This industry belt with an annual output of 300 million pieces of underwear has found new momentum for development in SHEIN

Recently, a conference on implementing the "Five External Linkages" to promote high-level opening-up was held in Guangzhou.

The cross-border e-commerce industry is now in a period of rapid development. As a new driving force for foreign trade growth, cross-border e-commerce platforms are helping enterprises improve quality and efficiency. The efficient overseas channels they provide are also becoming one of the important ways for Guangdong Province to implement the "five external linkages" and promote high-level opening up. By supporting enterprises to expand markets, increase orders, increase efficiency, and seize opportunities, the integration of cross-border e-commerce and industrial belts will accelerate the cultivation of new advantages of Made in China in international competition.

As the "vanguard" of Guangdong's foreign trade , business operators in Chaoshan with a keen sense of business have taken the lead and started to lay out the cross-border overseas track early. As the old saying goes: "Where there is tide, there are Chaoshan people; where there are Chaoshan people, there are Chaoshan merchants."

 
If you open the website of the cross-border platform SHEIN, you will find that toys, stainless steel kitchenware, fashionable shoes, underwear and home clothes are rich in products with good quality and low prices. There are also many hot-selling products that have recently received more than 10,000 repeat purchases from consumers. According to the reporter, many of the above products are indeed from the characteristic industrial belts of Chaoshan, and some sellers have even achieved sales growth of millions or tens of millions. However, it is not difficult to follow the business trend. The difficulty lies in how to stand out from the heavy competition and continue to maintain a competitive advantage in the new track. "Only hard work can win" is continuing to write the new business story of Chaoshan.

Finding "new momentum": Chaoshan boss's new overseas story

Yan Manyun, a shoe factory owner from Puning, Jieyang, has hit three booms: she set up a stall in Shenzhen in the 1990s, opened a stall in Guangzhou to do foreign trade after the millennium, and opened an online store on a cross-border e-commerce platform a year ago. Although the shoes all come from the factory in Puning, each change in business model has brought her exponential business growth.

"From a time perspective, we should try cross-border platforms now," Yan Manyun said. "When we started doing foreign trade 20 years ago, we talked about 'making money'. As long as there was a factory, we could take orders and make money. But the practices at that time seem too long now."

A pair of shoes starts from Puning and arrives at the hands of traders after a long-distance sea transport. It often has to change hands several times before it appears on the shelves. This year, some traders even complained to Yan Manyun: "The styles that are promising this year have not even had time to be produced, but have already started to be sold on cross-border platforms."

In the fashion consumer market, which is racing against time, what can win the hearts of consumers are often more market-forward products and more efficient services. Cross-border e-commerce platforms, especially SHEIN, which has become a favorite of young overseas consumers in the fashion field, are good at meeting such consumer needs.

Seller Xu Jie has also established cooperation with several factories in the underwear industry belt of Shantou, which is known as the world-famous "underwear town". With Gu Rao Town and Chendian Town as the core, the annual output of the underwear industry belt in Shantou reaches more than 300 million pieces, accounting for half of the national output. The industrial output value of the textile and clothing industry cluster headed by underwear has reached hundreds of billions.

Although the production capacity is strong, Xu Jie's underwear business has also experienced many twists and turns in the past ten years. When it comes to trying to open a store on a cross-border platform, Xu Jie's original intention is that she does not want to be "led" by customers all the time. Many years ago, a foreign trade order had a problem with the capital turnover of a foreign customer, resulting in the failure to pay the payment on time. Xu Jie still remembers it vividly: "Many workers in the factory have to send money home regularly every month, so we have to pay wages on time. At that time, I waited all night but did not get the payment."

Before starting her own business, Xu Jie had already accumulated rich work experience in the clothing industry. From a local leading clothing OEM enterprise to a foreign-funded clothing company, she has become the business manager and realized that even a modern factory with more than 10,000 employees will be submerged in the torrent sooner or later if it does not keep up with the changes in the business world.

The traditional order model is familiar to many sellers in the industry, but its ceiling is obvious. Through the cross-border e-commerce platform SHEIN, sellers can directly sell their products to more than 150 countries and regions, and the "new momentum" of foreign trade is being released at an accelerated pace.

In the eyes of the Chaoshan merchants who dare to be the first in the world, transformation and entering a new track is a must nowadays, and even many good news about going overseas have come. In 2023, Chaozhou's cross-border e-commerce import and export volume reached 1.68 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 950%, ranking first in Guangdong Province; in the same year, Jieyang's cross-border e-commerce trade volume reached 844 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 283%. The operators who dare to be the first have entered the market early and are creating surprising new performance highs in the new track.

Monthly sales of 60,000 pairs! The old shoe factory unlocks the "experience card" for going overseas

Located at the junction of Guangdong and Fujian, Chaoshan is a region with overlapping hills but few plains. The unique geographical environment has determined that generations of people have chosen to venture out on the rough sea instead of relying on farming. Although their parents have been engaged in cross-sea trade for many years, cross-border e-commerce is still a new and challenging thing for a large number of industrial belt sellers who focus on production.

When she first came into contact with cross-border e-commerce platforms, Yan Manyun had been in the shoe business for more than 30 years. It was her son who was studying abroad who introduced the cross-border platform SHEIN to her: "My child said that this e-commerce platform selling clothes and shoes is very popular, and I also want to learn something new."

Although cross-border e-commerce platforms have tried to reduce the startup costs of sellers through models such as agency operation and empowerment, for Yan Manyun, who rarely uses a computer, the adjustment and adaptation of the transformation is inevitable. During this process, Yan Manyun mentioned the support provided by the SHEIN team many times: "The SHEIN team is very sincere and professional. They can see my confusion at the beginning, and then help me answer all questions and tell me step by step how to do e-commerce well."

Nowadays, Yan Manyun's shoe store can sell more than 60,000 pairs of shoes in SHEIN per month, with monthly sales increased by more than 5 million yuan, and it has not even been a year since she opened the store in SHEIN.

After running the shop, Yan Manyun's colleagues and people around her were surprised by the efficiency improvement and order growth of the old factory. Her husband used to question her: "How can you do overseas business when you haven't even graduated from elementary school?" Now her family supports her to add more production lines in the factory to produce products for consumers on cross-border platforms, believing that this is a good choice to play to her strengths.

Yan Manyun often said that when she encountered a problem, she would prepare at least ten solutions. The diligence and tenacity inherent in Chaoshan merchants were the key to her successful transformation several times, and choosing the right "newbie-friendly" cross-border platform also made her efforts worthwhile.

Through an integrated empowerment support system, SHEIN is providing a convenient path for industry-leading sellers to enter the international retail market. The platform not only comprehensively covers key areas such as laws and regulations, customs and habits, and market trends in overseas markets, but also covers empowerment in every link from product development to sales channels, logistics and distribution, and even supply chain models, providing all-round support and guidance for the difficulties that sellers may encounter during the transformation process.

Xu Jie, who has also been on the SHEIN platform for about a year, also saw a continuously rising curve on the sales page on the computer screen. The monthly underwear sales volume has also steadily reached more than 50,000 pieces. However, looking back on the first attempt to transform into e-commerce many years ago, it was not so smooth.

Compared with the e-commerce platforms she has worked with before, Xu Jie believes that the biggest feature of SHEIN is its stable orders. This has to mention SHEIN, which started as an independent fashion brand and expanded to a platform. After more than ten years of global and local operations, it has accumulated a good reputation and a large number of fans in the overseas market, which also makes experienced cross-border sellers like Xu Jie feel at ease: "When I worked on other platforms before, I didn't dare to sleep all night. When I was under a lot of pressure, I often woke up in the middle of the night to check the data, for fear that there would be no orders. Now I feel more at ease and have a good idea of ​​the sales volume."

Cross-sea trade 2.0: Platforms help high-quality overseas trade become a new direction

In the southeastern coastal area of ​​China, the Chaoshan area, including Chaozhou, Jieyang, Shantou and Shanwei, has been a must-go place on the "Maritime Silk Road" since the Tang Dynasty. Based on the superior and unique port conditions of the "century-old commercial port", the Chaoshan people have been the pioneers of cross-sea trade since ancient times. Now facing the cross-border e-commerce model, sellers are also actively looking for ways to break through.

Xu Jie told the reporter that she had no basic knowledge of e-commerce before, and only regarded the platform as a customer. As a factory owner, she mainly focused on production management. It was not until the team changed five or six operators that Xu Jie realized that e-commerce not only requires ensuring product quality and production efficiency, but more importantly, it requires identifying market trends and consumer preferences. Only by forming differentiated and stylized product barriers can the continuity of orders be guaranteed. This ability has been significantly improved after cooperating with the SHEIN platform.

Although the e-commerce business has been in operation for nearly ten years, joining the SHEIN platform has made Xu Jie's factory undergo a "makeover". Due to a small number of returns at the beginning of the cooperation, Xu Jie began to learn through the empowerment of the SHEIN team and standardize her business operations with higher standards: "Start with the first quality inspection of the surface and auxiliary materials, and treat the fabrics 72 hours in advance after they arrive to improve the stability of the fabrics. After the finished underwear is made, it will undergo two rounds of quality inspections before it will be shipped."

In addition to adding quality inspection links, Xu Jie also standardized the management of many operational details. For example, when making underwear of different colors, the machine must be thoroughly cleaned to prevent the dust of different colors from contaminating each other. Even the appearance of the factory has changed greatly: "Now the employees have a consensus that quality inspection is not a matter of one link. Anyone who finds any details and defects of the product will take the initiative to propose improvements."

Although Xu Jie's cross-border store ships thousands of orders every day, the number of return applications in the first month was less than ten. After this adjustment, the store has almost no returns. Xu Jie believes that the product strength jointly honed with the SHEIN platform is the core competitiveness that can compete with other brands and sellers in the international market in the future, and it is also the long-termism in the business world that she believes in.

A cross-border e-commerce practitioner told the reporter that in the past, when doing foreign trade orders, they only needed to get the quality inspectors sent by the brand to nod and sign the order to receive the payment. Then the factory operators would focus on the satisfaction of one or two key personnel instead of improving the overall quality and details of the product. In contrast, the positive and negative reviews of cross-border stores will affect the consumption decisions of potential users. It is necessary to actually improve product quality, which is also an important motivation for many sellers to continuously optimize the supply chain.

For factories and sellers in traditional industrial belts, now is an important node for accelerating integration with the international market, and it is also the key to transformation to improve quality and efficiency. At present, Guangdong Province has achieved full coverage of 21 prefecture-level cities and above in cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones. As a major foreign trade province, from 2015 to 2023, the import and export value of cross-border e-commerce in Guangdong Province increased from 11.3 billion yuan to 843.3 billion yuan; in the first quarter of 2024, the total import and export value of cross-border e-commerce in the province exceeded 200 billion yuan.

Whether it is the desire to obtain more orders, or to improve product quality and introduce more advanced production models, embracing cross-border platforms is becoming the choice of a wider group of industrial belt sellers, and more and more domestic manufacturing companies have also connected to the SHEIN platform. So far, industrial belts from more than 20 provinces and more than 300 cities have settled in, and multiple industrial belts including all 21 cities in Guangdong Province have also accelerated their entry into the SHEIN platform.

The favorite song of Chaoshan businessmen often goes "Life is like the waves on the sea, sometimes rising, sometimes falling". Unlike the storms and dangerous shoals that their predecessors had experienced when sailing for business, a new chapter of going overseas with broader markets and brighter prospects has arrived.

SHEIN

Underwear Industry Belt

New momentum