Down Jacket Industry Plays A Good Role In Innovation

This winter, when you enter the supermarket clothing store in Nanjing Xinjiekou Business District, you can see a variety of down jackets of different brands, with prices ranging from hundreds to thousands of yuan.

"This winter, the new down jacket increased significantly. The price of the old down jacket was relatively stable, and the price of some individual items even dropped." Wang Jie, the head of a clothing store in Xinjiekou, Nanjing, told reporters that the overall customer price of down jacket in this winter increased by about 10% compared with the same period last year due to the rising price of duck down and goose down, the raw materials. Down jacket is just needed in winter. Previously, affected by some down jacket manufacturers' illegal behaviors such as using "flying silk" to pass off "down", consumers paid more attention to the quality of down jacket than the style and price when purchasing down jacket products.

Changshu City, Jiangsu Province has the largest down jacket industrial belt in China, and about 50% of the down jacket production in China comes from Changshu. In the face of challenges such as industrial gradient transfer, rising factor costs, and intensifying price competition, local down jacket manufacturing enterprises rely on digital transformation to constantly accelerate product category innovation, material innovation, and technological innovation to drive the overall transformation and upgrading of down jacket industry.

Entering Bosideng National Intelligent Manufacturing Demonstration Factory located in Guli Town, Changshu City, one neatly arranged intelligent template machine is running at high speed, and intelligent manufacturing scenes such as automatic filling machine and hanging assembly line are also busy. Wang Chenhua, vice president of Bosiden Co., Ltd., told the reporter that from the warehousing of raw materials, to automatic cutting, automatic filling, automatic sorting, and then to the delivery, the factory has achieved the whole process of data collection, analysis, early warning and decision-making, and the key production equipment and manufacturing system are interconnected. The degree of automation in the production process has exceeded 90%, and the overall collaboration efficiency has increased by 20%.

In recent years, Changshu has actively promoted the textile and clothing industry to "use the cloud to endow intelligence", innovate the "manufacturing+digital+service" model, and accelerate the "butterfly change" of traditional textile and clothing industry innovation. Bosideng, Changshu Polyester, Baichenghui and many other Changshu textile and clothing enterprises are actively promoting the deep integration of production and operation links such as raw material production, design and R&D, customized processing, and marketing services with industry digitalization, so as to realize the dual wheel drive and coordinated development of production digitalization and operation and maintenance digitalization. In recent years, more than 700 textile and clothing enterprises in Changshu have carried out digital transformation, and the total investment in transformation has exceeded 2 billion yuan. After transformation, the average labor productivity of enterprises has increased by 35%, and the product manufacturing cycle has been shortened by 19%.

During the visit, many leaders of down jacket manufacturers said that the price formation mechanism of down jacket in the terminal market was comprehensively affected by many factors, such as innovative design and manufacturing process, market supply and demand relationship and competitive pattern, brand positioning and market strategy. Branded down jacket manufacturers should offset the cost pressure brought by the rising down prices by optimizing the supply chain, improving production efficiency, expanding production capacity and introducing innovative products. (Reporter Jiang Bo)

(Source: Economic Daily)