After waiting for a month, Wu Pengfei finally returned to his clothing stall in Sanhang, Guangzhou.
As the largest clothing wholesale place in China, Guangzhou used to include Shisanhang, Shahe, Baima, and Red Cotton and other wholesale business districts start operations around the Lantern Festival. Affected by the epidemic, the resumption of business was repeatedly delayed this year, and it was not until March 5 that we welcomed customers.
Although Thirteen Banks was one of the companies that resumed trading earlier, Wu Pengfei felt that it was still too late.
February to April after the Chinese New Year is the peak trading season for clothing wholesale. The delay in starting work and the significant reduction in foot traffic have reduced sales opportunities in the spring by one-third. Wu Pengfei’s hundreds of thousands of women’s equipment items may become unsaleable “packaged goods”. Failure to collect payment means that new products cannot be purchased. How to carry out summer sales is also a problem.
Wu Pengfei did not dare to continue to think about such a chain reaction. Right now, he and most merchants just want to strive for rent reduction or rent exemption, and this has become the biggest headache they encountered after the market opened.
The Shisanhang Commercial District is located in Liwan District, Guangzhou. It is located on both sides of the 400-meter-long Shisanhang Road, led by New China Building, Chengda Fashion Plaza and Hongbantian Building. , spread across dozens of shopping malls, large and small, with more than 6,000 merchants.
Among them, the New China Building is the most famous and largest, and the corresponding rent is also the highest. Wu Pengfei’s stall is located in the New China Building. He revealed that the monthly rent generally ranges from 60,000 to 300,000 yuan depending on the area.
At the beginning of the construction, New China Building did not announce some rent reduction and rent-free policies, but Wu Pengfei felt that the policies were generally relatively limited, and different floors had different standards. However, the policy is aimed at stall owners, and individual merchants are largely unable to enjoy it.
The so-called stall owner refers to the tenant. Zhong Dongying works at a shop consultation center in the 13th Bank. According to her introduction, most floors of the New China Building are leased to tenants according to five-year contracts. Since the first-hand tenants have a relatively long lease time, they often rent them out for profit, which resulted in Second-hand landlord. They will renovate it and divide it into densely packed stalls to rent to merchants.
“Some stalls are actually grid stores, the size of two bricks, less than 1 square meter, and the monthly rent is at least 60,000. The rent payment methods are different, compare The easy ones are to deposit two and pay one, and to deposit three and pay one, and I have also heard of paying half a year or one year,” Wu Pengfei said.
The rent reduction and rent-free policies cannot be enjoyed. After many discussions with the landlord to no avail, Wu Pengfei asked several familiar merchants, and the feedback was basically the same. He said, “Some said to see how other landlords handle it later, some said to consult with the shopping mall management office, and some did not reply to WeChat for a long time and did not answer calls.” Anxious merchants began to form WeChat groups to discuss rights protection measures. They have put forward demands for “free rent in February and halved rent in March and April.”
Until March 8, the New China Building WeChat official account pushed an announcement to all merchants with the message “In the current epidemic situation, abide by the law” and stated that it would assist merchants to return to normal operations. on track. Regarding the existence of second-hand subletting merchants, New China Building once again issued corresponding policies on March 17, saying that the preferential plan would be implemented to end merchants.
So far, Wu Pengfei has learned that some merchants have received partial rent refunds, while some still have no results in negotiations. “Because, there are not only second-hand landlords, but there may be third-hand landlords on some floors, who make the difference through layer upon layer of flipping. As long as any landlord does not reduce the rent, the merchants cannot expect to get a refund.”
In fact, in addition to high rents, the traditional clothing wholesale market has gradually become deserted. Not only Shisanhang, but also wholesale markets such as Shahe, Baima and Hongmian in Guangzhou, as well as Hanzheng Street in Wuhan, are no longer as good as before.
In the 1990s, clothing wholesale emerged. This industry was initially represented by street stalls and greenhouse operations. Slowly, merchants entered shopping malls, and it was gradually formalized under unified management. It ushered in prosperity after the millennium.
In its heyday, the Shisanhang Commercial District had a flow of hundreds of thousands of people, and thousands of tons of goods were shipped in and out every day, which were distributed to markets across the country through logistics. There is a saying in the clothing industry that “80% of China’s clothing comes from Guangdong, 80% of Guangdong’s clothing comes from Guangzhou, and 80% of Guangzhou’s clothing comes from the Thirteenth Industry.”
Wu Pengfei clearly felt that the wholesale market was going downhill at the end of 2014. After 10 years of development, e-commerce exploded rapidly at that time, and everyone started to go online.��Clothes. The most direct impact is on offline clothing stores.
“It is difficult to sell downstream goods, which ultimately affects our upstream wholesale market.” According to Wu Pengfei, e-commerce diverted at least more than one-third of the customer flow of the Thirteenth Line .
At the same time, the impact of the Internet has made wholesale market transaction prices open and transparent, causing wholesalers to lose profit margins.
The business model of these downstream wholesalers is mainly “speculating”. In the wholesale market, including the 13th Bank, some merchants usually do not have factory resources. They use “speculation” to buy goods from a lower-priced wholesaler and then resell them to the next wholesaler.
But e-commerce has cracked down on this way of making money. In the past, Taobao store owners would purchase goods from the wholesale market, but now they have bypassed wholesalers and placed orders directly with factories, causing the profits of Thirteenth Bank merchants to be squeezed again.
At the same time, the characteristics of the traditional wholesale market’s own model have also made its development difficult now.
Huang Xiaoqin, who works as a clothing buyer, said that in the early years, wholesale markets were generally located in core areas of cities or close to transportation hubs. For example, Liwan District, where Thirteenth Line is located, is the old city of Guangzhou and was once the core business district. Baima, Tianma, Liuhua Clothing Plaza, etc. are close to Guangzhou Railway Station and Bus Terminal. Land prices have generally risen over the years, and rents in core areas have risen even more sharply. Huang Xiaoqin described it as “selling clothes is not as good as speculating on shops.” The problem of homogeneity is also quite serious.
Huang Xiaoqin is familiar with the Shisanhang and Shahe markets. Their clothing is positioned at the mid- to low-end, and their styles are more homogeneous. There is a poor atmosphere of copycats and original designs.
For example, after a one-shoulder women’s top became a hit, manufacturers and merchants rushed to follow up. Merchants can only keep lowering prices to compete and engage in price wars. After the profit value of this hot item is almost squeezed, they turn to new hot items, which gradually becomes a vicious cycle.
Faced with difficulties, merchants have not considered transformation. The most direct path is to “get an electric shock”, but it is not easy. “If you do e-commerce, you will die, if you don’t do e-commerce, you will die” has become a saying they often say.
Wu Pengfei observed that there are several current situations of merchants in the Thirteenth Bank: although some merchants’ business is not as good as before, they are still lucky because they are not forced into a desperate situation; some merchants are trying to In the “dropshipping” business, in the past, the minimum batch size required for receiving goods from the 13th line was 5-10 pieces; other merchants were unable to make the transition.
If a merchant relies on live broadcasts such as Douyin to sell goods, the cost of turning the live broadcast account into an enterprise account is actually not small. First of all, you need to pay a part of the fee to the platform. During the live broadcast, you need to add product links, attract fans, increase traffic, and use advertising, etc. All of this also costs money, and the platform will also take a commission based on sales.
“Generally speaking, it is difficult to start live broadcasting without two to three years of initial preparation and investment. Some merchants did not persist and gave up midway.” Wu Pengfei said.
Compared with the transformation of Hangzhou Sijiqing Wholesale Market, the Thirteenth Bank still has not grasped the live broadcast dividend.
“If we talk about internet celebrities incubating and selling goods, the 13th Bank of China obviously cannot beat Hangzhou.” Huang Xiaoqin said, “Hangzhou’s internet celebrity economy has reached a large scale around 2017. You will find that many Internet celebrities whose names everyone knows are from Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai. If you don’t want to simply follow hot spots, but create hot spots, you need to rely on Internet celebrities, even if they are not top Internet celebrities, they must be waist celebrities.”
“And there are not many online wholesale markets in Guangzhou.” According to Huang Xiaoqin’s understanding, in Hangzhou, Sijiqing has created a series of online wholesale markets based on the original market. Offline online wholesale markets such as Siji Constellation, Sijiqing E-commerce Base, Jiubao New Sijiqing Market, etc. Driven by local policies, Internet celebrity incubation and live broadcasting, the ratio of Sijiqing’s offline wholesale business to online wholesale has become 4:6. In 2015, the ratio was 6:4.
Face the impact of the epidemic, Sijiqing also postponed the opening of the market. As soon as the market opened on March 10, more anchors and Stall clerks participated in the live broadcast and digested spring clothing inventory through online channels. Lin Yusheng, a merchant of Sijiqing, said in an interview with the media, “Last Saturday, Taobao Live held a special session for the anchors of the Sijiqing stall. I heard that at least 50 new anchors joined that day.”
As one of the recovery plans for the source of production, the Guangzhou Thirteen Banks Chamber of Commerce has also joined forces with the Alibaba 1688 platform to launch the “Thirteen Banks Live Broadcast Special” on March 28, claiming that there is zero threshold for the platform to go online, allowing merchants to do business without opening an online store. The exhibition hall can be moved online. According to Alibaba’s data, since February, the number of merchants participating in the “Business + Live Broadcast” on Alibaba’s 1688 platform has increased by 87% during the same period.
However, these are still only in the experimental stage. For individual merchants like Wu Pengfei, what they most want to see is that the business recovers as before, and then they think about the direction of transformation.
In the Qing Dynasty, Guangzhou was the only trading port, and the Thirteenth Bank was famous overseas as a “foreign goods store”, attracting people from all over the world to do business here. A hundred years later, Thirteen Lines has become an important part of China’s clothing wholesale market, but its development has been confused so far. The future direction of Thirteen Lines has become a matter of concern to everyone.
“Will it be relocated to surrounding cities like Beijing’s approval, or will it be renovated and upgraded to get Internet tickets? These are all unknown.” Wu Pengfei is still thinking about that number Hundreds of thousands of wholesalers with different accents shuttle here, belonging to the golden age of the Thirteenth Industry.
�”The number of merchants settled in increased by 87% during the same period.
However, these are still only in the experimental stage. For individual merchants like Wu Pengfei, what they most want to see is business. Recover as before, and then think about the direction of transformation.
In the Qing Dynasty, Guangzhou was the only trading port, and the Thirteenth Bank was famous overseas as a “foreign goods store”, attracting people from all over the world. This business. A hundred years later, Thirteen Banks has become an important part of China’s clothing wholesale market, but its development has been confused so far. The future direction of Thirteen Banks has become a matter of concern to everyone.
“Will it be relocated to surrounding cities like Beijing’s approval process, or will it be renovated and upgraded to get Internet tickets? These are all unknowns. “Wu Pengfei is still nostalgic for the golden age of the Thirteenth Industry when hundreds of thousands of wholesalers with different accents shuttled here.</p
