Market Analysis: The Confusion of Traditional Clothing Enterprises Touching "Electricity"

“Today, we will not do a good job of e-commerce and we will have no business tomorrow.” After the financial crisis, apparel companies that are still experiencing various pressures such as the appreciation of the renminbi and rising costs of labor and raw materials are experiencing an unprecedented cold spell. In recent years, the increasingly e-commerce has become a huge cake that the traditional clothing industry has to pay attention to. To some extent, e-commerce will also be the only way for companies to survive and develop in the increasingly fierce global market competition.

For traditional apparel companies, the temptation of e-commerce is enormous. Data show that from 2007 to 2009, the domestic online clothing retail apparel market has a compound growth rate of 174.88%. In 2009, the apparel retail online retail market reached 50.6 billion yuan. In addition, according to the publication of "Quarterly Monitoring of China's Online Retail Market in the Second Quarter of 2011" by Analysys International, the transaction volume of China's online retail market reached 192.4 billion yuan in the second quarter of 2011, of which the sales of apparel products reached 44.5 billion yuan, a The growth rate was 8%, a year-on-year increase of 68.9%, accounting for 23.1% of the total transactions. Regardless of whether Taobao Mall’s single-day transaction exceeded 900 million yuan, or where the customer created a sales myth of 2 billion yuan in 2010 in a short period of three years, it caused a lot of embarrassment in traditional service enterprises.

For the wave of e-commerce, it is impossible for the small and medium-sized enterprises or large-scale domestic and foreign companies to take a leisurely look. At present, there are many clothing companies in action to try to get a piece of cake in the online shopping market, such as Li Ning, Anta, Belle, 361 °, Peak, Daphne, Septwolves, Smith Barney and so on.

Li Ning Company began to try it out from Taobao Mall a few years ago. After tasting the sweetness, it set up its own B2C mall and applied the e-commerce management system to achieve division of labor and benefit sharing and online sales between online and offline store entities. Seamlessly interact with the offline logistics and benign interaction. In addition to online sales, many brands also adopt a series of measures to strengthen interaction with consumers in order to stimulate market consumption and gain more market share. According to Hu Yirong, director of e-commerce operations at Belle, e-commerce is the path that traditional companies must take. “You don’t do it, your opponent is doing it; your genuine product is not done, and your cottage is doing it.”

Despite the explosive growth of online shopping transactions, the sales volume of the entire distribution channels is still very limited. Belle began its e-commerce business in the second half of 2008. Currently, Belle has developed more than 100 online distributors, but the online shopping platform currently contributes less than 1% of Belle’s revenue to less than 10,000 physical stores.

In fact, the proportion of e-commerce accounts for only 2% to 3% of the entire social retail transaction, which is still a big gap between developed countries such as the United States, which is between 7% and 8%. In the future, online sales of domestic apparel products will undoubtedly maintain rapid growth and huge development space. However, the traditional e-commerce business in the apparel industry also needs to experience pain and struggle.

There are many reasons for them to be confused, for example, what kind of approach should be adopted to solve the problem that the short-term investment and output of e-commerce do not match; how to balance offline and online brand conflicts and channel interests; how to integrate online and offline completely Different two sets of systems maximize the value of resource integration and so on.