Is It Feasible For Sports Brands To Enter The Children'S Wear Market?

Recently Nike After sports brands such as Adidas, Anta, Li Ning, Tebu and 361DU, Kappa and the well-known domestic children's wear brand Parkland jointly set up a joint venture of KappaKids brand to enter the children's wear market. This news has once again brought the public focus to the movement shoes The current situation and future development of the service industry.

In recent years, the development of domestic sports brands is excessive, the product homogenization is serious, and the inventory is constantly rising, and the sales continue to decline. Facing the Domestic Adult Movement clothing As the market is nearly saturated, sports brands are looking for new business opportunities to boost their performance, and they have turned their attention to the children's wear market known as the sunrise industry.

Footwear enterprises have reached the node

Experiencing Footwear industry So far, I think the enterprise has mainly gone through the following stages:

The first stage was in the early 1980s, when enterprises relied on the model of courage+luck=success. As long as they had the ability to produce, they could meet a single market demand. No matter what the style was, even if there was no design or terminal management, as long as simple logistics quickly reflected to the market, they could make profits. Indeed, many enterprises have completed their original accumulation and grown up under such circumstances.

After entering the 1990s, many enterprises found that they could not meet the market demand only by volume or production of a single product, such as shirts, suits, pants, etc. Enterprises must consider how to build their own channels, maintain their own terminals and stores, and achieve the goal of increasing profits and diversifying their operations through monopoly and combination. That is to say, in this period, Chinese footwear and clothing enterprises are actively eager to learn and give full play to their ability to imitate.

With Giordano jeanswest The early entry of brands like Bennilo into China not only brought products, but also advanced management beliefs and models, teaching Chinese enterprises how to do chain franchise, how to do fast logistics, how to operate specialty stores, how to promote the expansion of the franchise market, etc. In this process, Chinese enterprises only spent 8-10 years to complete the process of learning to rise, It has also driven the rapid growth of a number of enterprises, such as Meters Bonway and Yichun, and has become a new force to promote the development of Chinese footwear and clothing enterprises.

However, since 2002, with the advancement of global integration, the market has become more and more standardized and the competition has become more and more fierce. Chinese clothing enterprises, whether men's clothing in Fujian, women's clothing in Han style or women's clothing in Hangzhou, have experienced collective decline. The reason is that Clothes & Accessories The lack of enterprise innovation spirit and motivation.

After completing the accumulation of original wealth and the promotion of brands, many garment enterprises are confused about the core competitiveness of their brands, their ability to grasp the market and the future development direction of the market, and are struggling to find new breakthroughs.

Breakthroughs cannot be achieved overnight. Breakthroughs must be found. Today, many enterprises have to face the following problems: increasingly homogeneous products, marketing technology and mutual imitation, business ideas still revolve around production capacity, scale, self built network, serious lack of technology research and development, brand lack of personality, if another decade as a cycle, I do not know how many enterprises and brands will die in the next round of competition.

Is it difficult to transform or not

If people have no foresight, they must have immediate concerns. So far, Chinese footwear and clothing enterprises have to face the following two types of transformation:

One is the transformation from wholesale to retail. Due to the homogenization, differentiation, business ability and market demand of the products in the wholesale market, some wholesale enterprises' profits have declined, and they have to transform from wholesale brands to retail brands. In this process, it can be summarized as: it takes ten years to complete wealth accumulation, two years to make blind transformation, and one year to declare bankruptcy. Is transformation so difficult?

The first is the transformation of concept and execution. Transformation is both a leap and an obstacle for enterprises. If this obstacle is overcome, enterprises will move towards another development trend. Brands such as Yichun and Gedi are all successful cases of transformation, and their success lies in their full preparation in concept, technology and thinking.

Secondly, it should be clear that wholesale and retail are two completely different ways of operation. It is mainly manifested in the following three aspects: different business ideas. What wholesale does is to have few styles, strong imitation ability and quick response to the market. As long as we master imitation, logistics and customers, we will be successful.

Retail is on the contrary. The problem to be solved is that the design and development of the product should have personality, the brand should have a clear positioning, while ensuring the sales volume, it should also ensure the personality of the product, cultivate the consumer's sense of identity, and finally make the brand be recognized by the market to the greatest extent.

Cash turnover is different. The capital turnover of wholesale is fast, while that of retail is relatively slow.

The storage management is different. Wholesale inventory is usually a single product inventory structure, while retail inventory, due to its different sales channels, will generate diversified channels of inventory, which will make enterprises under tremendous pressure.

The second transformation is like Meters Bonway, Yichun, Li Ning After successfully completing the first transformation and gradually establishing their own brands, mature enterprises of scale such as Kappa face the transformation of internal management in the next round of competition, including management innovation, marketing innovation, seeking benefits from management and marketing, and meeting new market demands through brand transformation.

In this regard, Meters Bonway is an example. Meters Bonway invited Guo Fucheng to be his image spokesperson in his early years. As a star of that era, Guo Fucheng was sought after by people born in the 1960s and 1970s. With the development and change of the market, the largest casual clothing consumer group in the current consumer market is targeted at the young generation born in the 1980s. This consumer group is no longer crazy about classic stars like Guo Fucheng, Meters · Bonway resolutely took the lead in changing the general, and used Jay Chou, who is currently popular among young people and frequently appears on CCTV, as its image spokesperson, to successfully introduce the product to the young generation of consumers. At the same time, through continuous product transformation and management innovation, it has maintained great vitality in recent years.

In the fierce market competition, footwear and clothing enterprises often face four major problems:

1. Enterprise brand lacks clear market positioning and development strategy, and is difficult to form unique and differentiated brand value.

2. From raw materials to consumers, enterprises cannot effectively eliminate non value-added activities in the design, production, marketing and sales links.

3. Enterprises lack plans and forecasts based on data analysis, which makes it difficult to achieve reasonable resource allocation and reduce cost waste.

4. Enterprises face more picky consumers. Consumers face more choices and have lower loyalty to a single brand.

Is the market of children's clothing really a savior?

Data shows that there are about 400 million children aged 0-16 in China, of which children aged 0-10 account for about 80%. From 2005 to 2020, about 16 million new babies will be born every year, and China will usher in another birth peak.

At present, the domestic infant and child clothing market has reached a market scale of 100 billion yuan, but there is no brand leader with a sales scale of 1 billion yuan. According to the statistics of China National Business Information Center, from February 2011 to January 2012, Sima's Barabala, Adidas and NIKE occupied the top three places in the domestic children's wear market.

Adidas and NIKE, the top three international sports brands, are the first to enter the children's wear market in China. Their outstanding performance in the children's wear market in China proves the popularity of sports clothing in the children's market. Faced with such a large profit space, the domestic sports brands in the downturn hope to help them expand the market and increase sales with the help of the children's wear market.

Now, young parents of the post-80s and post-90s generation are becoming the main consumers, and they are more willing to spend heavily on material matters for their children. Of course, they pay more attention to their children's physical quality and hope to cultivate their children's habit of lifelong physical exercise.

At present, some international level foreign training institutions have entered the Chinese market and are trusted by children and parents, which will drive the development of domestic youth sports and training. It is a good opportunity for sports brands. If domestic sports brands can correctly grasp the direction and seize the opportunity, they will get good development.

When sports brands enter the children's wear market, they will probably choose to separate from the original adult brands, re-establish distribution channels, and reduce the impact on their original distribution channels. In addition to Kappa and Li Ning mentioned above, the distribution and marketing of children's wear business will be handed over to professional children's wear brands in China.

Adidas adopts a dealer led model, and Nike also cooperates with several domestic dealers, including Goodbaby. Goodchild is currently Nike's largest dealer in the world's children's category, and the sales channel is set up by Goodchild Group separately. The number of stores in China alone has reached more than 900, with total sales exceeding 1 billion yuan.

However, enterprises should also avoid the negative impact of lowering the threshold of selecting dealers or franchisees in order to rapidly expand the market. For example, the disunity of ideas will cause greater losses to enterprises. In addition, running in with new dealers is inevitable.

When promoting children's wear brands, the usual marketing method of sports brands is to sponsor some youth sports competitions with relatively high popularity and attention. On the other hand, they should be able to grasp the preferences of target consumer groups. Different from adult sports brands, the target consumer groups of children's clothing can be divided into two major parts: children and parents.

In the face of children's brand promotion, most brands choose to cooperate with cartoon brands loved by children, sports or idol stars worshipped by teenagers. In 2010, Adidas cooperated with Disney to launch a series of autumn and winter children's clothing designed with popular cartoon characters in Disney's animated film Toy Story 3.

Taking advantage of the global release of Toy Story 3, the sequel of this classic animation, Adidas successfully attracted consumers and won the market. Only in the first quarter of 2011, Adidas ranked first in the comprehensive market share of children's wear in China. It is very important to choose the right partner at the right time to do both.

Among several sports brands entering the Chinese children's wear market, Nike and Adidas are the two international brands with the strongest performance. In addition to the early entry into the children's wear market, every link from product design, quality to distribution and brand promotion has not been left behind.

Successfully use the children's market to expand business scope and increase sales figures. If domestic sports brands want to succeed, they can't compete with international brands just by following their development path. They should also be brave to innovate and combine their own advantages to find their own brand characteristics.

In addition, it cannot be ignored that a group of new generation footwear and clothing with higher educational background, unique strategic vision and excellent business performance are growing up with irresistible force. Their thoughts and actions provide a new frame of reference for observing the Chinese footwear industry.

It is difficult to dig the "first bucket of gold" to complete the original accumulation of the old brand scenery in the era of "heroes don't ask where they came from". How to transcend their own limitations and create a new "entrepreneurial era" of Chinese footwear and clothing with the new generation is a difficult historical mission for a long time.