After the outbreak of the past two years, the domestic garment industry went to a new watershed.
According to the 2019 Social E-commerce Women's Wear Industry Report jointly released by Youzan Research and Tencent Advertising, the GMV of China's apparel market grew 7.8% year on year to 2.07 trillion yuan in 2018 and is expected to slow to 3.5% in 2019. Women's wear is the largest sub-segment in the market. Overall sales are expected to top 100 billion yuan this year, but the growth will slow to 2.7% from 7.6% in 2018, mainly due to the market becoming saturated.
Textile and apparel retail consumption is weak. Sales of clothing, shoes, hats and knitwear fell by 1.1% year-on-year, and the growth rate was 10.3% lower than the same period last year, marking the first negative growth in recent years. From January to November 2019, the accumulative growth rate of apparel, knitted footwear and hat textiles was 3% year-on-year, which decreased by 5.1% compared with the same period in 2018.
China's womenswear market is already worth more than rmb800bn and is expected to grow to more than Rmb1.7tn by 2021, according to Frost & Sullivan, a business consultancy.
It has been pointed out that with the development of China's apparel industry entering a new plateau, from production-oriented to consumption-oriented, the ceiling of the domestic women's apparel industry is approaching, the focus of industry competition has changed to the competition of brand power, and e-commerce has become the fastest growing retail channel of China's apparel market. Brands relying on traditional department store channels for a long time neglect the personalized shaping of brand image, resulting in the current domestic clothing brand product homogenization increasingly serious phenomenon.
This change also appears from the strategic layout of domestic clothing brands in recent years.
Women's clothing is actually started the earliest and the most active domestic garment industry, in view of the last century 80 s and 90 s global manufacturing transfer to China's southeast coast has undertaken as a labor-intensive industries clothing OEM business, a large part of the earliest domestic clothing brand in clothing OEM, then in the late 90 s registered trademark establishment of an independent brand.
Under the influence of the floor distribution of traditional department stores, domestic women's wear has been gradually subdivided into many categories according to the age level, such as big shu, medium shu, young shu and young girl, forming a relatively complete industrial chain. However, although such a growth path has given Chinese clothing brands sensitive awareness of supply chain and hardware advantages, the thinking set of large-scale production has bound the development of brand awareness and original spirit for a long period of time.
