Who's Buying MO&Co.?

Beyond the cotton-linen and Japanese-Korean styles that fill Chinese stores, this company has found a market of its own.

In late July, MO&Co.'s parent company — which started more than 20 years ago as a bricks-and-mortar cosmetics chain — threw a lavish launch event at Beijing's 751 D-Park. It announced that it would bring its four brands under one roof as the "EPO Fashion Group," and that it would move into Hong Kong in full in the second half of the year.

The parent company's full name is Guangzhou Aibai Apparel Co., Ltd. Its founder, Jin Ni, is married to Cai Ruqing, who also chairs Jiaolan Jiaren Group, China's largest cosmetics retail chain, with more than 2,000 outlets.

The portfolio now holds MO&Co., a mid-range women's wear label founded in 2004; Edition 10, MO&Co.'s upscale sister brand launched in 2010; and REC, a cosmetics line that appeared this past April as the "official designated" makeup brand of Shanghai Fashion Week. Only one brand was unveiled for the first time that day: a children's-wear line, Little MO&Co.

The golden years for China's own apparel industry were 2005-2006 and 2009-2010, when the sector grew about 20% a year.

Aibai started in Guangzhou. In the first half of this year, combined sales for MO&Co. and Edition 10 grew 40%, up 15% year-on-year, and profit grew 54%. MO&Co. has 577 stores across Greater China, plus 8 directly operated stores and 36 wholesale clients in cities such as Paris and London, with annual sales of 2.4 billion yuan. Edition 10 has 90 stores across Greater China, and 5 directly operated stores and 25 wholesale clients in Europe, with annual sales of 300 million yuan.

Jin Ni and Cai Ruqing said that by the end of 2020, Aibai would reach 80 countries and regions, with total revenue of 11.9 billion yuan. "We're not considering an IPO," Jin Ni told QDaily.

A MO&Co. garment costs 1,500 yuan on average; an Edition 10 piece, 2,100 yuan. Stores and online channels discount often. Against the cotton-and-linen designs that dominate in China, MO&Co. and Edition 10 fill a gap. MO&Co. is aimed at women aged 20 to 35, "cool and fun"; Edition 10 at fashionable "gentlewomen" aged 25 to 40, with a "clean cut" look.

Marie, who once worked in fashion and earns around 100,000 yuan a year, finds Edition 10 "a bit pricey."

She saw the show too, but she had been buying Edition 10 before that: "It's fairly high fashion. Next to places like I.T., the quality and design are pretty good, and the price is reasonable. It suits office ladies — a bit more fashionable, not so rigid. Just very Western, simple."

Many such customers gather in the "MO Circle," communities on the brand's app, WeChat and Weibo. Jin Ni sizes them up this way: "They're pretty cool, not overly feminine, they have an international outlook, and quite a few studied abroad."

More and more labels are chasing this group. Take Maje and Sandro, the two French brands Shandong Ruyi Group bought recently: they caught on in China thanks to Jun Ji-hyun in My Love from the Star and to celebrities like Yang Mi and Tang Yan, and they too run about 1,000 to 3,000 yuan through cross-border shopping.

Online channels such as Farfetch and Net-a-Porter are pushing more upscale workwear for women as well. It is less conservative than traditional luxury design, but not as offhand as streetwear. Working within the vocabulary of office dressing, these brands look for small tricks — a button, a neckline, a print.

We interviewed several shoppers in MO&Co. stores. Asked why they buy the brand, they kept using the same phrase: "keeping up with the trend." Some even call it fast fashion.

They like the high-street elements in its designs. A few high-end labels usually send those signals from the runway first, and brands in the middle and lower reaches of the fashion chain then work them out further. MO&Co.'s 2016 spring/summer lookbook, for instance, has raw-hem jeans, high-waisted chiffon wide-leg trousers and boat necklines.

The phrase also refers to the pace of renewal. An ordinary brand may put out two seasons and two sets of designs a year; a fast-fashion brand can manage 10 to 14 sets. MO&Co. sits in between: four seasons a year, an average of 300 SKUs a quarter. Among women's wear brands, 1,200 SKUs a year counts only as fairly high, but MO&Co.'s restocking strategy resembles Zara's — many styles, few pieces of each.

You will see a term on clothing tags that the trade calls a "wave": the rhythm at which stores restock. It is one of the main ways to judge whether a brand is fast fashion. ZARA, the quickest of them, works in weekly waves. A typical mall brand's wave runs 15 to 25 days.

From our visits to several MO&Co. stores in Beijing, its wave is 15 days: one major delivery at the start of the month and another mid-month, 24 a year. But two smaller deliveries also arrive each week, so the pace shoppers actually feel may be 8 times a month, 96 times a year. Each store also keeps only a few pieces of any style in stock, which creates the tension that pushes people to buy.

MO&Co. has the advantage of "vertical operations." According to a 2014 report in the South China Morning Post, MO&Co. already had 16 factories nationwide and 2,200 employees more than 20 years ago. Vertical operations mean you can control the whole chain and the price better and faster — market research, design and pattern-making, sample production, then manufacturing, shipping and retail.

A faster pace of renewal weighs heavily on designers: one small adjustment changes the weight of the fabric, its color, even the shape of the product. MO&Co.'s design team runs to about 60 people. Jin Ni told QDaily: "I spend most of my time with the design team. We have a group of young designers who studied abroad, and they go out ahead and collect all kinds of information and sources of inspiration. Once everyone feels we have enough, we sit down and talk, and we can pin down the concept for the new season very quickly."

Keeping up with the trend this closely can bring other brands to mind a little too precisely.

The big eyes on the 2016 spring/summer handbags and slip-on shoes still selling in MO&Co. stores recall Anya Hindmarch. The clean-lined, oversized shirts, meant to be half-tucked into the waistband, look something like COS, H&M's upscale line. And in the 2016 spring/summer parent-child poster, the little boy's stance resembles a model shot for a gray T-shirt on Vetements' own site from the same season.

Some details on the runway even feel like a tribute to Vetements designer Demna Gvasalia. Thigh-high boots in bright colors turned up in the Vetements 2017 spring/summer menswear show that just ended. Oversized leather trousers worn with only one suspender fastened, and hoodies worn with the hood up under a jacket or trench coat, were the breakout looks of the Vetements 2016 spring/summer show — Rihanna has been photographed on the street in the leather trousers. Jackets worn askew, and hoodie sleeves long enough to drag on the ground, are among Vetements' more recognizable looks from past shows.

Even so, international buyers like MO&Co. and Edition 10.

Edition 10 entered the high-end boutique Lane Crawford in 2013 and Galeries Lafayette in Paris in 2015. MO&Co. followed it into Galeries Lafayette a month later, and opened directly operated stores inside Selfridges, the British department store, in London, Manchester and Birmingham. At the launch event, Jin Ni put up a single slide of overseas clients' logos, among them the American streetwear boutique Opening Ceremony, the Dutch luxury department store de Bijenkorf, Ireland's Brown Thomas and the Southeast Asian online retailer Club 21.

When Edition 10 entered Lane Crawford in 2013, the retailer was in the middle of expanding on the mainland and looking for Chinese designers. That year Lane Crawford spent 700 million yuan opening stores in Shanghai and Chengdu, which gave it four stores on the mainland, counting its two specialty stores in Beijing. To keep up with the mainland market, it also opened a Chinese-language online store that accepted online payment.

Jin Ni wants to ride this momentum and draw in more of the middle class around the world. Her core strengths, she believes, are "design," "speed of renewal" and "value for money."

"Overseas consumers' tastes still differ somewhat from those at home. They're more rational, more demanding, better educated in aesthetics, and they have more choices. But our competitive edge is how fast our designs get refreshed. And China's advantage in mid-range manufacturing is still there — Chinese design plus mid-range manufacturing can produce good-value designs," she told QDaily.

Even so, Jin Ni is holding the store count down on purpose. Ochirly has more than 1,000 stores nationwide; MO&Co. has 577 in China and plans to reach only 800 by 2020. "You have to pick your franchisees. Not just anyone can do this."

The company also reaches for other ways to improve the experience. The Little MO&Co. 2017 pre-spring collection shown at this event, for instance, went on sale on Tmall at the same time under a "see now, buy now" service.

In 2010, when Han Huohuo was first becoming known in China for his street-style photographs, he wore MO&Co. pieces in his own street shots. Liu Wen and Freja Beha appeared in MO&Co. campaigns that same year; according to the South China Morning Post, that series of campaigns cost 60 million yuan.

The strategy of sparing nothing on marketing continues. For the late-July event, Aibai's own team designed the set: half of it hollowed out like a cave, with a large metal ventilation duct jutting from the other side. More than 20 child models walked out in parent-child outfits identical to the supermodels'.

Casting and styling were handled by the designer Zhou Xiangyu. The Chinese models came from Dongfang Binli, the agency that discovered Liu Wen; the makeup team was andycreation, which has worked with Dior twice; and the music came from Finn Mactaggart, the PC Music art director who made an album with Li Yuchun. Ai Kelili, with 8.3 million followers, and Fill Xiaobai, with 710,000, live-streamed the whole thing.

After the show, Dou Jingtong sang five songs. Clara 3000, the DJ from Vetements' 2016 fall/winter show, spun records for the crowd below with her headphones half on.

Outside, beside Tank 79, stood a pop-up booth set up like an open-air concert. Laser lights in every color hung from a black metal frame, and makeup campaign images and videos featuring the model Xue Dongqi hung on all four sides. Lipsticks, lip glosses, eyeliners, mascaras and eyeshadow palettes were laid out on black display cases, with a row of mirrors framed by bulbs standing in the middle. A makeup artist in a black T-shirt smiled and said: "Feel free to sit down and try it."

Not many people did. Among the 1,000-odd guests, few were consumers in the ordinary sense — most were corporate or individual distributors, fashion media, celebrities or influencers.

We found one of them in the crowd later and asked: "Besides MO&Co., which brands do you buy most?"

The answer sounded familiar: "Just anything distinctive, Western. I don't follow one brand — I buy from whoever puts out something good-looking."

Cover image and photos from MO&Co. and on-site photography.