Are Chinese Real Buyers Deep?

If someone asks you what your occupation is, you only need to answer "I am". Buyer There is no need for additional notes to add that China has a real buyer. 。

Not long ago, an entrepreneur asked me a series of questions: should my company set up a buyer? What kind of people should be trained to be a buyer? How much room should the buyer buy in the company? As buyers and buyers are increasingly concerned by people in and outside the industry, entrepreneurs are starting to rush to the topic of "buyers". For a time, it seems to be a new popular topic.

In fact, the buyer has always been around us - the buyers in the department stores and the owners of small clothing stores in the early years. But strictly speaking, they are not real buyers. What is a buyer? A buyer is a professional term. It represents a special identity. We use the most popular language to define the concept of a buyer: a buyer is the person at the most appropriate time, in the most appropriate place, to provide the most suitable product to the consumer. It can be said that the buyer is the transition in the industrial chain, and is the intermediary between design and sales, brand and consumer. Good buyers can not only affect downstream consumers' preferences for product styles and actual buying behaviors, but may even reverse the brand's products and ideas.

A buyer is a subdivision of business born in the retail industry at a certain stage. Buyer At least has gone through half a century of development, has already been a very mature occupation. Generally speaking, as a link between design and sales, buyers mainly change from design or sales. About 70% of buyers in mature markets come from design or fashion related specialties, and about 30% come from sales. Mature brand buyers like ZARA and GAP are mostly transformed by designers.

And in China, the designer Career development All of them are not mature enough, professional designers are relatively scarce, and they are able to make further changes to buyers. Therefore, the prototype of domestic buyers mostly comes from salesmen. Most of the local garment enterprises rely on the franchise mode to do a great job in the scale of enterprises. After the first generation of agents were born, although no one directly called them buyers, they still had a big gap in terms of professionalism, but their duties were similar to those of buyers. However, their choices are mostly confined to a certain brand range, so they are more like a small wholesaler.

These agents usually do not learn the buyers as a profession, nor do the people who undertake the work of the buyers are not fixed. Some agencies choose their own goods to assume the responsibility of the buyers, others take the experienced retail store manager to pick the goods, and then find a friend who looks more sensible to help. Therefore, their overall quality is self-evident.

Since the reform and opening up, the development of local garment enterprises has been thrived, especially in the past ten years, with the help of the upgrading of China's consumer market. Clothing enterprise The scale is expanding, but why is there no real buyer in China? We can easily understand it from the upper and lower reaches of buyers and the environment of Chinese buyers.

First of all, in the downstream retail enterprises, there are few special "buyer" posts. If you introduce yourself as a buyer when negotiating with the upstream product providers, it may be difficult for the other side to understand. Buyers are not a common profession in the industry. Only when the "buyer" is often talked about as a concept or topic, but as a real post, reflected in the organizational structure of the enterprise, it means that this job is maturing and the role of this position can really be played out.

From another angle, the buyer is actually an indicator. Its quantity and maturity will affect the maturity and foresight of China's fashion week or fashion release. But in the moment, companies do not pay much attention to the position of buyer. {page_break}

For example, in some domestic brand launches, even the top brands in China, the first row is the industry leaders, fashion media, competitors, and some college students in clothing colleges. When I see this situation, I sometimes can't help asking the owners of these brand enterprises, who are you going to see for your conference? I even jokingly suggest that they can hold two conferences, one is for the industry leaders to see, and the other is a special press conference. The audience should be those who will affect your brand taste. The people in the real fashion circle include some buyers and new consumers.

Now, such brands as Louis Weedon and Chanel, which have centuries old heritage, will invite some very young and unusual people to be the audience of the conference in order to integrate with the young people in the international market. This shows that a show represents the evolution of fashion civilization and the improvement of the industrial environment, which are the basis for the survival of buyers. At the same time, in turn, buyers are also the symbol of the evolution of fashion, and the improvement of the industrial environment depends on the change of enterprise consciousness and action.

With the change of external environment and the growth of enterprises, some Chinese brands have begun to pay more and more attention to interacting with their most popular buyers, agents: in the past, two orders have been turned into four seasons, six seasons or eight seasons. Before ordering the fair, some important agents are invited to select products and put forward opinions and evaluations to determine the quantity of production, or to revise them again. Although the proportion of interaction is not large, it has begun to show signs. Domestic brands, such as song Li Si, Ou Shi Li and BELLE, will interact with agents (BELLE's recall after BELLE's dealership) in a variety of ways before the large-scale listing of products, so as to ensure that products can be more acceptable to consumers.

Secondly, from the growth environment of buyers themselves, there is still a lack of professional training environment in China, and there are specialized buying courses abroad. Textile, fashion trends, data and financial management need to know all the contents of these buyers. By learning these buying courses, we will understand that this is a professional duty with special requirements, rather than a fictitious and vague form of address.

A few years ago, when I was invited to a lecture at the clothing Institute, I found out that when they interact with the young college students, they are very strange to the brands which are more concerned internationally. The knowledge system is limited to several top international designers. This kind of education which is out of touch with reality is worrying. China needs too much education in the fashion industry.

Finally, from the perspective of consumer demand, China has been a farming nation since ancient times, paying attention to the "circle culture". People in the same circle should have the same language, so that everyone should be unified as far as possible in the costumes, and do not encourage heterogeneous groups. I often see the same box in overseas, wearing the same Burberry lattice T-shirt, the Chinese with the same windbreaker, and carrying a Luis Weedon bag on the outside. It looks like a tour group very much. It is found that it is the boss of Wenzhou. Such clothing culture completely contradicts the individualized and differentiated services provided by buyers.

Therefore, the above factors can explain why China has no buyers. With the maturity of consumers and the upgrading of consumption environment, more and more consumers begin to have their own opinions and opinions. The market demand for buyers is becoming more and more urgent. So in general, the profession of buyer will become more and more mature, and its specialization and professionalism will become more prominent. If someone asks you what your job is, you only need to answer "I am a buyer" without additional notes, and China has a real buyer.