What Might the "10,000 Hours" of a Taobao Influencer-Store Designer Look Like? | Behind Influencer E-Commerce, Part 3

The "10,000 hours" rule holds that skill comes only from long practice and accumulation. In the last piece of our influencer series, we want to show you how a designer in this business is made.

Chen Ya designs clothes. Her clients are two influencer stores on Taobao.

One of the influencers does a "fairly grown-up white-collar look," which sends Chen Ya to Lane Crawford to scout styles and hunt for ideas. The other, a "fresh and girlish" type, keeps her running through markets that sell Japanese- and Korean-style clothes.

Chen Ya works for a clothing company in Hangzhou. It used to design and make its own clothes and sell them itself, covering everything from the sketch to the production line. Since 2015, supplying influencers has been its main business.

Her boss flies to South Korea about once a month and brings back a few sample garments with unusual fabrics or unusual cuts. Sometimes Chen Ya goes along to buy samples for reference.

A garment that sells a thousand units in an influencer's store generally passes through eight stages: pick the style, design it, cut the pattern, make the sample, revise it, produce it, photograph it, list it.

Chen Ya handles the first two.

What Is "Style Scouting" Actually Looking For?

"Body in the urban-rural fringe, heart at Paris Fashion Week" is the joke a lot of people make about designers at influencer stores. But the job is not only sitting in an office scraping runway photos and drawing sketches.

Besides the occasional trip to the fabric market in Keqiao, Shaoxing, or to a fabric fair in Shanghai to hunt down new materials, the "style scouting" above has become a main way Taobao influencer designers keep their skills stocked.

Take the current cycle. Most fashion brands had released their fall/winter 2017 looks back in April 2017; by May, Prada, Chanel and others were rolling out their resort 2018 collections one after another. All of it runs a step ahead of the schedule on which influencers put out designs. The fashion week calendar, built for the fashion industry, hands influencers exactly the lag they need to catch a trend in time.

Womenswear trend sites, runway shows, even the ready-to-wear hanging in shopping malls — all of it feeds designers like Chen Ya. She borrows from big houses like Fendi and keeps an eye on newly hot labels like MSGM and Vetements. But she is precise about what is worth taking from whom. With Fendi she "mainly looks at the pattern details — the silhouettes are too rigid." As for "Valentino, it's too ethereal for the mass market. Sometimes I only take a small element."

Beyond the cut, which is what most people notice first, Chen Ya has to track trending colors, color combinations, details, fabrics and construction. She works fast: walking into a mall store, she first sweeps her eyes over the shop's overall color scheme to gauge what may be in this year, then goes at the details.

Trying garments on, she also notes whether a cut has changed since previous years, and whether the construction shows anything new.

Her reference points move with the season. For fall and winter she follows European and American brands — winter clothes have big silhouettes and forgive the wearer's figure. Fall and winter also leaves more to play with: shoulder and sleeve details, hem length, the way fabrics are pieced together. All of that she can "customize" for a client.

For spring and summer she works mostly from Japanese, Korean, even Shenzhen brands, because European and American summer clothes, plain and cut too straight, are something "girls in third- and fourth-tier cities don't like."

For these shoppers Chen Ya will nip in the waist of a plain T-shirt, slit a sleeve, or cut the hem short in front and long at the back. "That's what makes them feel it has some design to it," Chen Ya says.

Fitting the right details onto a given style for each client's positioning — that is the heart of her job.

Designing for an Influencer With a Strong Style Means Aiming at the People Behind Her

"I only give advice out of experience. They decide whether to take it," Chen Ya says.

At many of the clothing companies that supply influencers, market forecasting and channel analysis have shrunk. What replaces them is reading the fans who follow the store.

An influencer's persona and style are planned before she is built. Fans treat her as an idealized version of themselves, a life they "might just reach if they jump a little." So an influencer does not sell a flawless persona; she is tagged with a few specific labels.

Other fans treat the store simply as a "buyer's shop" with a clear point of view, an affordable reference wardrobe. Once a store sells them a garment they like, it lands in their favorites and becomes the effortless option next time they shop.

Influencer stores on Taobao were never known for originality or fine materials. What most people want is a cheap garment that looks like something off a runway and holds together. In the third- and fourth-tier cities fast fashion hasn't reached, influencer stores arguably have the better claim to "democratizing fashion."

An influencer's early positioning has in fact already sorted out who will buy the clothes, and drawn the customer profile for designers like Chen Ya. As long as the styles she draws match each influencer's own look, much of the market forecasting is done.

From the moment a style is picked, she and the influencers mostly talk by "throwing a pile of pictures at each other on WeChat." The influencers come into the company to speak with the designers face to face only a few days a month.

Feedback often arrives at one or two in the morning, listing where a design has to change. They also send photos of clothes and ask her to make a similar style, or copy a detail.

A few months ago her company took a request from a "wild" influencer — no agency contract, no fixed supplier. All she wanted was the sample in her photos turned into a real garment. The design stage was skipped.

From the Fading Hangzhou Womenswear Trade to Taobao Influencer Stores

Chen Ya graduated from Zhejiang Textile and Fashion College — ten years ago it was called the Ningbo Fashion Institute — and joined Qiushui Yiren, one of the flagships of "Hangzhou-style womenswear." Three years later she moved to 3COLOUR, which had 2,000 stores across the country. Still the same Hangzhou womenswear circle.

The phrase "Hangzhou-style womenswear" appeared in the mid-1990s. In the early 1990s, China's garment industry was turning away from processing supplied materials for export and toward selling at home. Husband-and-wife womenswear shops multiplied across the coastal cities of the southeast. In Hangzhou, fashion graduates of the China Academy of Art, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology and other schools joined in: a few sewing machines, their own designs, a business of their own.

By incomplete counts, Hangzhou then had more than 2,000 womenswear manufacturers, a dense industrial cluster the trade called the "Hangzhou school." Through local wholesale markets like Sijiqing and Longxiangqiao they took the domestic market quickly. These brands sold mainly through order fairs, three or four a year, one per season.

An order fair is the fashion week of a clothing brand and its dealers from around the country. Rather than pay salespeople to travel the country, traditional brands gather everyone for a concentrated showing every so often. Buyers look at the samples, ask prices, place orders, and deal with the manufacturer directly.

Before each season's fair, a traditional brand plans out the lines it will bring to market next quarter, sorted by garment type — trousers, shorts, jackets, shirts — and split by mood: casual, sporty and so on.

In the run-up to a fair, Chen Ya would be handed a few designs. After turning them out to the quota the company had planned, she also had to set up the display at the fair and walk buyers through it. "Twenty-hour days," she says.

Then Hangzhou womenswear faded. Its styles and its way of making clothes were both old, and e-commerce broke its network of dealers apart. So Chen Ya decided to become a second-tier wholesaler: she rented a stall in the Sijiqing wholesale market and supplied Taobao shopkeepers.

It was the wrong move. What Chen Ya is good at is design, not chasing customers and closing sales. Only a handful of the garments in the stall were her own. Most of the time she was undone by the crush of the wholesale market and the mess of partner factories packing orders any which way. Within a year she withdrew to familiar ground and went to work for an influencer supplier.

She had never made clothes for an influencer before, but nearly ten years in the trade made her the most senior of the company's six designers, with an assistant of her own.

Offline brand, second-tier wholesaler, influencer supplier: the center of her work moved from the order fair to the wholesaler to the influencer.

At a brand company, the market-led model meant the design department had to study demand together with sales, planning and product before any clothes were planned.

Once the trend was settled, Chen Ya and her colleagues spent part of their time working up the brand story, and each took one or two garments to design inside the frame the design director had set. When the samples were done, design sat down with every other department to review the styles and guess which of them the public would want.

Now she turns around whatever the influencers ask for.

Still, Chen Ya does not think she is a different designer at an influencer supplier than she was at a brand. She has always designed by borrowing. "Even at the European and American shows, big-name designers look at what small designers are doing."

Plagiarism, the "Original Sin"

The influencers she knows, Chen Ya says, do far more than pout at a camera. "They watch the fashion news themselves. It's their own shop, after all."

Even so, she can sell the same style to more than one client. Influencers with different styles sometimes arrive at that unspoken arrangement.

The "style" a designer means is not the finished garment a shopper pictures, but the basic silhouette. Keep one silhouette and change the details, the fabric, even the construction, and it turns into something else: a plainly cut coat with little decoration goes to the grown-up influencer's store; put lantern cuffs on it and add a lettuce-edge ruffle, and it goes to the sweet one; piece a panel of mesh or lace into the woven fabric, and it becomes a coat with more unusual construction. That piecing trick comes from MSGM, an Italian brand that took off last year on big prints and clashing pieced fabrics. "A new trick like that catches the eye without feeling jarring. The public will take it."

Selling one style to several buyers is how many clothing companies raise their output. Influencer stores turn over faster still. The stocking cycle has been squeezed from quarters to months, so Chen Ya has to draw faster.

"In the old days you'd be preparing runway pieces for the winter order fair before summer had even begun." Now she is designing the twenty-odd garments that go on sale in the next month or two. When it's urgent, an influencer sends her a picture and the sample has to go out the next day.

Days later the samples she drew are crossing oceans with the influencers, photographed in the fine weather and at the landmarks of the United States, South Korea or France. That is the life influencers have to be seen living.

This speed of copying is why many people accuse influencer-store designers of plagiarism, or dismiss them as mere "style scouts."

Chen Ya feels no moral guilt about the work she does. She does admit that some influencers, "because of what they have to work with," copy a design outright.

Clothing companies of any size rarely take orders from "wild" influencers, whose sales usually fall short of a large factory's minimum. Those influencers have to find smaller workshops to knock the design off directly, with no guarantee of fabric or workmanship — the model that deepened the reputation of influencer stores for bad quality and endless repetition.

Chen Ya's reading: "Small orders can't win on price, and a me-too style has nothing to set it apart. Long term, that business doesn't grow."

She designs, as she sees it, with restraint. A sweatshirt she drew this year uses the metal rings Vetements made a hit, the sleeves held together by a row of them. But "I won't use them on summer clothes. Overuse an idea and it floods the market and stops being worth anything." The ring should still run on into fall and winter, she thinks, only at a different size and in different places.

"They still look quite different," Chen Ya says.