From a 10 billion industry to a brand, Guangzhou's small formal wear is selling well overseas through SHEIN

The small dresses from Guangzhou quickly swept into the wardrobes of women in Europe , America , the Middle East and other places .

Bead embroidery, sequins, flying pleats and lace edges ... Thousands of small dresses with different craftsmanship and jewels are rushed out on several clothing production lines in Guangzhou. They will soon travel across the ocean as the new "battle suits" for women in Europe, America, the Middle East and other countries and regions, from London to New York, from Dubai to Istanbul, and become the elegant and beautiful scenery appearing in various festival parties at the end of the year.

When talking about the domestic wedding dress industry, people will first think of Chaozhou and Suzhou Tiger Hill . However, in the past two or three years, some clothing companies in Guangzhou have actively transformed themselves, developing a product line of small dresses more suitable for festivals and parties from some categories of casual clothing such as chiffon skirts, quickly breaking out from many types of domestic exported women's clothing and opening up a new overseas situation.

Among the Guangzhou enterprises that have recently gone overseas, some have transformed from making chiffon skirts, some from sexy short skirts, and some were originally good at making custom wedding dresses . After changing their production lines to make small dresses for export, some enterprises have achieved annual sales of 200 million yuan in just a few years. By landing on cross-border e-commerce platforms such as SHEIN, these small dresses made in Guangzhou quickly captured the hearts of consumers after they went overseas. Industry insiders roughly estimate that from the initial transformation of more than a dozen major clothing factories to the recent addition of at least dozens of enterprises making small dress products for export, the output value of Guangzhou enterprises that have transformed through this new track has reached tens of billions of yuan, and is expected to become a new 10 billion yuan industry.

Who is leading Guangzhou's small formal wear to "kill" overseas?

The dress review section on overseas shopping websites is full of pleasing pleasures. For example, under a small dress shaped like a mermaid's tail and sparkling water, buyers are not stingy with five-star reviews:

OMG! I love my dress, I have received so many compliments on it and so many people have asked me where I got it, it is so special and the material is amazing!

Another review shows that other users are equally satisfied:

Stunning! Love, love, love this dress! So perfect and the color is everything …

The company that designed and sold this dress is Chen Ling's company, a small dress company located in Guangzhou that was established only two or three years ago. The company's boss Zhou Zhou, because of his hobby of design and seeing a friend running a clothing factory, he plunged into the dress industry three years ago. Zhou Zhou likes gorgeous and exaggerated styles, while the domestic small dress market prefers soft and graceful aesthetics. She chose to settle in the SHEIN platform and set her sights on the vast overseas customer acquisition. To use the current popular words, the overseas expansion of small dresses is, to some extent, a passion and "powered by love" for Zhou Zhou, but the dream was soon realized.

In 2021, the company had just decided to join the SHEIN platform. The team was still being formed, the office hadn’t warmed up yet, the staff hadn’t arrived yet, and the products were still being uploaded in a slow process of operation and exploration. Zhou Zhou and Chen Ling caught up with the "Black Friday Cyber ​​Monday", a very prestigious overseas year-end consumption festival.

In the first year of participating in "Black Friday", Chen Ling, the person in charge of the company's operations, was a little confused. "At that time, I went to market when I was asked to, and I prepared stocks when I was asked to." She hastily launched some new styles, and more than 40% of the dresses became hot-selling items. With the first victory, Chen Ling completed her first experience of personally promoting products overseas.

As Black Friday approaches this year, Chen Ling moved up the preparations for stocking to September, made plans for new products, and prepared nearly one-third more spot inventory than usual, until the company's own warehouse was full. Just a week or two ago, Chen Ling also participated in the Black Friday stocking meeting organized by the SHEIN platform and learned many new ways to go overseas. Currently, the company has more than a thousand models on the SHEIN platform shelves, and more than 60% are in active sales. Chen Ling expects this year's Black Friday promotion to be a good harvest.

"A high-cost-effective dress makes every girl shine." With this product positioning, the dresses, which are priced between $40 and $80, are loved by girls of different skin colors and regions. They proudly show off their looks when they put on the new dresses at home or appear at parties, and contribute thousands of short videos and buyer show photos in product review areas and other social media websites, as if wearing this dress made in Guangzhou can make them stand out from the crowd on the other side of the ocean and become the most beautiful girl on the whole street.

Business in the Middle East

Since the beginning of this year, more and more cross-border practitioners have discovered that in addition to the popular markets in Europe and the United States that have been talked about by word of mouth in the past, the Middle East has grown into another hot spot.

According to analysis from professional organizations, the Middle Eastern countries are currently at a critical moment of transitioning from an oil economy to a diversified economy, and continue to release the dividends of the digital industry. The large young population (median age is 28.2 years old) and the high Internet penetration rate mean that the Middle East is likely to gain a long-term growing online economy.

Chen Ling also found that the consumption of customers in the Middle East has increased significantly. During the Ramadan promotion in April and May, chiffon dresses with dress-like styles can bring a wave of sales peaks, and at the end of the year, some heavy-duty clothes such as velvet will become popular there. Especially some large-sized dresses have a high success rate. In Chen Ling's words, the success rate is nearly twice as high as other styles. In addition to large sizes, ethnic embroidery and colorful styles are also very popular among local women in the Middle East . Based on the operation of the SHEIN platform and the buyers' accurate grasp of popular elements and experience sharing, they began to incorporate ethnic prints into the design of their own dresses.

Another thing that surprised them was that expensive dresses with beading or other craftsmanship also sold better in the Middle East market. This is somewhat different from the original experience of overseas markets: unlike the consumption trend of "preferring lower prices" in the European and American markets, there is no obvious feeling of "consumption downgrade" in the Middle East market. In the second half of this year, many high-quality, expensive dresses are even more likely to achieve good sales performance.

"Who says you have to offer low prices when going overseas?" This incident has also changed everyone's understanding of the overseas consumption environment.

Workshop-style garment factories are moving towards becoming "brands"

As we all know, the small formal dress industry in Guangzhou has always been mostly small and medium-sized factories with small scale and low visibility. Compared with very mature domestic wedding dress industry clusters such as Chaozhou and Suzhou, the long-term market awareness is relatively low, and it is urgent to consider improvement and improvement from the design side or the brand side.

Whether or not a company can move towards branding is also something that Zhou Zhou, a "design enthusiast" and company owner, cares about.

"When I first started working with SHEIN, I thought we wanted to be an international brand. But because we lacked scale when we started going overseas, the advantages of dress design could not be reflected. At that time, I contacted a person in charge of SHEIN, who guided us step by step to learn how to use the platform's resources and become familiar with going overseas."

After the 2021 "Black Friday" promotion, Zhou Zhou brought Chen Ling to repeatedly communicate and run-in with the SHEIN platform operations, deeply understood SHEIN's own brand building path and product development direction, and began to recognize her own mind more clearly: she must make it a dress brand. From the initial development of some new dresses, to the tonality of dresses, from discovering the prospects of the Middle East market, to making some of her own products more suitable for the Middle East market and more well-known among the Middle Eastern female groups, from cooperating with garment workshops to building her own garment factories... Step by step, SHEIN's feedback on the operating conditions and strategic guidance also runs through her operations. By the first half of this year, Zhou Zhou's company's products finally appeared on the SHEIN platform with a branded image, and it was reborn as a large-size dress brand with a certain degree of popularity, especially in the Middle East market.

After more than two years of overseas exploration and learning, Zhou Zhou's team has developed more comprehensive overseas operation capabilities in cooperation with the SHEIN platform, and has also built an independent website to strengthen brand awareness. By increasing traffic promotion and overseas influencers' endorsements, the road to brand development overseas is getting wider and wider.

According to the sales forecasts of many sellers, if the Guangzhou small formal wear industry is about to usher in a new peak in overall sales during this year's overseas "Black Friday" promotion, then the transformation and accumulation over the past two years have provided the key resources for the current concentrated outbreak of the industry.

The success of Zhou Zhou and Chen Ling's products and brands has brought about a new wave of "going overseas fever" to join the SHEIN platform. More domestic companies are still adjusting their direction to promptly reverse their old product lines that have been unpopular in the domestic market. It is reported that many small formal wear companies in Guangzhou have become "big sellers" with annual revenues of over 100 million yuan by going overseas on SHEIN. As of now, Zhou Zhou's company has also achieved a monthly income of 10 million to 16 million yuan, which has already doubled its sales compared to when it first joined SHEIN.

The successful transformation of Guangzhou's small formal wear industry has benefited from the new opportunities brought about by the trend of global trade and the huge demand in the global market, as well as the government's multiple supports to promote cross-border trade facilitation. Equally important, platforms like SHEIN have become a new driving force for platforms to help domestic industries achieve rapid overseas expansion, and can help more third-party sellers to enter the new blue ocean of global trade more easily and worry-free. It is reported that since the beginning of this year, SHEIN has focused on launching multiple modes such as platform self-operation and agency operation, providing more sellers with "menu-style" options for overseas expansion, and officially announced the national 500-city industrial belt plan to drive high-quality manufacturing, brand overseas expansion and industrial upgrading.

Guangzhou small dress

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SHEIN