Bree looking for dreams
At around 6 o’clock in the evening on April 10, the night gradually fell, and another day entered the surrounding area of China Textile City located in Keqiao District, Shaoxing City, Zhejiang Province the busiest time. The market’s business hours are about to end, but the business is not stopping at all – Anhui girl born in 1995, Tang Yanhui, took off her cotton jacket and quickly copied the waybill sent by the merchant in front of the pile of express packages. The express delivery company she works for was just established last year and was specially set up to transport textile samples. Packages filled with sample fabrics are sent out that night and can be delivered to clothing factories and designers in many places across the country early the next morning.
Keqiao’s textile market began to take shape in the 1980s. Today, it has become the world’s largest textile distribution center with the largest range of products.
Walking on the streets of Keqiao, colorful and huge fabric advertisements come into view. People come and go in a hurry, and the topic they talk about is the textile business. Around this small piece of fabric intertwined with longitude and latitude lines, the road to wealth and business opportunities is laid out. According to statistics, the China Textile City market cluster achieved a transaction volume of 216.325 billion yuan in 2020, and more than 30,000 merchants have settled here.
In a store in the East Market of China Textile City, Zhu Ruigang, a Shaoxing boy born in the 1990s, is skillfully introducing the product features of his own fabrics to visitors. After graduating from a university in Nanjing majoring in pharmaceutical engineering, he returned to his hometown and switched careers to textile sales. Compared with pursuing his original major, he prefers the current working atmosphere. He is surrounded by mostly peers and can practice communication skills and stress resistance. The company he works for is an old textile fabric company with a history of more than 20 years. It pays special attention to the cultivation of youngtalents and often goes to colleges and universities to recruit outstanding fresh graduates. Zhu Ruigang believes that the textile industry seems to have a low threshold, but with the market’s demand for innovative and environmentally friendly fabrics, more professional talents will bring new development to the industry in the future.
The “Textile Capital” full of opportunities is also attracting more and more young people from other places. 29-year-old Hou Meiling once worked as an English teacher in Chengdu, Sichuan. The job that others envied meant to her a life of “seeing the whole world at a glance”. Four years ago, she followed her boyfriend from her hometown and came to Keqiao. She was optimistic about the development prospects of the textile industry and wanted to challenge a “different world” while she was young. Hou Meiling believes that young people are more sensitive to the information of today’s era and have an advantage in working here. Today, she has become the store manager of a textile company’s store. “As long as you work hard here, you can see the rewards.”
In comparison, Guo Pengcheng from Xiangyang, Hubei Province is a little immature. Just over a year after graduation, he previously worked in a clothing company in Hangzhou, but lost his job due to the sudden outbreak of the new coronavirus. Under the introduction of his colleagues, he decided to work in a store in Keqiao that specialized in selling workwear fabrics. Guo Pengcheng describes his approach to work as “Buddhist”. The nine-to-five life here is far less colorful than in big cities, but it can block out many “ineffective social interactions”. Although he has only negotiated small orders worth tens of thousands of yuan since joining the company, he Still quite a sense of accomplishment.
The development of the Internet industry has also extended Keqiao’s fabric business to the “cloud”. During the epidemic last year, many merchants began to try to move the fabrics displayed in the physical counters into online live broadcast rooms in order to broaden their sales channels. But textiles are different from other commodities. Generally speaking, buyers need to see and touch them with their own eyes before placing an order. Cheng Peizhao, who works for a design service company in Shanghai, did more than a dozen fabric live broadcasts for merchants in China Textile City last year, and the most popular one was watched by more than 10,000 people. He believes that the value of fabric live streaming is not to directly bring benefits to merchants, but to connect clothing manufacturers, designers and fabric manufacturers through this form, allowing more clothing practitioners to have more intuitive access to low-price, high-quality products. Fabrics, “let Made in China gradually transform into created in China.” Cheng Peizhao said.
The pioneers of the older generation laid the foundation for Keqiao’s textile industry, and the “second generation of cloth” who grew up here are trying to find new possibilities in this traditional industry with a long history. After returning to China after graduating from the University of London, Chen Zhenzhen, a post-90s girl whose family is engaged in fabric business, hit it off with junior high school alumni Pan Zhuoying and Li Fei and established a clothing studio in Keqiao. “My life has revolved around fabrics since I was a child. When I grew up, I wanted to jump out and look at this industry from another angle.” Chen Zhenzhen said. Pan Zhuoying studied fashion design in Italy for many years. She took a fancy to the potential opportunities in Keqiao’s ready-to-wear market. “The competition in the clothing industry here is not as big as in Hangzhou and Shanghai, and the studio rent is free for the first year. It is very suitable for starting a business.” Textile industry Closely connected with the clothing industry, with the help of geographical and resource advantages, their brand can be directly connected with local fabric factories in Keqiao in the future, which not only reduces costs, but also has more categories to choose from.
Grain Rain is approaching, and the climate in the south of the Yangtze River has become rainy. The roads under construction outside the Textile City Market have become extremely muddy, but…�It has not slowed down the pace of people coming to buy fabrics.
Not long ago, the nearby Keqiao Textile City Avenue Viaduct began a fully closed construction project that lasted for more than a year. The tangled roads made Xiao Xiao, an online ride-hailing driver born in 1993, a little lost for a while. After quitting the fabric business in the past few years, he didn’t come to Keqiao often, but he always heard people say that new properties were built here. Looking out from one side of the car window, the thousand-year-old Xiaocao Canal is wrapped in spring green trees, giving people a sense of time travel; on the other side, a steady stream of vehicles carrying bundles of cloth is speeding into the distance. .
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