Author | Xu Wenpu
Edited by | Yaqiong Shi
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How long does it take to produce a down jacket?
In the Bosideng intelligent production plant, the average worker can only produce two long down jackets a day, and a medium and short down jacket can only produce 3 to 4 pieces a day.
Down jackets are one of the most complex garment categories in production. Improving production efficiency and quality has always been an important issue in this industry. Four years ago, when Bosideng had not yet upgraded its smart production factory, down jacket production relied more on skilled workers to produce manually, and the production time would be extended longer.
The penetration rate of down jackets in the mainland is only about 10%, while Europe, the United States and Japan can reach 30 to 70%, and the efficiency improvement of every point in this industry is likely to burst out of a lot of economic value.
After the reform and opening up, the domestic down jacket market began to sprout, of which Bosideng, which was established for 45 years, is a name that cannot be skipped. Since 1995, Bosideng sold 680,000 down jackets a year, and Bosideng has been sitting on the throne of the first sales for 26 years.
Since the weather turned cold this year, Bosideng has successively released two new products - trench coat down jacket and Dengfeng 2.0 series. The former is the main knife design of the famous Italian designer Pietro Ferragina, and the latter is the first time that aviation material technology is used in the field of clothing, with more than 1 million automatic temperature regulation energy storage units per 1 square meter of fabric, creating a constant temperature experience of 31 °C ~ 33 °C for the wearer.
In terms of sales, during the "Double Eleven" period in 2021 (November 1 to 11), Bosideng also achieved good results, with omni-channel sales of 2.78 billion yuan, ranking first in Tmall China's clothing (including men's and women's clothing) sales.
Behind the product strength and sales report card, on the other side that consumers can't see, 36Kr found that Bosideng has completed digital transformation and innovation in all aspects of production, warehousing, logistics and sales.
In addition to the intelligent production plant at the production end, Bosideng also carries out intelligent transformation of warehousing and logistics links, increasing the proportion of small single fast reaction and pull-type replenishment, and minimizing the "inventory" problem that plagues garment enterprises for a long time; in order to accurately distribute sales-side products, Bosideng has established a data middle platform to open up omni-channel data to empower consumer research, commodity planning, channel matching, etc.
Now, every piece of down in Bosideng is produced to reach the consumer, behind which is a digital journey.
In one or four years, the degree of automation between production has tripled
In the fleece filling room of the Bosideng intelligent production workshop, a worker wearing a dust jacket, wearing a mask and a hood, sits at the outlet of the fleece. The worker wraps the cut piece of clothing opening around the fleece outlet, presses the switch, and the down is evenly transported up the pipe. The piled data of each piece of clothing has been uploaded to the device through the system in advance, and when filling, the machine grabs the data from the cloud, and the workers only need to fill the pile one by one according to the order of the parts. After filling the fleece, the workers put the opening of the clothing piece into the ultrasonic equipment within reach to automatically seal it.
Automatic fleece filling machine
Down filling is a major part of the down jacket production process. If you have seen the "romantic" scene of the traditional down jacket filling room, the down flying in the sky, you will know that the cleanliness, intelligence and efficiency of the down filling room of the Bosideng intelligent production workshop are not easy to come by. Here, the down is stayed in the down filling machine box, when filling, in order to ensure that the down is in a high fluffy state, the pile filling machine has been kept stirring state, while precipitation, removal of the impurities mixed in the down.
According to national standards, a qualified down jacket needs to be marked with filling, fleece and filling. In general, the higher the amount of down, the warmer the clothes, but under the constraint of the fabric, there is a maximum value for the filling of the down jacket, beyond this value, it will reduce the storage of air, resulting in heat loss. At the same time, the higher the amount of down, the more bulky the down jacket, therefore, the general down jacket filling capacity is between 100 and 200g. At Bosideng, the pile filling machine precisely controls the amount of pile filling with an accuracy of 0.01 grams.
Out of the emphasis on product quality and production efficiency, Bosideng invested 20 million yuan to build a production base as early as 1992, and introduced assembly lines to expand production scale and production capacity. At the end of the 1990s, Gao Dekang, the founder of Bosideng, purchased the first velvet filling machine to assist in production. By 2018, the Bosideng production room has been fully intelligently upgraded.
As a functional garment, compared with the production of regular clothes, down jackets have increased the links of liner cutting, filling and locking down, and the production process is longer and more difficult. In the Bosden intelligent production factory, the first link in the production of down jackets - template production, Bosideng adopts a fully automatic template mechanism for modeling. The machine with advanced CNC technology connects to the garment template CAD software, obtains the garment template data on the system, and can be automatically cut.
Automatic template machine
In the sewing process, Bosideng grouped the workers according to the process, using German anti-fleece needles, mercerized anti-fleece threads and Japanese sewing equipment, with 3 cm 13 needle technology for sewing. In the invisible insems, Bosideng performs a double-layer locked edge treatment to prevent down jacket drilling down. At the end of each job group, a monitor records worker output, productivity, and bad problem points in real time, providing reliable data for production decisions.
Sewing workshop kanban
Bosideng's new trench coat down jacket is produced here, by 52 pieces through more than 300 processes and 11,000 stitches of high-density embroidery to complete, which means that in the production process, the various parts of the clothing must be cut, sewn, piled, and then combined and spliced. Countless transport transitions of intermediate garments were done by rickshaws in the past, and now the intelligent hanging system takes over this heavy, repetitive work, and the clothes are easily transferred at the top of the production room like flowing water.
Intelligent hanging system
In 2021, the automation level of Bosideng intelligent production workshop will reach 50% to 60%, which is nearly 3 times higher than 20% in 2017.
In the case of greatly improved automation, high-end products such as trench coats and down jackets, in Bosideng, a worker can only produce two pieces a day, and the human effect of short and medium-sized down jackets is only 3 to 4 pieces a day. In contrast, Station B hand-up main Jinshi Ginth told 36Kr that with the assistance of a multi-function sewing machine, it takes 1 to 2 days for her to make a down jacket with only 7 pieces of clothing. The charm of smart production is revealed at this time.
Gao Dekang, the founder of Bosideng, once mentioned in an interview that the digital application of equipment is "because there is a sense of crisis, if you don't do it, there is no future." This has become a consensus within Bosideng, Bosideng insiders believe that the value of building digitalization far exceeds the value of short-term economic returns, and the effect has emerged, in the increasingly expensive labor, recruitment difficulties under the tide, Bosideng intelligent production plant because of the small dependence on technical personnel, the current recruitment problem is not big.
Second, 30% futures orders, 70% pull replenishment
Before the full construction of the intelligent production plant, Bosideng was one step ahead of the transformation of inventory and logistics digitalization.
Inventory has been the biggest headache for apparel companies in history. In the pre-digital era, clothing sales and production often have a time difference of up to half a year, the production side predicts sales half a year in advance, stockpiles, products sell well in short supply, and slow sales are already in a boat.
In China, the last inventory crisis in the garment industry broke out in 2012-2013. Affected by the economic environment at that time, the export of garment enterprises stagnated, the growth was weak, accompanied by a large number of export enterprises to domestic sales and the rise of e-commerce, the data show that in the first half of 2012, Li Ning, Anta, 361 degrees, Xtep, Peak and other 42 listed garment companies total inventory of up to 48.3 billion yuan.
At that time, there was even a joke in the garment industry: even if all the garment companies in China stopped production, only the pressurized goods in the warehouse could be sold for at least 3 years for domestic garment sales enterprises.
Bosideng also faced serious inventory problems at that time. In 2012, international fast fashion brands Uniqlo, Zara, H&M and Four Seasons enterprises began to enter the down jacket industry, quickly seizing the minds of young consumers with more fashionable designs; at the same time, the rapid rise of e-commerce has made offline down jacket stores have a surplus of products. Bosideng has rapidly expanded its stores due to its four-season and brand development strategy. In 2013, the number of retail outlets in Bosideng exceeded 13,000, and problems such as high inventory and old products were prominent.
In this context, a grotesque phenomenon occurred in Bosideng, where the store shortage and the warehouse stockpile coexisted at the same time. Gui Yilong, bosideng's director of information, calls this shortage a "structural shortage" — that is, a sufficient supply of goods, but not at the right time where consumers need it. The high inventory "freezes" the cash flow of the enterprise, and the high shortage of goods seriously affects the user's reputation.
Now, such scenes are almost extinct in Bosideng. Nowadays, when consumers go to Bosideng stores to consume, if the desired style does not have the right size, the clerk only needs to enter the product model number and color number in the system, you can get the national inventory information with one click, transfer the goods nearby, and ship within 24 hours.
Everything began in 2013, when Bosideng began to digitalize warehouses and logistics.
This year, Bosideng established an intelligent distribution center of more than 70,000 square meters in Changshu to solve the logistics needs of procurement, production and sales. In 2014, Bosideng integrated the logistics information system to realize the real-time sharing of data stored in three warehouses (terminal POS, branch warehouse ERP, and general warehouse WMS system, but at that time, the degree of digitization of the three was not high). The logistics center began to assume the function of a data center, accurately predicting the needs of consumers and providing a basis for decision-making on the warehousing layout of goods.
Dai Jianguo, director of the Intelligent Distribution Center of Bosideng Group, began to do pull-type replenishment according to digital information in 2014, "doing digitalization is to capture all information, online and offline real-time traffic, order completion, workshop production efficiency, etc., so that when a certain category is found to sell well, it is quick to replenish those stores that are out of stock." ”
In 2016, Bosideng and Alibaba Cloud worked together to build a "retail cloud platform" that brings together warehouses, store inventory data that were originally scattered around the world, as well as online inventory data that is separated from offline, providing a source of more information for pull-back replenishment decisions. In 2018, Bosideng only put into production about 30% of the futures after the order meeting, and then reacted according to the market terminal data after the new product was listed, and then placed rolling orders in the peak season, 15 days of high-quality fast supply, and made up for the remaining 70% of the market orders.
After this set of combination punches, Bosideng's inventory sell-out rate has increased year by year, exceeding 80% for the first time in 2018. This also allows Bosideng to have more energy and resources to focus on the long-term development of the group.
In 2020, in order to better respond to the national product demand, Bosideng canceled the retail company warehouse, set up nine intelligent distribution centers and twelve dealer warehouses in East China, North China, Qingdao, Central China, Northwest China, Southwest China, Northeast China, Harbin and Urumqi, after opening up multi-level inventory data, based on integrated inventory, Bosideng independently developed an intelligent pull-type replenishment iSCM system, logistics WMS system, industrial control WCS system, real-time collection of offline store retail data, online platform sales data, Realize the automatic matching of the nearest inventory location of the goods based on the geographical location of the store and the consumer, and automatically provide suggestions for adjusting and replenishing the goods, and realize 100% automation of the replenishment of warehouses and stores.
Based on the continuous optimization of the algorithm model, the calculation performance and accuracy of Bosideng replenishment and transfer have been greatly improved, and it originally took about 5 hours to complete the replenishment action of more than 4,000 stores across the country, but now it only takes 1 hour.
Intelligent warehouse scheduling system
In this case, the degree of automation of Bosideng intelligent distribution center is already quite high, enough to cooperate with the continuous optimization of intelligent systems. In Changshu Bosideng East China Intelligent Warehousing Center, in addition to the zero picking center that requires man-machine cooperation to pack orders, from upstream receipt and warehousing, weighing and verification, product warehousing, warehousing scanning, warehousing and other links, to downstream depot delivery, scanning code labeling, order review and other links have been unmanned. The automation rate and equipment interconnection rate of Bosideng intelligent distribution center exceeded 90%.
On the day of "Double 11" in 2020, the shipment volume of the East China Intelligent Distribution Center exceeded 1.8 million pieces, and it took only 24 hours for Bosideng to send these goods. It is said that this speed ranks first among more than 5 million brands on Tmall's "Double Eleven" in 2020.
With the digital blessing of warehouses and logistics, Bosideng's inventory turnover period is much lower than that of its down jacket counterparts, compared with Canada Goose's 396 days and Moncler's 278 days, Bosideng's turnover days are 175 days. The efficient turnover days are on the one hand, the sales side is doing well, and on the other hand, the supporting support of the supply chain is very powerful.
Bosideng inventory turnover days in the past 10 years
Now, Bosideng's inventory turnover days are no less impressive, even when compared to popular casual wear brands.
Source: Wonder, BOC Securities
It is thanks to the smart warehousing and logistics system that covers the whole country and shares data, in the early stage of the new crown epidemic in 2020, in the face of traffic control and poor logistics, Bosideng only took 48 hours to hand over 150,000 pieces of epidemic prevention down jackets to Wuhan medical staff. This is unthinkable before Bosideng has built an intelligent warehousing and national data sharing system.
Third, thousands of stores and thousands of faces, 70% of sales in advance forecast
The gradual improvement of production and inventory infrastructure has given Bosideng greater confidence in building brands and boosting sales. This time, the path chosen by Bosideng is also digital.
In 1997, Bosideng founder Gao Dekang showed the importance of sales data, at that time there was no electronic design to provide real-time down jacket sales data, so Gao Dekang proposed to put a bar code in the bottom of the down jacket hangtag, manual statistics at night, to achieve manual data.
In 2011, Bosideng fully introduced the ERP information system and opened an e-commerce platform. In 2014, the utilization rate of ERP in Bosideng's national sales network reached more than 75%, and the POS system coverage rate of down jacket brands exceeded 80%, which significantly improved the efficiency of dealer data management and commodity management. In the same year, Bosideng purchased sap systems to optimize business processes, strengthen risk management, and realize integrated management of industry and finance.
By the beginning of 2020, Bosideng cooperated with Alibaba Cloud and Singularity Cloud to establish a data middle platform, open up omni-channel data, and empower business innovation such as consumer research, product planning, and channel matching with data, which makes Bosideng's down jacket have a digital basis when and where it appears.
In terms of business channel matching, Bosideng now determines the product structure according to the portrait of the consumer in the business district where the specific store is located. Shangqu matching intelligent application comprehensive consumer portrait (gender ratio, theme preference, consumption level, etc.) and business circle climate, historical sales and other dozens of dimensions, matching clothing theme style, size, color and other indicators, to provide automated and intelligent distribution.
On the basis of the commercial channel matching system, a Bosideng company located in a residential area in the southwest, a Bosideng in a commercial and leisure area of an eastern city, and a Bosideng in a department store next to a CBD in the northeast have obvious differences in their main style selection and inventory of different styles. At present, Bosideng has achieved refined business channel matching in 1300 stores across the country, and in the 4 months after the system was built, the accuracy of the first shop increased by 79%, and Bosideng will gradually build "thousands of stores and thousands of faces" in the future.
In terms of sales forecasting, Bosideng predicts the whole life cycle of product introduction (listing) to growth period, maturity period, and final delisting period, and dynamically adjusts inventory.
In order to cover more comprehensive demand with more accurate inventory, reduce inventory backlog, and improve the selling rate, Bosideng integrates multiple influencing factors such as temperature, festivals, discounts, store status (mass stores, flagship stores, Ole stores, etc.), channels, historical sales, etc. to build a sales forecasting system, from predicting the sales volume of each model and size at each stage, to predicting the total sales volume of a single channel, real-time output results, and based on this product insight and operation action such as replenishment, order production, marketing promotion and so on.
At present, the accuracy of Bosideng sales forecast is 70%. He Xi, vice president of Singularity Cloud and digital transformation strategy consulting expert, mentioned, "The forecasting algorithm will continue to iterate and improve, so that the sales forecast will become more and more accurate. ”
In the guidance of precision marketing scenarios, based on the data middle platform, the transaction amount of Bosideng, the proportion of transactions in the whole store and the input-output ratio have also been significantly improved. According to statistics, Bosideng ROI (return on investment) has increased from 6.4 in the "618" period in 2020 to 508 in 2020 .11.
At the same time, Bosideng will focus on building private domain traffic from 2020. According to the 2020/21 financial report, Bosideng cooperated with Tencent's smart retail department, with 8 million weChat friends, more than 5.5 million WeChat public account fans, an increase of more than 50% over the end of the 2019/20 fiscal year, and 19.65 million registered members.
On the Tmall platform, the Bosideng brand has more than 4.76 million registered members, an increase of more than 160% over the end of the previous fiscal year, of which young consumers under the age of 30 account for about 27.4%, a significant increase over the same period last year. Through cooperation with Alibaba to accurately profile members, Bosideng has realized an online and offline omni-channel member ONE ID labeling system, which has greatly improved the repurchase rate of members.
As of March 31, 2021, Bosideng's net profit attributable to shareholders hit a record high, at RMB13.517 billion and RMB1.710 billion, respectively, an increase of 10.9% and 42.1% year-on-year, respectively, which is the fifth consecutive year that Bosideng has achieved double-digit growth in revenue and net profit.
The world's authoritative market research agency Euromonitor International completed the sales and sales volume statistics of the retail channels of down jacket products in 2020, and the results showed that Bosideng down jacket scale was the first in the world, and the sales volume and sales volume ranked first at the same time. Today, Bosideng Dengfeng 2.0 series has once again sold domestic down jackets for tens of thousands of yuan, and international brands Moncler and Canada Goose have confronted each other in the high-end down jacket market.
Correspondingly, China's down jacket production has fallen year after year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2019, the mainland produced a total of 150 million down jackets, less than half of the output in 2016, and in 2020, the national down jacket production fell by 24.43% year-on-year. Moncler and Canada Goose, which are also the world's down jacket brands, reported in the last fiscal year that revenue and profit fell twice. Moncler revenue in 2020 was €1.44 billion (approximately $10.673 billion) and Canada Goose's fiscal 2021 revenue was $904 million (approximately $4.645 billion).
In the context of the decadence of the industry, digitalization has also become a boost for Bosideng.
In the past, the down jacket business was very susceptible to the impact of the season and climate change, but down jacket companies needed to prepare goods in advance, and their status was very passive. Digital and intelligent technology has helped enterprises shorten the cycle from down jacket production to listing, production is more flexible, and inventory is effectively reduced, which is the key to the survival of enterprises.
On this basis, digital and intelligent technology has become one of the important driving forces for Bosideng to enhance the potential of the brand. By producing stable high-quality products, Bosideng differentiates itself from the products with uneven quality on the market, and as the brand adds value, the average price of Bosideng products increases, and sales volume also increases.
From the market value ranking of listed apparel companies in 2020, it can be seen that among the top ten market value companies, Bosideng is the only company whose main brand is a single season product, and it has also made the market value the third in the industry.
Data source: company financial report, Oriental Wealth Choice, number said business
(End of this article)
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