After Ant, Tmall, Hema, Fliggy, and Xianyu, Alibaba The zoo had a new addition last week! After three years of keeping it secret, Alibaba’s mysterious project: a new manufacturing platform – Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing, was officially released.
Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory focuses on the textile and apparel industry. It hopes to apply digital insights into the manufacturing process to achieve true production and marketing integration and help small and medium-sized businesses solve a series of problems in the production supply chain. Pain points. Ultimately, it will be data-driven, closely linking consumer insights, industry insights and production links to achieve smarter production scheduling and flexible production.
This digital factory specializes in accepting small orders. Its core capability lies in “customization on demand, with a minimum order of 100 pieces, and the fastest 7 Delivered within days.” In short, it only takes 7 days from the time an order is placed to when the consumer wears it. This allows clothing brands to take off quickly and seize the fashion trend.
Why does Alibaba choose the textile and apparel industry as its first choice for new manufacturing?
What is the on-site situation of Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory?
What is the feedback from merchants who have tried Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing?
Today I will reveal to you one by one why new manufacturing starts with saving the garment industry?
Rhino can actually “embroider”. We never expected that the first “crab” Alibaba would take when it entered the smart manufacturing industry would be the production of clothing?
In terms of management, Alibaba, which is accused of having no “industrial genes”, chose people from traditional industries to take charge of new businesses. Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing CEO Wu Xuegang was once Hu Zhijun, the former general manager of Uniqlo’s global supply chain and the director of the model factory built by Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing, has also been working in the garment industry for more than ten years.
Why did Alibaba choose to enter the apparel industry vertically? Wu Xuegang explained that the manufacturing industry has long links. To truly create value in the industry, you need to choose a vertical industry to deepen.
There are three reasons for starting from the clothing industry:
First, the clothing industry already has a sales volume of 3 trillion in China. It is one of the top three vertical industries in the consumer goods industry;
Secondly, the pain points of the clothing industry are deep enough. Due to the fashion attributes of clothing, the product life cycle is extremely short, and it is subject to Affected by many factors such as trends and weather, the traditional business model of production and sales has caused huge waste;
Thirdly, for Alibaba, the clothing category is the largest vertical sales Category, platform sales exceed one trillion, Alibaba has the opportunity to use the platform’s digital technology to gain consumer insights and help small and medium-sized merchants with accurate development and design.
In the opinion of industry insiders, in addition to the clothing category being Alibaba’s largest vertical sales category, from an industrial perspective, the clothing manufacturing industry has relatively low barriers to entry and is relatively simple. This is also one of the reasons.
Rhinoceros Intelligent Manufacturing Factory has grasped the business pain points of the following three groups of people, and its goal is to serve them well:
1. Small and medium-sized clothing merchants – The goal is to solve the “inventory difficulty” problem that has plagued the clothing industry for a long time. By predicting sales trends and quickly responding to market demand, brand owners do not need to produce a lot of goods in advance.
2. Fashionistas/Anchors/Designers/Entrepreneurs – These people are good at grasping fashion trends and have strong marketing capabilities and fan appeal, but the supply chain is For short orders, especially small orders under 1,000 pieces, it is difficult to find a high-quality factory to take orders. New manufacturing will allow designers to focus on design and marketing, and they will provide fast supply chain capabilities.
3. Small and medium-sized factories and workers – At present, most small and medium-sized factories in China are “family workshops” and are not highly digitalized. Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing will open up digital technology to improve the efficiency of small and medium-sized factories. . In the context of the relocation of manufacturing industries, enhance the competitiveness of China’s manufacturing industry. At the same time, the “Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory” also uses technology to lower the threshold of work, allowing workers to work more easily and engage in more creative work.
Rhino’s ultimate goal is to serve 100,000 fashion brands and 100,000 designers. In the future, Rhino will also be opened to the whole society to form an open, interoperable, inclusive, and win-win digital collaboration network (i-DCN) to help small and medium-sized factories achieve digital upgrades. Popularize cloud factories, create millions of new industrial workers, promote the digital transformation of industrial clusters, and lead the upgrading of China’s garment industry.
Enter Alibaba’s “Rhinoceros Intelligent Manufacturing” workshop
In In the Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory in Yuhang District, Hangzhou, a high-speed and precise robot is automatically sorting fabrics. It not only easily loads and delivers materials, but also handles them with ease. Robots have subverted the traditional clothing manufacturing industry, and the era of automatic sewing has quietly arrived.
▲Alibaba’s “Rhinoceros Intelligent Manufacturing Factory” robots automatically sort fabrics
In Rhinoceros Intelligent Manufacturing In the factory, workers’ task and work schedules are all digitalized.�Visualization;
In terms of “goods” (raw materials), in the Rhino factory, the Rhino intelligent central warehouse is like the “central kitchen” of the catering industry, enabling intelligent procurement and flexible supply. Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing, each piece of fabric has an ID, which enables full-link tracking, automatic inbound and outbound management, automatic distribution and intelligent picking. The resource utilization rate is 4 times higher than the industry average;
In terms of the “field” (factory), the “intelligent navigation “checkerboard hanging” similar to Hema’s hanging chain was invented. Through the Internet of Things + artificial intelligence technology, hanging hangers can be automatically assigned to the corresponding The idle workstations have changed the problem of one-way circulation and easy congestion in garment factories in the past.
▲The turntable hanging system in the Rhino factory
The workers on the production line are no longer like the female workers on the traditional clothing production line who are immersed in weaving. In the Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory, every worker has an iPad in front of him. Many operations can be completed on the screen. This is one of the reasons why Xunxi is called a “three-many” factory – many engineers, many iPads, and many young people.
Being “in tune” with small and medium-sized clothing brands
The “Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory”, which is under confidentiality, was quietly operating before it was announced, and some small and medium-sized businesses have already cooperated with the Rhino Factory during its confidential trial operation, and the experience was good.
This “rhinoceros” seems to be born with a “tacit understanding” of small and medium-sized clothing brands. They all have their own feelings about the rhino factory
Taobao live broadcast merchant Lieerbaby
Taobao live-streaming merchant “Lie’er Baby” had previously suffered from inventory problems.
Zeng Yangjian, product manager of Lieer Baby, said, “The live broadcast pre-sale model they adopt often sells out on the day of pre-sale, and they are often busy adding orders to replenish the goods. Waiting for a long time to return orders and returning goods inappropriately have caused inventory backlog.”
At the end of 2018, “Lie’er Baby” reached a cooperation with Rhino Factory. Relying on Alibaba’s “new manufacturing” flexible supply chain capabilities, Lieerbaby’s pre-sale cycle has been shortened by 60%, and the out-of-stock refund rate has dropped significantly.
Taobao store FANO
Taobao store FANO was founded by a couple It is an independent designer brand with segmented positioning, smaller audience coverage and fewer single orders, but has higher quality requirements. Previously, due to the size of the order, FANO’s products could only be processed by small factories in the industry, with insufficient quality and delivery stability.
Since September 2018, FANO’s new denim clothing every week is basically produced by the “Rhinoceros Factory”, and the minimum order is only 100 pieces. Although the order volume is small, the quality has not declined but has increased, achieving both stable delivery and quality under new scenarios every week. The return and refund rate has both decreased, and the overall GMV of denim category sales has increased by 5 times.
Taobao clothing brand Xiaochong
Founder of Taobao clothing brand Xiaochong Sister Renchong said: “Before cooperating with New Manufacturing, Xiaochong’s supply chain stability was insufficient: the overall delivery time of suppliers was long, and some suppliers experienced quality fluctuations in the process of rapid replenishment.” Xiaochong There are four main reasons for cooperating with Alibaba New Manufacturing: fast order return, no inventory pressure, lower quotation, and high stability.
Clothing brand Miancang
Miancang CEO Yao Kun said with emotion: “Rhinoceros Factory works with the mentality of promoting changes in the entire industry. It is also truly customer-centered and does everything possible to satisfy customers. Traditional factories focus on their own production capacity and schedule. This orientation is different. ”
Rhinoceros Factory drives the C2M concept stock sector
Rhinoceros Factory has an obvious new manufacturing style – small orders and seasonal styles , sold immediately and produced, the brands are very mixed. And its core is C2M.
C2M is the abbreviation of Customer to Manufacturer, that is, consumers go directly to the factory. This model emphasizes the connection between manufacturing and consumers, and can also be simply understood as a user-customized model.
C2M customization is actually not new. In the early days, Fanke, JD.com and even Pinduoduo all proposed this concept. However, it is more of a cooperation at the sales and marketing level, and does not really open up the backend data and customize it according to needs. The core capability of Rhino Factory is “customization on demand, minimum order of 100 pieces, delivery within 7 days at the fastest”.
A report from iResearch shows that in recent years, C2M will maintain a growth rate of more than 40%, and the scale of the C2M industry will reach the trillion level in 2022. As a new idea for development and a new tool for industrial upgrading, C2M undoubtedly has considerable room for imagination.
After the Rhinoceros factory was put into operation, the C2M concept stock sector performed actively. Judging from the performance data, the majority of textile and apparel stocks in the C2M sector were in the sector.
Previously, Jack Ma emphasized in a lecture at Hupan University, “If I start a business again now, I must not choose the Internet, but enter the traditional Industry.” Obviously, Rhino Factory is Ali’s in-depth exploration of traditional industries. We will wait and see for its future development! </p
