The "new business card" of a small city in Henan: In addition to Pang Donglai, there is also the overseas story of SHEIN

In the pursuit of beauty, consumers' enthusiasm has never diminished, nurturing new business opportunities. In the past, the "beauty industry" was dominated by European and American brands, but in recent years, the industrial chain in many parts of China has slowly emerged. While cultivating and polishing products, they have also set their sights on the broader global retail market.

"Going overseas" has finally changed from a desire of a few companies to a destination for most companies.

Good quality and good price > conspicuous consumption, consumers are no longer obsessed with big brands

The beauty-related industries are far more than cosmetics, skin care, and fashion. Many sub-segments around styling and personal care are giving rise to new consumer hotspots, from hair to fingernails, from false eyelashes to beauty eggs. Market information shows that the performance of global luxury goods has cooled, and young people are no longer buying them. Therefore, in this year's year-end shopping season, it is likely that the ones who can finally fill the shopping carts of "beauty lovers" with high-quality and low-priced goods will no longer be international brands, but the source factories in the domestic industrial belt that are ready to go.

Consumers recorded a lot of videos of unboxing the beauty products they got from S HEIN

This summer, Xuchang, Henan, became popular with the "ceiling of the supermarket industry" Pang Donglai. It mainly relied on the local supply chain advantages of Henan and cut down on unnecessary rent and other costs to create competitiveness that can compete with supermarket giants such as Sam's Club and Costco. However, few people know that this northern small city has another golden signboard - wig production. In Xuchang, more than 300,000 people are directly engaged in "wig"-related work, which means that on average one in every 15 people makes a living from it.

The "Xuchang County Annals" records that as early as the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, local people were making wig props for drama performances. This craft has been passed down through many technological innovations. However, the people who use these wigs and hairpieces have changed from folk artists in the troupe to countless fashion figures at home and abroad. Especially in Africa, people wearing wigs is commonplace, and they even wear wigs to salons for trimming and shaping .

Deng Nan, who works in the hair products industry, has long noticed the demand for wigs in the international market. When the company was seeking to innovate, he first set his sights on the cross-border e-commerce platform S HEIN , which has high user stickiness and strong fashion attributes . In just three years, Deng Nan's S HEIN store has been able to sell 40,000 colorful wigs per month. Deng Nan has also upgraded from a "worker" to a "partner", and going overseas has become the company's core business direction.

Consumers share their purchases of wig products

"On the eve of Black Friday this year, we found that sales had increased by 85 % compared to normal days , especially since the end of October when an increase in consumers began using wigs for role-playing and attending costume parties on Halloween," said Deng Nan.

" The return rate overseas is very low, and the customer base is as knowledgeable about wigs as the manufacturers. For example, domestic consumers do not consider wigs as necessities, and may feel a little ashamed when wearing them , but overseas , wigs are a fashion must-have. I found that some of my customers buy more than a dozen wigs at a time , and they really buy wigs as accessories. "

When Deng Nan first decided to go overseas, she observed that S HEIN has a wide range of fashion categories. Consumers who buy clothes, cosmetics, and accessories will come here and take a look at wigs.

"In order to accurately attract these consumers, we first made a color card sequence, and then a curvature sequence in the wig . When designing the product, we first made a small order test to target the target group. When shooting the actual product, we also referred to various exquisite model pictures on SHEIN to ensure the fashion sense of our graphics . "

Actively deploying cross-border online stores, the manufacturing town has a "good start"

The hot atmosphere brought about by the "Black Friday" promotion has not only spread to small manufacturing cities in the north, but also in factories in the south where industries are concentrated, preparations for Black Friday are also in full swing.

S HEIN sellers have launched a variety of makeup brushes for the "Black Friday" promotion

Xie Chun, a seller in Dongguan, owns a makeup brush factory that has been running at full capacity for more than two months. Eyeshadow brushes, nose shadow brushes, foundation brushes, eyelash brushes and other makeup tools... As long as a hot item is released, 300,000 to 400,000 pieces will be sold on the SHEIN website. In the face of this year's big promotion, Xie Chun expects that the peak sales at the end of November can reach 150 % of the daily level , because orders have already started to rise since November .

On social networks, some brush factories have filmed the "immersive makeup brush production" process into short videos, which have received tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of likes from netizens. Although the product seems to have low technical barriers, it is not easy to control the quality and make a brush that can grab powder without flying, and is soft and stylish in the eyes of experts.

Xie Chun introduced that the production of exported makeup brushes may involve hundreds of links starting from the raw materials. Take the basic brush handle as an example. There are hundreds of materials to choose from, and each has subtle differences in feel and texture. From white handles to different paints and painting techniques, there are tens of thousands of options. If the painting materials are not selected properly, or the production process is not careful enough, it may be impossible to produce makeup brushes that feel smooth to the hand.

In the past few years, Xie Chun has been trying to make innovative breakthroughs in the shape of brush handles to meet consumers' expectations for "good-looking" tools, and the flexible production capabilities of its own factories also provide strong support for the rapid iteration of styles.

"So why is our factory here so efficient, fast in R&D, and with good product quality? This is the charm of building our own supply chain. During the new seller training provided by SHEIN, I was deeply inspired by the flexible supply chain that SHEIN's own brand excels at. For example, my brushes, even if they are out of stock today, the factory can produce them tomorrow or the day after tomorrow at the latest - because the inventory in my material warehouse is highly coordinated with the production line, and both small and large orders can be quickly adapted," shared Xie Chun.

Deng Nan's company, which has also gained acceleration in cross-border e-commerce, has also faced challenges in production management and team building. According to Deng Nan, when he first started doing cross-border business, the factory was basically in a state of barbaric production. In order to make the production operation meet the growing demand for orders, he thought of building a management system and personnel echelon. Now, through the seller courses provided by the platform background, operators and production foremen can learn independently. "Although we are the source factory, we also want to become a learning organization," Deng Nan said with a smile.

The advanced team that Deng Nan expects is not only one step ahead in production and manufacturing, but also makes a lot of efforts in the direction of branding. It is not difficult to see his determination to build a brand from the decoration of his cross-border store: large and eye-catching marketing pictures, bright and unified theme colors, exquisite and fashionable product pictures and detailed instructions for use - with the future expectation of sales growth, sellers are naturally willing to work hard on other sections.

Looking at the development of the domestic cosmetic tools industry, from the 1990s to the present, it has gone through three stages: OEM for foreign-funded factories, OEM for self-built factories, and then developing domestic makeup brush brands. However, not everyone has found a suitable path for the third stage of transformation. The different ability requirements for production, sales, and branding require operators to become "polygonal warriors" in order to achieve performance breakthroughs in a larger market, and the emergence of cross-border e-commerce platforms has undoubtedly given more factories the opportunity to enter the market and take a share of the pie.

Looking back a few years ago, the business of the company headed by Deng Nan has achieved an astonishing expansion of twenty times, and the sales of the SHEIN online store carefully built by Xie Chun have also climbed to more than five times of the past. According to SHEIN statistics, the platform and sellers launched as many as one million selected products during this year's Black Friday, and there were many dark horse hits such as leather jackets with weekly sales of more than 40,000 pieces and cherry-shaped cleaning brushes with weekly sales of more than 10,000 pieces. It is no accident that these sellers and products stand out, but thanks to the precise selection of the overseas track and the efforts to prepare for the rainy day. As cross-border e-commerce platforms such as SHEIN continue to expand their global market territory, more and more good products and brands produced in small cities are expected to move from behind the scenes to the front, and from the margins to the middle of the mainstream narrative.

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