JD.com Took a Runway Show to London Fashion Week. It May Really Have Been Just a Show

Make noise abroad, sell traffic at home. JD.com's way of doing fashion is still a blunt instrument.

On the afternoon of September 19, Chris Spira walked through the rain to 116 Pall Mall in central London to watch a Chinese brand's fashion show. It was the second-to-last day of London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2017, and Burberry's "see now, buy now" show would start that evening. But Spira, a partner at True Capital, a private equity firm that specializes in consumer goods and fashion, had no wish to join the crowd at the main venue. He was saving his afternoon for "Chinese fashion," a world he barely knew.

The show, called "Jing·Zhi," was staged by JD.com, which had come all the way to London to announce a new "customization" business covering both high-end bespoke and made-to-order pieces.

Put simply, JD.com has teamed up with Chinese custom brands, these six among them, to launch the "Jing·Zhi" channel, selling clothing, footwear, jewelry and accessories. Shoppers pick the style, fabric and size, then place the order.

On its two earlier outings, at Milan and New York Fashion Week, JD.com brought the work of Chinese independent designers. This time it brought six brands to London: EVE de CINA, NE·TIGER, Kevin Kelly, By Creations, X·Lando and Hengmeirui Jewelry. Not familiar? Put it this way: each of them is said to have something to do with custom work. EVE de CINA has been making custom clothes for 22 years and has 500 stores across China. NE·TIGER, which has staged the opening show of China International Fashion Week (informally, "Beijing Fashion Week") 16 times, has long done bespoke, and takes a third of its sales from Europe, the Middle East and Russia. By Creations, which already runs its own online store selling Italian menswear, also pushes made-to-measure.

JD.com timed the show to coincide with London Fashion Week, but "Jing·Zhi" was not on the official schedule, and it was not held where Burberry and Paul Smith were showing. It took place instead at the clubhouse of the Institute of Directors (IOD) — the 116 Pall Mall that Chris Spira walked to.

The IOD, sometimes called the association of British chief executives, was founded in 1903 and now has more than 34,000 members from the country's business elite. Since 1978 it has lived in this 1826 house, which belongs to the Crown Estate.

On the day of the show, the ground floor of 116 Pall Mall stayed open to the members who pay an annual fee for the right to come in and drink coffee. The six brands showed upstairs, in a room hung with 10 oil paintings, each about 2.5 meters tall and a meter wide.

By Creations showed modern tailoring; the other four clothing brands brought looks heavy with Chinese motifs — embroidery, qipao cuts, silk. As the models carried custom embroidery down the runway, the enormous painted figures of Lord Collingwood, King George V and Queen Mary looked on without blinking, "admiring" the Chinese style — an odd match for a house that reeks of the Tudors, the Stuarts and Bloody Mary.

That contrast was probably what Spira enjoyed. In his words, he "really liked the EVE de CINA gown that opened the show, white with red embroidered flowers, and the model with her hair up."

But Spira had no idea what JD.com was. He once invested in Mary Katrantzou, the independent label known for its prints, yet he knows little about Chinese fashion brands and has never been to Beijing or Shanghai to see Chinese independent designers show. A friend had brought him along, he said, and he wanted to find out what Chinese fashion brands are doing now — he turned up in blue Converse sneakers and a canvas jacket.

Alex Commbe came in a suit. He is a senior business development manager at Debenhams, the London department store founded in 1778, and he was there at JD.com's invitation, "considering whether to work with JD.com."

Drawing people like Commbe and Spira to a show, then sending the very British pictures home for publicity, was probably the point of the London trip.

Five years ago, you could not have imagined this company — a retailer built on 3C goods (computers, communications and consumer electronics), with an early user base that was overwhelmingly male — saying it wanted to sell clothes. In 2011 JD.com began expanding into every category: large appliances, books, general merchandise. In 2015 it reorganized and moved apparel up. The apparel and home unit became one of four new business units (the others are 3C, home appliances and consumer goods) and took charge of the former third-party open platform (POP) business, which brought it more independence and more resources.

Over the past year, then, JD.com has been busy in clothing. Several hundred international brands, GAP, New Balance, Levi's and Hugo Boss among them, have opened stores on the site, and a brand launch event happens roughly once a month. In October 2014 JD.com put its name on the iQiyi fashion reality show Falling for Supermodels (《爱上超模》). Since 2014 it has run two "Shang JD" fashion shows a year, in spring and autumn. In March 2015 it teamed up with the China Fashion Association to build an online platform to support designer labels. Then it took Chinese independent designers — Gu Lin, Xu Xiaoyan, Tan Ali, Zhang Chi — to Milan and New York Fashion Week.

JD.com has been stubborn about fashion. Opinion outside the company is split on whether it belongs there, but it keeps sending the signal that it is in. The London show, staged off the official schedule, serves the same purpose as the events it insisted on holding outside the Milan furniture fair earlier this year: atmosphere.

"JD.com's customers are mainly domestic. We have an international unit, focused on Russia and Southeast Asia; we haven't gone into the US or the UK. The point is to bring international brands into China," said Xin Lijun, a vice president of JD.com and president of its apparel and home unit. Which tells you, indirectly, what the London trip was for — and what it wasn't. It wasn't about selling to Britain.

Selling clothes is hard work, especially with a giant like Tmall already on the field.

JD.com is nowhere near Tmall's size. According to the second-quarter results both companies published in August, Alibaba's gross merchandise volume for April to June 2016 was 837 billion yuan, of which Tmall accounted for 40 percent, or 329 billion yuan, up 33 percent from a year earlier. JD.com's volume over the same months was smaller but growing faster: excluding virtual goods, 157.1 billion yuan, up 52 percent. Size aside, Tmall holds another advantage — official authorization from brands, which buys it more trust from shoppers worried about fakes.

And although fashion sites that never understood Chinese shoppers, ASOS among them, have pulled out of China, the ones still here each have their own angle.

Vipshop runs flash sales only and competes on price. NET-A-PORTER, the authorized luxury site, is doing well in China: its results for the first quarter of fiscal 2016, published in May, showed Chinese sales up 15.9 percent. Farfetch plays the multi-brand boutique, selling obscurity and taste. WOOLALA, a latecomer, pushes Asian designers and borrows a trick from the American dating app Tinder, letting shoppers swipe left or right to say what they like.

So what can JD.com, with its 169 million active users, do in fashion?

"The people JD.com serves are middle- and high-income Chinese, most of them over 25. Compared with our domestic rivals, we're not going to fight over the very young, the under-25s — 17- and 18-year-olds aren't JD.com users," Xin Lijun said at the "Jing·Zhi" launch. "We only serve the high-end, high-quality part of our audience. We pick designers to match that position, and we build a platform for them."

Twenty-five. To JD.com, apparently, that age is already enough to mean "middle-to-high-end" — it is the number internet companies reach for when they want to say their users are not all kids. In fashion retail, 25 is young. Nike aims at 22-year-olds. And most 25-year-olds cannot possibly pay for "high-end" or "bespoke."

The independent-designer business is not easy either. These designers have real advantages — young, inventive, sometimes genuinely original. They are the future of fashion, and the next Tom Ford or Alexander Wang will come from among them. They also have a fatal weakness: as a rule, their designs are hard to commercialize and hard to get into ordinary retail channels.

Abroad, the places that find independent designers and make them famous are fashion magazines and multi-brand boutiques. Anna Wintour, the fearsome editor-in-chief of American Vogue, pioneered the work and turned Alexander Wang into a star. You hear the same few boutique names too: H.Lorenzo in Los Angeles, or Opening Ceremony. What they do is simple — give a designer a chance to be known, and get the clothes into shops where customers can see them.

At Shanghai Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2016, Sara Maino, a senior editor at Italian Vogue and head of its young-designer program, Vogue Talent, went from trade fair to showroom in Shanghai looking for designers worth backing. She found very few.

That is the bind Chinese independent designers are in. If the design is unremarkable, the next steps — production at scale, getting into shops — stall.

JD.com cannot match the reach of Vogue or the boutiques that make trends. So a designer who opens a store on JD.com is unlikely to become known through it, and the sales will not be thrilling either. Having walked into the world of Chinese independent designers, JD.com cannot walk around these problems.

Which explains why it advertises itself as a supporter: beyond technology and traffic, it has little else to give them.

"This customization business needs a strong supply chain behind it, manufacturing that can actually handle custom work. The concept is different from the previous two shows, and so are the brands," said Liu Hong, general manager of the clothing department in JD.com's apparel and home unit.

The Chinese brands doing custom work, on the other hand, do seem to need an e-commerce company like JD.com. Eve Group is the obvious case: JD.com brought two of its brands to London at once, EVE de CINA and Kevin Kelly.

Founded in 1994, Eve Group now owns five labels — EVE de UOMO, NOTTING HILL, Kevin Kelly, JAQUES PRITT and EVE de CINA — and runs 500 stores across China, offering both made-to-measure tailoring and a "butler" service that advises customers on what to wear.

By the account of Xia Hua, Eve Group's chair, Yu Minhong, who used to wear nothing but T-shirts and jeans, is a loyal customer. "The butler service lets him wear a suit day to day without a tie, so he's comfortable. That one thing turned Yu Minhong and his 300-odd principals into our customers," Xia Hua said. She is also proud that her tailors can "take 24 measurements in two minutes without the customer minding."

Eve Group has its own method for custom work, but Xia Hua has never considered running her own online store. As Xin Lijun puts it: "In China, it isn't realistic for a brand to do its own e-commerce, because you'd be competing with JD.com and Alibaba."

"Every traditional company has been burned this way. Management today isn't about managing competition, it's about managing cooperation. I'm certainly not going to do everything myself," Xia Hua said. "JD.com brings me exactly the traffic I want."

Once a customer orders, Eve Group starts what Xia Hua calls the butler service — a crucial step that does not sound as if it needs JD.com at all. It is a long way from what young niche brands abroad do with customization online.

Fame and Partners, a Sydney label that entered the US market in 2015, also runs customization over the internet. It has dropped fit as the selling point and built the service around style instead.

Say you want the Ada, a halter-neck, open-back dress with a slit. First, you can change the nude and pink of the sample Fame and Partners shows you; there are 31 colors, including black, brown and champagne. A custom color costs US$16 extra.

If the Ada isn't right, you can delete the front slit, or add a matching one so the front has two, or cut the dress to mini length.

The point is that Fame and Partners' version of customization actually uses the internet: you settle the design when you place the order, without a tailor or a butler in a shop.

If JD.com cannot support that level of detail, it ends up somewhere awkward. Where traffic is concerned, there is no loyalty.

"We go where the traffic is," Xia Hua said. Another Eve Group label, EVE de UOMO, opened its store on Tmall.

Lorenzo Caramalli, who runs By Creations' European business, is interested in Tmall too.

"JD.com came to us," Caramalli told QDaily.

NE·TIGER isn't putting all its eggs in one basket either. It talked to JD.com for six months before starting the custom business with it — and is building its own custom-order site at the same time. "We're building a fairly big global platform for quality living, live around October, open to designers worldwide, not only Chinese designers the way JD.com is," said Zhang Zhifeng, NE·TIGER's creative director.

There is another problem: "custom" implies luxury. Besides the craft that Xia Hua prizes — the measuring, the styling advice — working with an e-commerce site creates trouble in the buying experience itself.

Click on an EVE de CINA custom piece for sale on JD.com and the product description is thin, less thorough than what an ordinary Taobao seller writes. Below it, JD.com recommends other clothes. Its algorithm serves up other custom brands — and also a 699-yuan Vero Moda.

Which may be close to what Chris Spira felt at 116 Pall Mall. "I don't know what this show was finally trying to say," he said. "But I suppose we all have things to learn."

Cover and in-article images: provided by JD.com, iod.com, venuefinder, luxuries100