Livestreaming helps open up big market for Baigou, Hebei

On June 2, Zhang Hui, manager of SHIMANO Trading Co., Ltd in Baigou town was busy with livestreaming. In his company, the ground was full of packages, and six workers were packing them for delivery.

Since the outbreak of the epidemic, Zhang's role has changed. Now she is not only a manager of the company, but also an Internet celebrity. A few days ago, due to the outstanding results with goods, she was selected as one of top 10 online celebrities in Baigou. Talking about the opportunities brought by livestreaming, Zhang even called it " a surprise" and "good luck".

Like many luggage manufacturers and operators in Baigou, SHIMANO used to focus on offline trading, with a lot of foreign trade orders and wholesale orders, of which foreign trade orders accounted for 80%. Zhang thought about delivering more goods in faster speed every day, and thought little about brand image building and other issues.

The outbreak of the pandemic hit the company hard. The company's business decreased sharply, and foreign trade orders almost fell to zero. In the face of difficulties, with the help of market supervision and other relevant departments in the jurisdiction, Zhang turned her eyes to China. At 20:00 every day, she starts live streaming on time. In direct communication with fans, she realized that she must pay more attention to the personalized preferences and suggestions from consumers, through which she quickly offers feedback to the designers and producers. After discussion with fans, some backpacks more suitable for the domestic market were quickly produced and favored. In more than three months, live webcast has brought 160,000 orders to SHIMANO. Zhang designed a unique express packaging bag for the company's brand "Bobo", and marked "Bobo China" in a conspicuous position.

Zhang now have 57,000 fans in her TikTok accounts, and fans who enter the studio every day have increased from the first dozen to more than 1300 at TikTok. "For small and medium-sized enterprises, only by paying more attention to brand building and promotion can they survive better," she said.

According to Li Jun, Secretary of the Party group of Baigou branch of Baoding Market Supervision Bureau, Baigou has more than 3,500 bag processing enterprises of various types, 6,124 individual processing households, and an annual output of 800 million bags, which is one of the largest production and marketing bases of bags in China. After the outbreak of the epidemic, production and operation were greatly affected, and many of them had no foreign trade orders. However, their research found that many local enterprises, which take the road of specialization and independent brand development, have carried out business through online live broadcasting, and have gone through the test of the epidemic. The orders have not been greatly impacted, and the sales volume of some patent luggage products has not even declined, but increased. For example, Guangshun luggage industry Co., Ltd.'s "GODSPEED" brand professional photography bag has a certain share in the international and domestic markets. After the outbreak of the epidemic, they improved a product for the domestic market, and the sales volume of this product doubled compared with that before the outbreak of the epidemic.

"The market entities should not go back to the old way of outsourcing and ‘large quantity at low price’. Instead, they should enhance the anti risk ability and competitiveness of the industry by means of product quality improvement, standardization construction and brand building." According to the unified deployment of the provincial market supervision bureau, the market supervision department of Baigou new city combined with the local actual situation to help improve the product quality. They set up quality revitalization cloud classroom to guide enterprises to firmly establish quality concept. The Provincial Institute of standardization is invited to investigate the luggage enterprises and solve the problems existing in the current standards of the luggage industry. The enterprise standards related to musical instrument bags and photographic bags are being formulated. Efforts have been made to create regional public brands, and the trademark registration scheme for Baigou bags geographical indication has been initially formed.