Buyer &Nbsp; Catalytic Lubricant Industry Chain "Hand"

The development of buyers in industrial transformation

The buyer was born before and after the two World War. Department store With the shift of the clothing industry in Europe, the brand clothing enterprises have a buyer's position, which is an opportunity for buyers to grow and develop. Due to industrial transfer, in Europe and the United States and other countries, the labor cost is high, and the manufacturing industry is gradually withdrawing from the developed countries such as Europe and the United States. With the transfer of this industry, the mode of operation of the garment industry has changed greatly.

Take Britain as an example, the British garment industry basically shrank from 80s to 90s of last century. The William Baird, a British manufacturer Marks and Spencer 's (Marsha supermarket chain) in 1999, terminated the long term contract as a representative event, resulting in a large influx of imported goods into the UK market. British sourcing is far from being able to meet the needs of consumers. The large demand for clothing industry has both fashion recognition and market sensitive operation. Purchase Professionals are able to develop rapidly at this time node.

In the garment industry dominated by manufacturing industry brand marketing In the course of the development of the main garment industry, most of the garment enterprises in Britain have successfully transformed into service enterprises, thus effectively avoiding the main contradiction of low cost competition. The application of the buyer's system has made the UK strong in running fast commodity circulation, high quality design services and high quality added value. As a result, the design and development in the United Kingdom, and orders for overseas processing and production of trade enterprises showed a gradual upward trend.

In the modern British apparel retailing industry, most of the enterprises have gradually transferred processing and manufacturing cooperative enterprises from local to overseas dominated by Southeast Asia. Overseas importing of imported garments has become the main channel. The diversity of cheap labor force and global sourcing varieties in Southeast Asia can not compete with the local manufacturing industry, and this global procurement has also accelerated the promotion of the buyer system.

Over the past 10 years, this kind of local design global sourcing company has been very popular in developed countries such as Europe and the United States. It has made a fertile soil for the development and maturity of the buyer's system.

Three types of buyers boost the development of garment industry

For the classification of buyers, Yao Xiaoyun, the famous buyer in China, gives such a definition: "buyers are divided into three categories: department store buyers, brand buyers and shop buyers. Buyers are a group of professionals with professional qualities.

Yao Xiaoyun summed up eight points for the quality of the buyer: first, he is highly sensitive to fashion and is keen on the fashion industry. Secondly, we are familiar with the raw materials, manufacturing processes and cost components of the products. Very important foundation, we need to grasp some basic gross margin accounting in sales. Good at data analysis, so as to capture market trends. Fourth, people with quick response ability and slow work are not suitable for this industry. Fifth, positive and cheerful personality, good to get along with others, good communication skills, good negotiation skills. Sixth, able to work under high pressure and be good at self-regulation. Seventh, strong sense of time and ability to control time. Eighth, be good at self-management and have the ability to work independently.

Buyers and department stores {page_break}

In interview with Yao Xiaoyun, she said that the early buyer buyer was the buyer in department stores, ordering many kinds of goods for department stores, organizing purchases and warehousing of goods, buyers paying attention to sales report records daily, and making corresponding adjustments to the quantity and variety of purchases. From the sporadic purchase to the buyer group of mass buying, until the two World War, the concept of "buyer" was quickly adopted by Europe and the United States and widely used in chain operated brand enterprises and other fields.

Yao Xiaoyun, who returned from studying in Britain, is very familiar with the business environment in Britain. She said: "take the UK as an example, the retail business of department stores has been flourishing in the early twentieth Century, and has lost its leading position since 70s when the brand chain stores began to rise. This is different from the current business environment in our country. In our current business mode, the department store industry is still the main channel for clothing brand sales, but with the increase of the sales share of the brand chain stores in the two or three tier market, the flourishing of the professional market and the development of e-commerce, the situation of China's general merchandise industry will be replaced by the business mode of various formats.

Yao Xiaoyun introduces that department stores in Britain can be roughly divided into three categories. First, some of the world's top and most upscale Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Liberty and Selfridge are famous for selling the world's top designer brands. On every fashion week, in the ready-to-wear show, these "legendary" most high-end department store buyers sit in the front row of the catwalk VIP seats, pointing out the design works of these designers, placing orders and ordering for the top designers of the world, buying buyout business. This mode of operation, because buyers are specialized for the department store specific customer group organization sourcing, procurement of goods, style and category of goods has a strong exclusiveness, so that department stores themselves positioning unique. Because most of the top designers in Europe and the United States rely on the buyers of these high-end department stores to place orders for their designs, these buyers have a fairly authoritative voice in the fashion circle. High-end department stores like this have not yet appeared in China, and all buyout business models are not available in domestic department stores.

Similar to most of the department stores in China, department stores that locate the mid-range consumer market also occupy a considerable proportion in the UK retail industry. Apart from the form of joint venture, unlike most domestic department stores, most of these British department stores have proprietary brands and occupy a considerable proportion, such as Houseof Fraser's proprietary brand Linea and Platinum, which are two very successful young fashion women's brands. The products of these self operated brands are bought and sold independently by the buyer team of the shopping malls, and are supplied by the OEM suppliers. The buyer team takes into account the functions of product development, commodity planning and clothing purchasing. Because of the need for technical support, such a buyer department will set up a technical department to help with the development of style and clothing, and the design work is usually done by the designer and buyer of the OEM supplier. Therefore, the buying system is not a personal act, but a team cooperation. Yao Xiaoyun believes that because the department stores are still in a strong sales channel in China, buyers have not yet made use of the department stores in China.

In the United Kingdom, there is also a department store chain business model, which originated in the United States in the 20s and 30s of last century. Similar to the operation mode of domestic supermarkets, but unlike in China, the products sold by these supermarkets, whether they are non-staple food, household goods or clothing, are brand names of supermarkets, and clothing is their main selling product. That is to say, these goods are bought by the buyers of department stores and bought by buyout businesses. The most representative ones are Martha Marks& Spencer and Bhs, and Littlewoods and Woolworths, which are located in the low-end consumer market. In fact, whether European or American traditional Chinese concept does not approve of selling clothing in such an environment like supermarkets, however, the success of Asda's clothing and apparel product series named after George has broken the traditional concept of the largest proportion of clothing market in the UK.

"All previous changes in the apparel retailing industry in the UK not only change the internal structure of the industry, but also change the way of sales and marketing, and affect and change the development of the British buyer's industry," he said. Yao Xiaoyun said.

Yao Xiaoyun also mentioned that in recent years, because of the market demand for diversity and personalized products, the increasingly fierce market competition and the continuous strengthening of market segmentation and specialization, buyers are no longer buying a large proportion of the seasonal products as they did 10 years ago, but rather adopt a small number of strategies. Especially those born after the 60s of the last century, they no longer follow the mainstream fashion trend, no longer wear the same or similar clothes as most people, but express their views on fashion. For most mainstream clothing retailers, the amount they purchase now is reduced by 30%-60% compared to ten years ago. Because the market is changing more and more rapidly, even a brand retailer with a large and stable sales terminal network will not purchase a large quantity of each single purchase in the past. A small number of strategies are used by most retailers. With the increasing competition in the apparel retailing industry, the frequency of many brands is accelerating, and the speed of style updating is faster and faster. This makes the work of buyers more busier and challenging.

Buyer and brand {page_break}

With the entry of ZARA and H&M into China, ZARA and H&M have achieved great success in business. Fast fashion has attracted strong attention from Chinese brands, while buyers are also concerned with fast fashion, because buyers are the key to the success of fast fashion brands.

For fast fashion brands, first of all, they are built on a smooth industrial chain, and buyers are the lubricants that make the industry chain smooth. The mode of the efficient operation of the buyer's goods makes the industrial chain smooth in a controllable state. For this reason, Yao Xiaoyun thinks: "the duty of the buyer is to provide the most appropriate goods to consumers for purchase at the most appropriate time and the most appropriate place." This is the most appropriate time management problem, the buyer system for the entire brand from the beginning of commodity planning, to order production, factory storage, marketing planning and so on all aspects of the very rigorous operation mode, fast fashion representative Zara is precisely using this mode of operation very smoothly achieved great business success.

Zara calls the design the "Trinity" - the "three bits" are "designers", "market experts" and "purchasing experts", which is the role of buyers in design. In an enterprise, it is not for an experienced practitioner to win a commercial success. The working system and method are the key to success. In fact, the buying system is the way that enterprises can make their own links run quickly. The buying system is the wisdom of a team, and the buyer is the most important key person to link the team. He initiated the beginning of products, production and marketing, and played a very important role in the implementation, promotion and supervision of all aspects of product design, production and sale, which could be called the catalyst for brand operation chain. Buyers have ensured the speed of enterprises' rapid reaction, and therefore, fast fashion companies will be buyers of buyers. It is understood that a Zara product from design to delivery to store shelves takes an average of only 10 to 15 days, which is strongly contrasting with the average standard of 6 to 9 months in the fashion world. In addition to the buyer of this department, each store manager is also a shop buyer. The store manager is responsible for the whole shop's selection, ordering, arranging the cargo band and other links, so as to ensure the maximum sales profit and quick response of each shop. Zara It is also because Zara implements the whole system of brand operation into all aspects of the whole brand operation, which makes Zara not only fast in every link of design and production to the shelves, but also every shop in Zara can run the garments with maximum efficiency and maximize the sales of single stores.

The application of the buyer system is not only for fast fashion brands, but also for high-end brands luxury goods. Similar foreign brands Dior, Prada, Fendi, LV, Gucci, D&G... These brands are what we usually call RTW, advanced garments. These brands must be designers who guide the market as pioneers. They are positioned as the most advanced and top-ranking people. The more forms of this kind of business are simple designer pattern or designer centered, and buyers are subsidiary. Yao Xiaoyun, introducing luxury buyers, said: "some top luxury brands such as GUCCI, CHANEL, etc. have trained salesmen or salesmen who have sales experience in the shop as buyers, who are responsible for the purchase of brands in domestic stores to meet the needs of local markets. This retailer sells its own brand completely, and the buyer is only responsible for the purchase of his own brand, the coordination of retail, marketing and visual merchandising. She also pointed out: "these luxury brand shop buyers mainly include group goods, merchandise management, sales tracking, according to the needs of different companies, and sometimes also cover the work of marketing and store display. These buyers do not need to know the process of product design and development, but more importantly, the knowledge of retail management. A luxury store buyer has a deeper understanding of the local market than the designer of this department, and requires the management of the store to be in place, and there should be expert level appreciation for the terminal.

As for the role of display in terminal sales, Zhou Tong, a famous buyer and Exhibition expert, thinks: "a good display is very important to the sale of products. Only when the display is right can the merchandise be sold at the best price in its own life cycle, on the contrary, the product can not be sold normally, which will cause the enterprise to lose the gross profit, and the product will finally become a non realizable inventory product, which will cause great economic losses to the brand." Shao Ligang, the chief consultant of Beijing nine faction one line management consulting, said: "the analysis of terminal display is the basis for the buyer to determine the quantity of styles. The agent buyer should consider the collocation between the styles, do the calculation of store SKU, and avoid the appearance of two phenomena: first, no goods can be displayed, and the other is pressing goods. The agent buyer should consider the amount of storage in the display area of the store, such as how much the terminal store can hang up, how much it can be hung at least, and the number of styles.

When it comes to the application of buyers in brand enterprises, Yao Xiaoyun said: "in the UK, when the early IT technology was not widely applied, it was difficult for management to grasp the specific performance of which or that series of sales at any time, and what they could see was whether the overall business quota was complete. Nowadays, with the development of IT technology, the cumbersome and lengthy manual sales and inventory data reports have become antiques. The analysis system provides data managers with quick and efficient data reports and summary analysis. These data can be fully generated automatically, or even do not require manual intervention by purchasing managers and commodity managers. It can analyze and extract products such as best sellers and popular colors at the early stage of the sale of goods. This function is very important for buyers' work. Because some small changes at the beginning of the season are likely to become the main trend of the whole market after entering the season. The data analysis system with the function of monitoring and early warning enables buyers and commodity managers to quickly and accurately extract and react quickly to a large number of weekly sales data. For example, in WalMart, using real-time data monitoring system, buyers can make accurate and quick decisions on replenishment and purchase based on solid data analysis. In Europe, apparel retailers are competing for these advanced information technologies. The sooner they have the advantage of technology, the sooner they can react to the market and fashion trends, and the more competitive advantage they have, the leader in the industry.

"Understand the industry operation standards, be sensitive and highly predictable to the products and the market, and organize professional sources to meet the customers' purchase needs, and earn the maximum profit for professional or business personnel or teams through timely sales after reasonable price increase." Shao Ligang, chief consultant of Beijing nine faction one line management consulting, said: "the agent buying terminal is the terminal shop type buyer. This determines that the agent buyer does not need to know the design and development process of the commodity, but more focuses on the actual grasp of the market sales, understands the real needs of the customers in the market, and satisfies the customers' purchase preference through order."

At home, most of the clothing brands have adopted the agent distribution mode, and the buyout system has also been adopted in the commodity supply mode. Agents have already felt the enormous pressure from commodity purchasing control. In addition, the date of the Brand Company ordering will be more and more advanced. It will become more and more difficult for the agents to book the future stock in advance a few months or even six months. Buyer mode can help agents conduct scientific commodity control, such as purchase plan analysis, merchandise inventory control and so on.

Of course, the analysis of the purchase plan described here is quite different from the purchase plan understood by many agents. It contains a lot of factors that need to be analyzed and planned in advance, such as purchase amount calculation, commodity structure adjustment, commodity attribute analysis, cross regional ordering, safety arrangement, cargo wave band and purchase style quantity analysis.

The purchase plan must complete the analysis of these 6 elements before it can become effective and complete. Therefore, the purchase plan is based on strong data analysis.

Among the 6 elements to be analyzed, the most important thing is to confirm the commodity structure, followed by the analysis of commodity attributes. Compared with clothing brand enterprises, agents can only play a management role in two stages, one is the order stage, the other is the sales stage. Therefore, after completing the purchase of goods, the agent buyer should formulate a sales strategy according to the different inventory conditions, and make a reasonable stock with the minimum loss, so that the commodity can achieve the best efficiency of making money.

Shao Ligang said in an interview: "inventory has always been a headache for most clothing brands and agents, but many people do not know that the inventory control of goods is not at the end of the season, but before the purchase of goods, that is, through effective orders at the order to avoid inventory."

Therefore, a good agent buyer not only needs to do a good job in the future purchase plan analysis before commodity planning, but also must avoid the "three evil" of the merchandise inventory, that is, surplus stock + stock in stock + sluggish stock. No matter how difficult it is to buy a buyer, no matter what the sales result is, a good agent buys money and makes money.

"Because goods purchased are quantitative, sales will lead to continuous changes in inventory. This change will in turn affect future purchases. Therefore, in the sales process, agents must constantly participate in data analysis. Shao Ligang said.

By analyzing the data of goods, agents can more accurately grasp which commodities are sold to what state, why they sell well or why they are not good enough to sell, and what goods they should replenish and when they should be replenish and how much they should be replenish. Of course, these will involve a complete set of data analysis system. For the value of data analysis, Shao Ligang pointed out: "the buyers of Chinese clothing circles need the cooperation of data analysis mechanisms, and many enterprises or agents have misunderstandings in their analysis, because the analysis method is fundamentally wrong."

The future and education of buyers

For Chinese clothing brand enterprises, brand buyers promote all aspects of production management and help enterprises reduce costs in all links. In the supply brand, the buyer only works in the company headquarters, and is responsible for the whole development and production process of the product, so the buyer's landing is easier. In recent years, China has also seen a number of brand buying enterprises, such as the men's wear, the women's Taiping bird, because of the implementation of fast fashion and the use of the buyer system. Without exception, these enterprises have achieved relatively large commercial success. The most similar e-commerce clothing brand to fast fashion brands is the largest in China. The representative enterprise of clothing e-commerce has nearly 500 buyers all over the world. Because of the support of such a huge buyer team, the popularity of VANCL has been recognized and accepted by the majority of consumers.

In China's largest factory style clothing brand, the important work of brand buyers is to coordinate sales departments to monitor sales data and make quick responses to maximize sales and minimize inventory. However, incomplete or inaccurate sales data collection is one of the important reasons for brand buying to work hard. Yao Xiaoyun pointed out: "due to historical reasons, most of the Chinese brand enterprises start from factories and develop to the terminal sales market. Therefore, processing, production, logistics and sales systems are one-stop. The advantage is that the style is not easy to flow out, and the disadvantage lies in the single variety. Therefore, enterprises can use buyers as a supplement to the production of their own factories. In fact, many designers in large enterprises have begun to play the role of buyers. Apart from part of their own design and development, some of the product lines are also exported to other professional manufacturers. Even some enterprises have specialized personnel to "processing goods" in the processing and production base, which is actually the primary prototype of the buyers in the enterprises, and the industry is called "group goods" to complete the integration of products. Nowadays, the operation of "group goods" is still too emotional, and the state that comes with sex leads to confusion in style, unclear theme, failure to integrate product from marketing analysis and brand integrity. In such an enterprise, some professional buyer training can be given to designers, or training of salesmen as buyers, as a supplement to design.

As for the huge channel group of agents, it can be regarded as the most direct acceptance group of buyers. For China's agents, more than 80% of the agents are facing the problem of goods and inventory management, so the buyer mode can help agents to analyze and control the data of invoicing and provide guidance for operation strategy. "A lot of franchisees actually started to match the brand names on the data supply, but the brands did not help the franchisee do effective data analysis guidance after they got the data, but became the basis for increasing the order of the oppressed franchisees, which naturally led to the great lack of data collection," Shao Ligang said. Yao Xiaoyun said: "because the buyer is a product guided by the market, the buyer's job is bound to come from the sales terminal. Now the agent buyer already has the soil of the buyer. Dealers and agents who control a large number of terminal sales channels will become the practitioners of buying agents.

For China's department stores, they are in a dominant position for a long time due to oversupply of brands. The vast majority of department stores do not do real business, but property, and operate in the risk free mode of "bottom guarantee plus point deduction". This pattern will not change much for a long time, so the implementation of the buying system in department stores is still unknown. {page_break}

Generally speaking, buyers are individualized and differentiated services, and they are the products of consumers' personalized consumption demand and consumption environment upgrading. For China's department stores, it's too early to buy a buyer. For China's clothing brands and agents, the business environment of buyers' landing is relatively mature. For Chinese agents, brands and business enterprises, their perception of fashion and market experience need to be improved.

Turning to the future development trend of the buyer model, Shao Ligang said: "with the annual increase in domestic labor costs, the price of raw materials has increased, leading to the rise in the cost of garments. When the cost price (including tariffs and transportation costs) purchased from abroad is lower than the domestic purchase price, China's mass trading brand will start the overseas purchasing system, and the buyer will usher in another "spring" in the industry.

To meet the "spring" of the buying system, are we ready? In fact, the education of domestic buyers is not perfect. Yao Xiaoyun said: "there are fewer professional buyers in China, and now it is a new major. At present, there are no courses offered by specialized institutions in China. First, the implementation of the buyer strategy is to solve the problem of education, even if the enterprises pay more attention to it, no professional personnel to operate, it is just a mere skeleton.

Yao Xiaoyun believes that the most urgent task is to set up education first, adopt and introduce advanced foreign experience and technology, disseminated widely by professionals, and train buyers for enterprises. That is the long-term plan for the development of the industry. Buyers are more important than business subjects, but because fashion buyers are very different from ordinary department stores buyers, they cover a lot of clothing professional knowledge and have more professionalism. At present, there are not many professional institutions of clothing and clothing that offer buyers. The training course of "fashion buyers and commodities management" of Beijing Institute Of Fashion Technology Continuing Education Institute is an early professional training for buyers. I believe that in the near future, we will export a group of professional buyers for the domestic garment industry.

With the development of China's garment industry and the transformation from manufacturing in China to China, the buying system will undoubtedly become the choice of more garment enterprises. TIPS

How do agents buy 6 factors to buy?

First, the confirmation of the purchase amount is actually the confirmation of the agent's investment in that year. This should be a push against the sales target, and the calculation of the amount of input can refer to the turnover rate or digestibility of goods and the discount rate of merchandise sales.

Two: confirm the commodity structure, calculate the input amount, and confirm the distribution of the total amount based on the category of purchasing merchandise. The basis of distribution is based on the analysis of gross profit rate, inventory turnover rate and cross ratio. The general and reasonable commodity structure should be controlled at 1.8%~2.4%.

Three: commodity attribute analysis commodity attribute analysis includes 5 elements: style, color, size, material, price band. The digestibility of the goods is the index of the analysis of the 5 commodity attributes. By analyzing the historical data of local sales in past years, we can get the digestibility of the goods, so as to determine which styles, colors and price bands consumers like in the market. Guided by the analysis results.

These analyses account for 70%-80% in decision-making and the remaining 20%-30% comes from buyers' judgement of popular information in the market. Each brand has part of the concept of money, these concepts will have a higher gross profit margin, and may also face a higher inventory, but the concept of money is the embodiment of brand style, is aimed at the consumption demand of fashion leaders, and is essential in a brand. Therefore, even if there is a larger inventory risk, the brand will still have a relatively fixed investment in this part of the year.

Four: cross regional ordering analysis, because China is vast, consumers in different regions have different height, shape and color preferences. Agents who cross regional orders must do regional segmentation. China has large span and large temperature difference in the north and south. In the process of ordering, we can not ignore the difference between regions. Ordering must consider the demand of local consumers, and the effective seasons for different regions are to arrange the upper shipment band.

Five: arrange the buyer of goods band agents to arrange the cargo band according to the analysis of the life curve of the goods, and then design according to the upper loading band of each subdivision, so that the terminal goods will change with the seasons, and customers will have new things every time patronizing, so that the purpose of stimulating consumption can be achieved.

Six: the analysis of the number of purchase styles, the analysis of terminal display is the basis for the buyer to determine the quantity of styles. The agent buyer should consider the collocation between the styles, do the calculation of store SKU, and avoid the appearance of two phenomena: first, no goods can be displayed, and the other is pressing goods. The agent buyer should consider the amount of storage in the display area of the store, such as how much the terminal store can hang up, how much it can be hung at least, and the number of styles.