Clothing Brand GU Enters China To Borrow Alliance UNIQLO To Enhance Product Visibility.

At the beginning of the year, Japan is fast.

GU opens second stores in China, located in Shanghai's Golden Green Court Square, with an area of about 1000 square meters.

This is another move by GU, another brand of fast selling group, to accelerate the layout of overseas markets after UNIQLO.

The fashion principle of parity

In the past two years, in the retail environment of the global economic downturn, several fast fashion groups have shown signs of slowing sales, especially in the European market.

While the UK's cheap brand Primark has maintained a double-digit growth rate, it has even surpassed ZARA in the Spanish market.

For a time, all the fast fashion groups speeded up their cheap brands almost at the same time.

GU has been established for 8 years, with a total revenue of 100 billion yen.

Today, GU has 300 stores in the world, two of which are located in China and two in Taipei, China.

Compared with UNIQLO, GU pricing is cheaper than three to 40%, but it is more fashionable.

GU's first store was born in Chiba, Japan in 2006.

At the beginning of its opening, it established the principle of parity and fashion. However, what really made it a hit was the "990 yen jeans" launched in 2009.

At that time, in the impression of the Japanese, jeans and jeans were more expensive and expensive. GU began to think about how to make customers buy a pair of jeans at a low price.

Usually, the prices of Japanese goods are calculated according to the figure of 1000 yuan or 10000 yuan, and the commodity of "990 yen" can be seen immediately.

Based on this price advantage, GU jeans are placed in the most prominent location of the store entrance to attract customers into the store.

Less exaggerated fashion

When interviewed by fashion designer Zhang Chan, the reporter said that although UNIQLO had many consumers in China, she observed that middle-aged consumers were the majority.

As we all know, UNIQLO is characterized by the sale of basic clothing, and also has a low evaluation on the comfort of clothing.

However, its fashion has never been valued by young consumers. Young consumers rarely find their bright designs there.

This has made UNIQLO lose its fashionable consumer group, and the emergence of GU just fills this shortcoming.

Its development was very fast. It took only 6 years to reach 50 billion yen, but it took 12 years for UNIQLO to achieve this achievement.

Zhang Chan also told reporters that the popularity of GU's cheap fashion brands is also based on the increasingly tight economic development. The economic downturn has made consumers more rational. This is also the root cause of the rapid development of parity fashion brands.

The way of spending money that had been wasted was gradually replaced by rational consumption.

It is fashionable to wear and not to spend too much, making more and more consumers try.

Fast fashion products like GU.

Zhang Chan also described the fashion described by GU as a "not too exaggerated fashion". It has both fashion design and outstanding highlights, but it is not overly exaggerated. It is both fashionable and elegant.

At the same time, the Japanese brand "sweet", "lovely" design elements into the clothing.

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Promoting popularity with UNIQLO

The main customers of GU are young women.

In Japan, the GU consumption group is concentrated at twenty or thirty years old, and college students or young "spicy mothers" are the mainstream consumer groups.

The head of China has found that GU has more young customers in China than in Japan, and most of the young people are mainly "post-90s".

For female customers, GU also used a series of Japanese idols as spokesmen, such as AKB48's Atsuko Maeda, Carly weird girl, and now the international model Rola.

At this stage, GU's reputation in China is still not high.

After all, it is the first year to enter the Chinese market, so operation, commodity planning and so on do not necessarily meet customer expectations.

There may be errors in the prediction of color, size, or quantity, which are also some of the problems of GU.

But the advantage of GU is that it belongs to a group with UNIQLO, and the operation process and data system can be used directly.

GU can also learn from the failure experience of UNIQLO in its overseas expansion.

At the same time, it can help GU build its brand by using UNIQLO's recognition and credit.

Today, it also launches mobile members' activities in shops to enhance customer stickiness.

Now, more and more people know this brand.

At present, GU has taken different store opening strategies in two shops in China.

One is in a building with UNIQLO, the other is a private shop.

Together with UNIQLO, you can see the difference between GU and UNIQLO.

From the perspective of future development, GU hopes to make use of the popularity of UNIQLO as possible, but it can hardly find such a large place in the same store from the reality.

High hopes for China's market

However, according to reporters, xungang group has high hopes for GU.

It has become another pillar of the group's development of global overseas undertakings, especially in China and Southeast Asia.

The development of German sports leisure brand ESPRIT, which is similar to the target group, is quite different in China.

Zhang Chan told reporters that although ESPRIT started early in China, it was once proud of its achievements. However, because of the ESPRIT's operation, it seems that China only regards China as a dispensable market rather than a battleground.

ESPRIT's success in the Chinese market has made it increasingly complacent. From designers to management, they lack the necessary understanding of the Chinese market and Chinese consumers.

In the past 10 years, ESPRIT, which lacked competitors, made a big profit in the Chinese market, but the crisis is also increasing.

along with

ZARA, UNIQLO and other fast fashion brands have become famous in the Chinese market, and the internal problems of ESPRIT are also exposed.

Zhang Chan said that designing enterprises should walk into customers, enter the line and enter the market, so that they are not far from success.

The success of H&M, UNIQLO and other brands is mainly due to the accurate positioning of target consumers, the keen discovery and quick response to customer needs.

On the contrary, if we ignore the changes in the market and remain indifferent to the needs of customers, we will eventually be eliminated by the market.