park serves the brand of Yizhihui, but it is more used by the industry. Yizhihui's ambition to lead the industry is evident.

The transformation of "fish"

For Yizhihui, fish culture is everywhere and always. The company has held dozens of new product launches at home and abroad, as well as all large-scale brand promotion and corporate culture activities, almost all of which are based on fish, and the theme of the activities is extracted from the changes in fish. Zhao Huizhou even declared to the media: "I am a flying fish."

Since ancient times, Chinese people have had a deep affection for fish. Fish represents auspiciousness, wealth and abundance, and is also a symbol of Buddha. Fish are soft on the outside and firm on the inside. Its external form is soft, but it is strong and independent in the face of water pressure. Over the years, Zhao Huizhou has led the Yizhihui team to tirelessly explore the oriental spirit and its expression in fashion design and brand soul. When she was looking for a representation of the oriental spirit, fish became her best choice. "Its shape and spirit can best represent a temperament of the East."

"I am a flying fish." The transformation of this "fish" is Zhao Huizhou's own transformation. Initially, Zhao Huizhou pursued the design of a beautiful dress. Later, she discovered that designers need their own design soul and DNA. When she has her own design soul and DNA, she needs to form a set of aesthetic philosophy. "If you don't have your own philosophical system for beauty, it's impossible to talk about DNA in a systematic way."

Zhao Huizhou admitted that this transformation is very painful, but it must be faced. In her view, the innovation of designers is different from the innovation of the Internet. Designers must stand on the basis of the past to innovate, and Internet innovation can completely start from scratch. "(As a designer) you can't lose the past, and you won't be called a designer with a soul; but you can't ignore the future. If you don't see the future, you will easily be eliminated, and the sense of the times will pass. It is the designer's difficulty."

As an important achievement of transformation and innovation, the aesthetic system of "New Oriental Spirit" explored by Zhao Huizhou began to gain social recognition. She was selected as one of the core designers of the official clothing of the "2014 Beijing APEC Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit". Together with other designers, she designed the dresses for the spouses of leaders of various countries, showing the world the elegant and elegant New Oriental aesthetics.

The transformation of "fish" is also the transformation of Yizhihui's brands. Zhao Huizhou found that women born in the 1980s and 1985s are more independent and self-reliant than women born in the 1970s. This started the transformation of the Yizhihui brand, from the aesthetic appeal of the post-70s generation to the life proposition of the post-80s and post-85s. In addition to maintaining a soft and fresh temperament, its fashion products are more modern, younger, more futuristic, more technological and more imaginative. The "New Breath" EACHWAY brand show released during Shenzhen Fashion Week clearly expresses the brand DNA.

"Under the complex social situation and the current new normal, fish can still dance, live leisurely, and breathe naturally." Talking about the core concept of fish culture expression Shi Zhao Huizhou said. This is also a true portrayal of her and Yi Zhihui's exploration of transformation and innovation in the face of pressure and challenges.