JNBY's Li Lin: Artsy? Maybe | Founders Speak

As long as Li Lin is in charge, JNBY and its sister brands will struggle to become mass-market names. That may not be a bad thing.

Three years ago, Li Lin took money from an investment fund. She was told the fund invested because JNBY's clothes are so easy to recognize.

In 1994, Li Lin, a chemistry graduate of Zhejiang University, founded the women's wear brand "Jiangnan Buyi" in Hangzhou. Its clothes used a great deal of cotton and linen and celebrated nature. Seven years later, "Jiangnan Buyi" shrank to the four initials JNBY. Today the brand has about 600 stores across China and nearly 1 million members.

The fund wanted to know how many people could recognize the brand. Its staff went to a shopping mall and bought several dozen garments from a few women's wear stores on the same floor. Then they recruited a group of shoppers in the mall and asked them to match the clothes to brands with the labels hidden.

Almost nobody got a JNBY garment wrong.

"That's exactly what they invested in," Li Lin said. In early November, JNBY had just opened a new store in Seattle. Yet a week later, sitting in a resort hotel in western Hangzhou, Li Lin showed little interest in talking about new markets. Instead she passed on the fund's verdict on how recognizable JNBY is.

JNBY Spring/Summer 2015 pieces

Zheng Minjie, brand manager at Jiangnan Buyi, thinks this recognition cuts both ways. The fixed impression gives JNBY a certain character, he said, "but it has also created limits."

Not least because people can't always say what that character is. You can find almost any description of JNBY. On Zhihu, a user called "Baomihua Jun" ("Mr. Popcorn") cited JNBY in a review of Chinese-style fashion, describing it as plain-colored and flowing, with straight lines. Yet he also said JNBY "looks just like CELINE, RICK OWENS and Yohji Yamamoto rolled into one."

Oddly enough, those brands can also stand for bourgeois-bohemian, goth, "forest girl" or deconstructivist style. JNBY is also fairly popular in Japan, and in the past it has been stocked at the British department store Selfridges and at Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

Anyone can say a few words about JNBY. Ask Li Lin, and she will say: "Artsy? I think that's possible."

When the Canadian magazine Yishu did an interview in Beijing, Li Lin, who loves art, eagerly went along as their audio assistant. In many artists' studios and galleries, she found JNBY customers.

That is a little far from most people. Niche.

Zheng Minjie said that compared with its competitors ZUCZUG and Mo&Co, JNBY did have this problem before 2013. The group's menswear brand CROQUIS had it even worse. From ten meters away, shoppers might decide that "a store decorated like this is probably not for me." Around 2012, Zheng Minjie's brand department reworked the look of CROQUIS stores to make them more approachable.

CROQUIS, the menswear brand of the Jiangnan Buyi Group

"But on the other hand, we don't want to give an impression that everyone thinks is OK, a very mass-market impression," Zheng Minjie said.

As long as Li Lin is in charge, JNBY and the group's other brands will struggle to become mass-market names. (This, too, cuts both ways.)

Their clothes have a distinct style, and they are not cheap. The company has always stressed a principle of "good things needn't be expensive," but prices are still creeping up, because Li Lin is doing what the designer brand Uma Wang does: spending more on fabrics. Uma Wang is a designer brand Li Lin has publicly praised. "What Uma makes makes me envious," she said. "It's very good, very personal."

Li Lin can't be that personal; she has to keep the brand moving forward. Zheng Minjie remembers that some distributors once wanted to reorder old best-sellers, and Li Lin blocked the orders. She would rather put drop-crotch trousers on the rails before they become fashionable.

For two or three years after 2011, JNBY almost stopped opening stores. Li Lin said she does not plan to expand into third-tier cities (Zhejiang Province is the exception), and in a first-tier market like Beijing, 30 stores are already plenty; the best single store there takes in tens of millions of yuan a year.

The full story is more complicated. In 2011, Chinese apparel brands across the board ran into trouble. Economic instability squeezed people's spending power, and foreign brands arriving in China took a share of the market. JNBY needed time to catch its breath and adjust, Zheng Minjie said. Only this year did it speed up and restart its store-opening plan, mainly in inland second-tier cities such as Xi'an and Chongqing.

Before that, Li Lin led a makeover of the JNBY brand.

It was not the first. In 2001, Li Lin remade the brand, steering it away from its original "lying on a haystack" forest-girl look toward clothes for everyday city wear. She had just ended six years of working alone, doing everything herself, from finding materials to finishing each garment. That same year, the brand took the English name JNBY. "Jiangnan Buyi" later became the name of the group.

In the current makeover, JNBY is getting younger. Li Lin does not stress this, but Zheng Minjie said that its products used to lean toward the older half of its 25-35 target age range, while now the company pays more attention to customers aged 25-30. To that end, JNBY has begun to use fabrics other than cotton and linen more boldly.

JNBY Spring/Summer 2015 pieces

Zhang Jiayin, founder of Shanghai Express, shot a series of street-style photos of JNBY customers

Li Lin said that since more young designers joined the team, 15% of the 600 pieces in each season have younger, bolder designs. "Sometimes I try not to impose my own eye on the team. I keep thinking I'm already 45. In theory, I'm no longer our target customer." She did not seem to be joking.

Three years ago, the 45-year-old founder brought fund money into the company, began learning more rigorous management, and now plans an IPO in Hong Kong next year. But first she settled some basic points with the fund, including JNBY's design style and the number of stores, so that the brand would not become too commercial. Future store growth may come mostly from the children's wear brand jnby by JNBY, a new market that is doing well.

"It's a tug-of-war," Li Lin said. She said she took outside capital at that point only because she wanted to give the company an "imaginative" office building. For it she hired Renzo Piano, a designer of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and that takes money. Li Lin personally visited Piano's buildings, the work of dozens of his studios around the world, which astonished even Piano. He said in an interview that this is why he took on his first architectural project in China.

In 2013, when JNBY showed its Spring/Summer 2014 collection at Toronto Fashion Week and Tokyo Fashion Week, it had already added "whimsy" to "nature" in describing the brand. Li Lin is more passionate about art now than when she founded the brand. She has spent heavily to build a large art collection and spends more time with artists. The Jiangnan Buyi Art Center is currently sponsoring a young artists' project called Imagokinetics Lab.

Imagokinetics Lab is funding a young artists' project

Asked what makes a brand succeed, Li Lin pointed to galleries. Gagosian's commercial success, she said, shows that if you hold firmly enough to your taste, "capital won't destroy you." But she clearly prefers small galleries, the ones that discover artists when they are young and keep working with them after they become stars.

Zheng Minjie said this has shaped how Jiangnan Buyi's brand department works. It has begun to move more events into stores and to invite artists to take part. In September, JNBY opened a concept store at Guanshe in Beijing. The artist Xu Qu designed the whole store, which ended up looking like several tennis courts stitched together. The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) also took part in the project.

Over the past two years, the media outlet JNBY has worked with most is VICE.

In 2013, VICE and JNBY launched a photography project called "Travel." Young photographers from 10 countries photographed young people wearing JNBY, among them drummers, stylists and fashion influencers.

VICE is young and fun enough, but it is also niche enough. One slip, and it could cost JNBY even more customers.

When the brand worked with VICE again in 2015, one employee in the brand department said he was a little worried. This time the collaboration moved into the stores: VICE invited "pretty interesting" young influencers to redo the shop windows. VICE said the windows would "make you stop dead in the street (or give you a fright)."

JNBY X VICE's 2013 photography project "Travel": in Tokyo, the photographer shot Sayo Akasaka

JNBY X VICE 2015: a window display Banni Food Lab redid for a JNBY store

Nobody knows whether this will backfire.

But at least the staff remembered what Li Lin told them. This "not authoritarian" founder's instruction is: "If you put on an event, you have to find it interesting yourself. Otherwise, don't bother."

What else Li Lin said

(Below, Q = QDaily, L = Li Lin)

Q: How did JNBY do in the Singles' Day sale that just ended?

L: We take part on Tmall too. For one thing, I feel people's shopping habits are changing, along with how they shop. But in my view, selling clothes on Tmall is not a particularly healthy situation for the people who make them. Everyone dumps years of old inventory there. So we haven't made it a priority, but we don't avoid it entirely either. For us, Singles' Day loses money on profit, but it does bring cash back in.

Q: Jiangnan Buyi now has four clothing brands. Which is the most important?

L: None is more important than the others. My philosophy inside the company is that when we are nurturing a new brand, it has freedom while it grows up. But if a brand can't support itself, we can't incubate another one. Once it can support itself and stand on its own, we can nurture a new one. For example, I can now start the furniture brand Beilunji ("Paradox Collection").

Q: Where does the women's line, JNBY, sell best?

L: Women's wear sells best in Beijing. The second-best city in the country may not even reach half of Beijing. So JNBY actually sells best in big cities, and it certainly has more stores there than in third- and fourth-tier cities. Because the company is in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province as a whole is special; our coverage there is especially good. But looking at the whole country, big cities definitely have more. In women's wear alone, Beijing has at least 20, Shanghai at least 15, and Hangzhou a dozen or so. Nationwide there are 600 women's wear stores.

Q: By those numbers, second- and third-tier cities seem to have more stores.

L: For me, Beijing already has too many. We went into Beijing and Shanghai very early, as soon as we started building a national market, and we have never cut back on stores in first-tier cities. It's just that, to me, we don't do branding as deliberately as others do. I just think that if a brand can survive healthily in a place, then open there. If it can survive in Tokyo, that means it suits that city; if it can survive in a third-tier city, then it can.

Q: Which brands do you compare yourselves with?

L: We never compare, and I don't know them. The only one I know is Uma Wang. I'm not comparing myself with her, but she's the only one I know about. Her brand is positioned completely differently from mine. But what Uma makes makes me envious. It's very good, very personal.

Q: For stores in malls, do you care which brands are next door?

L: I don't go to malls in China. When others go on store visits, I'm too embarrassed to go. I haven't been to most of our stores. I'm the ostrich type. Someone at our company cares which brand is next door, so I don't have to.

Q: How many people does the company employ now?

L: Six or seven hundred. By brand, women's wear has the most, mostly in sales.

Q: The brand went international almost ten years ago. Are the products the same in every market?

L: The same everywhere. That's also why we ran the New York market for two and a half years and then shut it down. I think we should have adjusted the fit. If you don't adjust the fit to the market, the American market is a struggle. American body sizes vary enormously, from size 0 to size 16. We used to sell very well on the American shopping site Nordstrom, but when I looked at the back-end data I found that the hottest styles had the most returns. Customers hadn't bought much from our physical stores, they didn't know us, so the return rate stayed very high.

Q: Which boutiques abroad stock you?

L: Boutiques in Japan stock us. Our client has a showroom at every Tokyo Fashion Week, and orders do come in. With Galeries Lafayette in Paris we worked for four or five years in all. At the British department store Selfridges we stopped after two years, because we had no people of our own there. Every year at the ordering fair, the buyers would come and place orders. But we didn't have much experience in how to coordinate in between. I went to see for myself: they had no one assigned to us, and we had no one locally to support them. Once it sold out, it sold out. It was left to sink or swim.

Q: What do you think is the best model for overseas markets?

L: The easiest is still having a local agent. But if you want the brand to grow strongly, in a market like the United States you have to do it yourself. You have to set up a local company and find very capable people. I remember Uniqlo was the same: it went to the US to open stores and then pulled back.

Q: I hear JNBY sells very well in Japan.

L: Not that well, but it is our number one market overseas.

Q: How does it compare with Beijing?

L: Beijing's sales will beat Japan's. Some single stores there do tens of millions of yuan a year. We went into Japan because our partner's father ran a clothing company that already had quite a few brands, and he wanted a younger one, so he found us. But in Japan JNBY's customers are older than in China. It may have to do with the sales channel: in Japan, the department store we're in is Takashimaya.

Q: Could it be that JNBY's customers are simply older to begin with?

L: I don't think so. Most are still young customers, mostly within the 20-35 range. Girls in that range love to dress up and love to shop.

Q: Does that mean competition is fiercest in that age group?

L: If you ask me about the market, I know nothing about it. I've never paid attention. For me, I don't even think about where the focus should be. I'm a very passive person. Wherever something grows and catches on, I'm happy. There's no particular spot I have to fight for.

Q: In the brand's 21 years, when was the most exhausting time?

L: The year before last was pretty tiring, because of the office building project. For a whole year I had to discuss designs with the Italian architect Renzo Piano. I didn't know that industry and I'm rather picky, so it was trip after trip. As we went along, costs ran far over.

Q: Why spend the time, energy and money on an office building?

L: Since it started, the company has moved ten times, almost always because it had to: either the site was being demolished or we'd run out of space. In 2007, when I was in Canada, we had just moved into our current office building, and the government said it could give us a plot of land to put up a building. The current building seemed big enough then, but it's especially ugly, an office building with no imagination. When the chance came, I thought, let's give it a try. I'm also an architecture enthusiast myself.

Q: Does the Jiangnan Buyi Group have a clear business plan?

L: I didn't use to think about these questions. I remember very clearly that when CROQUIS first started, I told the design team: I'll give you three years, the design is completely free, but after three years, make it as mature as you can. Because that team had all come from women's wear, some details were too fussy by men's standards, leaning feminine. But that was the time I had given them, so I set them no sales targets. CROQUIS probably broke even in its fifth or sixth year.

Q: Five or six years is about how long a designer brand takes to break even.

L: CROQUIS really did take that long. When we first launched it, we threw a party at the Zhongbei store in Hangzhou. A friend in the industry walked in and asked me why I would make menswear like this. He said that if he made menswear, he would tidy my stuff up a bit commercially and it would be a hit right away. I understood what he meant, but to go straight into making something like that didn't seem interesting to me. My feeling is that very commercial things do bring some brands huge success in a short time, but they don't attract me.

Q: Do you have no ambitions for JNBY? How big you want it to be, or whether it should become some kind of international brand?

L: I haven't thought in that direction. My team and I are quite happy when people say your clothes are good in quality and design, and the price is bearable too. That gives us a sense of achievement. I think differently from many people. I've never wanted to make very, very expensive clothes... Although we have raised prices a little over the past few years, every bit of the increase has gone into better raw materials. Of course we want the materials to keep getting better, because good materials make clothes last and wear well. Within what our system can bear, we keep using better materials, step by step. That's the effort we're making. In other areas, like the brand department: if you put on an event, people have to find it interesting. Otherwise, don't bother.

Q: But the sales and marketing departments get their sense of achievement from numbers.

L: That's why our company is still alive today. If everything were done my way... I'm only saying that I do what I can to exert my influence in the company. But because we now also have a fund on board, there are the fund's demands too.

Q: Why bring in fund investment at that point?

L: We brought in the fund in the summer of 2012. We had decided on the building project and needed to buy land, so we needed investment. But from the start I told them there are some things we have to stick to. In fact, it's a tug-of-war. Take the big international galleries, like Gagosian: they couldn't be more commercially successful. The artists it signs are top-tier, and its shows are of a high standard. When you have enough confidence to stand up to capital, what capital brings you may be a different kind of wings. It's hard to say.

Q: Do you want to be the Gagosian of clothing brands?

L: No, no, no... What I mean is that if you hold firmly enough, capital won't destroy you. I'm only saying that it's run very successfully. It has so many galleries around the world and so many artists on its books, and not just anyone could handle that.

Q: What kind of gallery do you prefer?

L: I prefer galleries that discover artists when they're young, grow with them, and keep working with them once they become superstars. The West has quite a few like that.

Q: Since the fund came in, do you weigh decisions differently than before?

L: I think so. The biggest difference is that the fund asks for much more rigorous management. I've never worked at a big company; I started on my own when I was very young, and many departments were built from nothing: it seemed we needed a department, so we put one or two people in and slowly it grew. There was an organizational structure, but no rigorous management. One big change, for example, is that they require budgets to be allocated, and the same for sales: roughly which new stores will open next year, and roughly what the figures will be.

Q: Does the fund make suggestions on how many stores to open?

L: That's not a problem. On the things I care about, I'm quite firm when I talk with them. Take opening stores: in a city like Beijing, as I see it, I don't want the number to grow much more. In principle, when a good site comes up, I'd rather close a weaker location. The total stays about the same, but the locations and sizes change, and the stores look a bit better.

Q: And on design style? Will they ask for something more mass-market?

L: They don't interfere much with the clothing design either. Funds usually think that what sells is what looks good. They told me that before investing in us, they ran an experiment. They went to the floor of the mall where we have a store, bought several dozen garments, and had people sort them, telling them the brand names. Only our products could all be picked out with the labels hidden. When clothes from many brands were mixed together, shoppers couldn't pick them out. That's exactly what they invested in. Our clothes are very recognizable.

Q: Do you have new ideas of your own about the women's wear style?

L: Sometimes I try not to impose my own eye on the team. I keep thinking I'm already 45. In theory, I'm no longer our target customer. But some things are fine. For example, I like the materials to be a bit better, and I still discuss those with them. But our brand still targets a younger group, and the team has young women born in the 1980s and 1990s. Some things I look at and say I don't like, but often they insist. Sometimes it goes several rounds. If they insist hard enough, sometimes I go along with them.

Q: What do you make of outsiders' opinions of JNBY's style?

L: I don't think outside opinions of our style matter. And something everyone says is good is rather suspect.

Q: But you must want to convey some kind of character. What is it?

L: ...I haven't thought about it carefully. I once thought about getting a little girl, a woman and an old lady to shoot a big campaign, with the line: women who love nature have no age. I think it's natural that people who love nature are our customers, say someone who loves gardening. But are people who don't love gardening not our customers? That isn't right either. So I don't much like making those definitions.

Q: Do you feel the artsy style is less popular in recent years than it used to be?

L: Our brand has never been the most fashionable. But if you say we're artsy, I think that's possible. The last time I went to Beijing, the Canadian magazine Yishu was doing an interview there, and I helped them as an audio assistant, so I followed them around to many artists' studios and galleries. I found that many people in those fields are our customers.

Q: Are the collaborations with street-style photographers and with VICE over the past two years meant to convey a particularly young feel?

L: The chief menswear designer was born in 1977, and all the designers under him are younger. The women's wear designers were mostly born after 1985 or in the 1990s. In fact a brand's age depends on many factors, and for a brand that has reached a certain size, the impression it gives often has to do with price too. For example, a 20-year-old girl who wants to buy our clothes needs her parents to pay. Designer brands are more expensive, but their customer base is only so big. Our brand reaches a much larger group.

Q: Are these young designers bolder in their designs?

L: Our collection is very large, with more than 300 women's pieces a season. Within that 15%, they can be very bold.

Q: Have sales kept rising in recent years?

L: Women's wear hasn't changed much. There's some growth, but not as fast as before 2011. I don't know whether the whole market is like this. For us, it's because the number of stores hasn't grown since 2011. Sometimes opening more stores drives up costs a lot without being very efficient. Quite early on I said women's wear should adjust, upgrade its stores, and not open so many. But the new children's wear brand has grown very fast. Menswear is normal.

Q: Do you have plans to go public?

L: Probably an IPO in Hong Kong in the second half of next year. Originally I didn't plan to go public. But because we have the fund's investment, you know, a fund's money always has to be earned back on the capital markets.

Q: Will that make your brand positioning clearer?

L: That's something the brand department is still tearing its hair out over, but our core creative team has no interest in it.

Q: But after that, investors will care a lot about store expansion.

L: Our group has other brands that still have room to grow. CROQUIS has been around for 10 years and has only just over 100 stores, and the children's wear brand jnby by JNBY also has just over 100. Children's wear sales are very good.

Q: How do you plan to run the furniture brand Beilunji?

L: For now we'll open a shop on Taobao, and we may also build a showroom store for Beilunji. The designer is my younger brother, Li Ming. He studied architecture in France and has designed stores for us. He's a philosopher who likes to work as a carpenter, and he thinks about the market and about what the public wants even less than I do.