Who Exactly Is Buying at Shanghai Fashion Week?

Making deals happen has become one of Shanghai Fashion Week's main aims — and from a market point of view, that is a sensible choice.

Liu Yongyan adapts quickly. She used to own a buyer's boutique, but as more and more buyer's boutiques appeared across China, she decided to go in with a partner and open a showroom instead.

A buyer's boutique and a showroom sit on opposite sides of the deal: one buys, the other sells. Take Liu's Match Showroom. At the spring/summer 2017 Shanghai Fashion Week she brought ten Nordic designer brands. If a buyer liked a style, they ordered it on the spot, then put the pieces in their own shop to sell to consumers.

A showroom is where fashion gets traded. What it runs on is expertise: brands of different categories and price tiers have to be kept apart, and the people who come to buy have to know the trade.

Five years ago, when Liu opened Göte Göta, she needed to know none of this. The shop's full name has a second half — A Scandinavian Concept. Even that clunky phrase tells you what it was: a shop Liu opened to her own taste, with a streak of idealism to it.

In 2011 the shop opened for business on the second floor of a 1935 building at 174 South Xiangyang Road in Shanghai, selling Nordic clogs and fashion labels that had not yet reached China's retail channels. Buyer's boutiques were still fairly rare then, and Liu's approach was quite avant-garde: she put on art shows and auctions, or arranged for customers to meet designers and talk.

You can probably guess how the story goes. Göte Göta's premise could not survive in mainland China in 2011. People then still preferred to shop at department stores; not many were yet complaining that "the clothes in brick-and-mortar stores all look the same," and e-commerce had not yet broken the old leasing model.

Looking back now, Liu puts the moment she saw the opening in showrooms at 2013. She traces it to two landmark events: Lane Crawford, which had once pulled out of China, reopened a store on Shanghai's Huaihai Road in 2013; and in 2015 Shanghai Fashion Week started its Mode trade show.

"Only once there are buyers, once there is volume, will people come to select merchandise — and only then do trade shows like Mode appear," she said. What she felt was "the rise of the buyer's-boutique model in China."

Shanghai Fashion Week really does stress how much trade matters to it. Given the long weakness of domestic demand for fashion, and an independent-designer industry and roster of brands that are still far from systematic, Shanghai Fashion Week has always been a slightly awkward proposition. On artistic breakthroughs it has never quite shaken the suspicion that it is playing to itself. Under those conditions, pushing hard on trade looks like the best option.

Besides Mode, set up in 2015, this spring/summer 2017 Shanghai Fashion Week added two more satellite venues: Ontimeshow and The Hub. At the main venue alone, participating showrooms went from 25 in April to 32; counting the independent designer brands at the satellite venues, more than 500 brands took part.

According to figures Shanghai Fashion Week released on October 18, Mode drew more than 6,000 visitors to the main venue at Expo Park between October 13 and 16. Trade buyers — buyers at 37.1% and agents at 10.8% — made up about half of them, and the number of buyers at the show was up 27% on the same period the season before. It also drew fashion brand designers, trend-forecasting agencies and people from apparel manufacturing.

Shanghai Fashion Week's official WeChat account always makes a point of the phrase "professional visitors," which usually means people who work in fashion. "We took a tally at Mode this time, and every exhibitor told us they had taken orders. There are more and more professional visitors. Buyer's boutiques have appeared too, and they've pushed the business along," Lü Xiaolei, deputy secretary-general of the Shanghai Fashion Week organizing committee, told QDaily.

Business is good at Liu's Match Showroom. Kauniste, a lifestyle brand that sells tablecloths and phone cases, and Marita Huurinainen, a ready-to-wear label that takes its inspiration from Nordic landscapes, are both popular.

He Lan, marketing manager at Tudoo Showroom, which came up from Guangzhou, felt something similar. As she describes it, the people who visit showrooms regularly now fall into five groups: buyers from buyer's boutiques, small boutiques on the street, e-commerce companies, traditional agents who hold a lot of stores and want to turn them into buyer's boutiques, and department stores looking to reinvent themselves.

"At Tudoo Showroom, buyers from boutiques and from e-commerce companies buy the bigger share — 50% and 30% respectively," He Lan told QDaily.

Guo Ziyi, who runs round round in Nanjing, belongs to that 50% He Lan mentioned. Though she feels the economy has made her tighten her budget, she still went carefully through Mode and Ontimeshow at this Shanghai Fashion Week.

Most of the brands round round carries were ordered at Shanghai Fashion Week — more than 30 of them, 80% of the total. One advantage of Shanghai Fashion Week, she thinks, is that it lets her feel the standards of the industry. "Because there's a whole pile of showrooms there at once, you can ask around about how business is, and really keep up with the rhythm of the fashion industry." Ordering at home also means not having to think about customs and shipping, and sizing tends to be a bit more accurate.

That was the problem Liu ran into when she first started Göte Göta. Back then, she told QDaily, "the market wasn't ready" — meaning both that consumers had not taken in the idea of a fashion buyer, and that foreign independent designer brands were not ready either. "Sizing alone was a problem," she said.

Still, ordering directly at the major fashion weeks is now standard practice for Chinese buyers.

Ai Zhuo, who runs the Chengdu buyer's boutique Shuashan, is not so keen on the Mode and Ontimeshow that Guo Ziyi likes. Her shop opened in the summer of 2012, devoted to "discovering and selecting new young designer brands from around the world," and in 2014 it began publishing an independent magazine, Funzine. After three years of growth, Ai opened another shop in 2015. She also has a goal she sets alongside Chengdu's own civic symbol, the panda: to become another reason people want to come to Chengdu and fall in love with it.

Because her shop is positioned more internationally, Ai goes more often to Paris Fashion Week. She mentioned: "At the Anrealage show in Paris, every guest's seat had a note introducing the collection, so you knew the theme before the show began. That's part of how the show expresses itself as a whole." In fact, most of the labels showing at Shanghai Fashion Week's Xintiandi venue do this too.

In Paris, Ai can get an early look in the showrooms at work by the Chinese independent designers she follows.

"We don't carry brands that only do showrooms at home. A lot of Chinese designers have showrooms in Europe too, so we see everything together while we're there," Ai said. "SHUSHU/TONG's clothes for this season, for instance, I'd already seen at Paris Fashion Week."

Dong Liang, a buyer's boutique that has long helped promote Chinese independent designers, still insists on placing its orders back at Shanghai Fashion Week, even though it too has seen designers' work early at showrooms abroad. "I'm certainly going to care more about the domestic market. I think launching in Shanghai has a bigger effect on the domestic market," Wang Yao, co-founder of Dong Liang, told QDaily.

As more and more buyer's boutiques appear, designers have relaxed. "In 2013 everyone came to buy. Designers wanted the minimum order higher. These past two years, though, some designers have said instead, let's try it out first, make contact and see," Guo Ziyi said.

Every buyer's boutique with any name in the Chinese market came to look around at this Shanghai Fashion Week: Lin Shu, a buyer for Qianyi Shangmen; Bai Sheng, who runs Shanghai Xiansheng; Li Liang, who runs joy in Nanjing. Last April, Li Liang ordered about 700,000 yuan of goods from roughly 12 brands at Shanghai Fashion Week.

As Liu puts it, "Match Showroom drew buyers from all over the country this time." She feels her customers really are no longer just Beijing and Shanghai.

Beyond these boutiques, another wave of buyers was busy placing orders at Shanghai Fashion Week. They are trying to serve a group far larger than all the country's buyer's boutiques put together, and what they weigh most is whether these unusual clothes suit the taste of their mass-market shoppers.

Sam, from YOHO!BUY, which calls itself a "trend shopping mall for young people," went to the main venue at Taiping Lake in Xintiandi on October 17 to watch the runway show for the Where What Who and Pizza Hut collaboration. YOHO!BUY has bought two seasons of this brand, which now ranks among the top five sellers in its mid-price band.

"We only buy brands priced under 4,000 yuan, because we're aimed at young people, and young people don't have much money," Sam told QDaily. "The design can be playful, it can be odd, but it has to be wearable."

Sam also went to see LABELHOOD's first static exhibition, Museum of Friendship, and Glamorous — the label worn by Britain's Kate Middleton — shown on the main runway at Taiping Lake in Xintiandi. Studio K and JICHENG, a Chinese independent designer brand that comes to Shanghai Fashion Week every year, are two he is still watching.

These buyers want, to some degree, to keep close to mainstream choices. Jin Mengdi, co-founder and buyer at the clothing-rental company YCloset, for one, puts wearability first when she picks merchandise. At Shanghai Fashion Week she went specially to see Reineren, a designer brand also sold at Galeries Lafayette in Beijing; at the same time, she worries that independent designer brands' supply chains are unstable.

But Lü Xiaolei, speaking for the organizers, would rather talk about the people who hope to become "buyers."

One thing she has kept at for the past three years: whispering in Bailian Group's ear. Bailian, with registered capital of 1 billion yuan, was formed in 2003 out of a merger and restructuring of the former Shanghai No. 1 Department Store Group, Hualian Group, Youyi Group and Wuzi Group. "Bailian is a very big group — half of Nanjing Road belongs to it. If it can pull off a transformation, Shanghai's whole retail landscape changes. That would count as a very big contribution Fashion Week has made to this city," Lü said.

On October 17, Lü pulled Zhao Chenbin, Bailian Group's board secretary and senior deputy director of its strategic planning center, onto a talk show. On "Kankan News," produced jointly by the news teams of Dragon TV and Shanghai TV, the two discussed "department stores restructuring to bring in buyers."

"Bailian is the one I've kept putting this idea into, taking them to Fashion Week. Next they're going to do it at Dongfang Department Store — clear out a space and do buyer's-boutique things. Right now they need to put merchandise together, find buyers, find a buyer team. Bailian says: keep sending us buyers, stop sending us designers," Lü said.

In this context, "buyer" becomes a more complicated idea. Less the term as Europe's and America's buyer-model department stores define it, more a straw that traditional department stores are clutching at while they look for a way out of trouble.

VEA, a former buyer at House of Fraser, the old London department store that has now opened in Nanjing, wrote in a work presentation back in April: "Retail faces pressure to transform and upgrade. Department stores and boutiques such as SKP, Lane Crawford and 10 Corso Como have led the way in bringing in products from Chinese designers. That has pushed traditional retail to turn its attention to this promising group of Chinese designers too, and has drawn a crowd of overseas buyer's boutiques to come see for themselves."

That is indeed how it has gone. On October 15, the day LABELHOOD held its GQ menswear day at the Bund Source, Cheng Yi, executive director of R&F Global Commodity Trade Port, was already standing in the crowd at 10 a.m. looking at work by the independent designer brand HIUMAN — though she did not know what sort of brand HIUMAN was, or what a "LABELHOOD menswear day" was either.

Lately this developer has been trying to build an innovative exhibition-and-trade complex. "What we came for this time is to find designers and buyer's boutiques and draw them to the Trade Port. We can offer buyer training, brand operations, all sorts of services," Cheng told QDaily.

As for the most mainstream buyers — the ones VEA named in that presentation — they either did not come, or refused to comment on what they saw at this Shanghai Fashion Week. By rights, judging how good Shanghai Fashion Week is ought to mean hearing from people like them.

Cover image and in-text images: Shanghai Fashion Week's official website.