A custom made suit has long been a desirable wardrobe choice for people seeking a more sophisticated look, but intense manual craftsmanship, from taking measurements to the last stitch for refitting, has made it a luxury for the mass consumers.
There are some good news for those unwilling to compromise their taste. Qingdao-based apparel maker Redcollar Group, specializing in men’s suits, claims to have brought down the cost for made-to-measure to only 10% higher than that for mass production, selling at prices lower than those for most high-end off-the-rack suits.
Inside a “magic bus” showcased in Qingdao, Shandong, customers change into a disposable leotard, stand in front of a light beam measuring apparatus for a few seconds, and get their measurements collected for a custom-made suit. Ten buses have been launched in the city since last December. Make an appointment and one of those will drive up to your door. This is part of Redcollar’s “customer to manufacturer” data system – or C2M as they call it – that fuels the company’s mass made-to-measure model, a system it has spent $40 million to hone over the past 13 years.
What used to be the holdback from mass made-to-measure was that the tasks for each worker are too complicated, and now those are simplified with Redcollar’s algorithms, says its founder and chairman Zhang Daili. Zhang and his family maintain almost complete ownership of the company that has been more than doubling its revenue over the past few years.
Accessible online, Redcollar’s system collects customers’ measurements and requests for different fabrics and design, such as the shape of the collar or embroidered initials, and automatically transforms those into manufacturing specifications. It reduces employee headcount by 30% and substantially eliminates problems in inventory and cash flow. A suit would be delivered to the customer in a maximum of ten days after ordering, including seven spent on manufacturing, compared with up to six months for conventional tailoring.
Automatic cutting machines help speed up the process. (Photo credit: Redcollar)
With suits sold at prices as low as $200, a fourth of a typical tailored suit in the U.S. and Europe, Redcollar rakes in 90% of its sales from those markets thanks to local agents and increasing direct online orders. The company is particularly strong in New York, where it made its first footprint overseas. Today it churns out 3,000 suits each day under a series of labels such as Redcollar, Rcollar and Cameo, and hopes to attain a customer base of tens of millions within the next decade in North America, Europe and China respectively.
A return to the world’s largest single country market for men’s suit sure is luring. In 2015 the made-to-measure segment in China accounted for 5% of its $15 billion sector, projected to grow at a 2% annual rate over the following five years. The global men’s suit market, pegged at $41 billion last year, will expand at a slower annual rate of 1% until 2020.
“The higher-end segment will grow much faster than the overall sector,” Zhang Tianbing, Deloitte China’s consumer and industrial products industry consulting managing partner. “It’s like the popularization of e-commerce retail, starting slow but now expanding at a 50% to 70% annual rate.” The made-to-measure segment in the more mature market of the U.S. accounted for 10% of its $2.1 billion sector last year.
Although contributing to a mere 10% of Redcollar’s revenue today, the domestic consumers have more spending power. “This made-to-measure market being at its early stage in China, its consumers – urban white collars or people with overseas educational background born in the late 1970s or 1980s – are higher up in the country’s demographic ladder,” Zhang Tianbing with Deloitte adds.
Zhang Daili, a 60-year-old Qingdao native, founded Redcollar in 1995 as an OEM factory, and began eyeing the made-to-measure market in 2003 when the margins turned thinner. Zhang developed a standardized method he calls “coordinates measuring” that creates axes along the vertebra and waist, and take down the coordinates of 19 places on the body – a process anyone without tailoring know-how can master in a week. Today Redcollar’s 300 outlets across China still provide manual measuring if you don’t prefer the “magic bus” experience.
All those measurements need to be drafted into patterns for manufacturing. With a database of pattern and design built from the company’s OEM experience, Zhang kicked off his experiment streamlining the process at Redcollar’s 3,000-employee factory.
The system didn’t start as entirely Internet-based – there was no such environment anyway. At first specifications were handwritten on a paper tag that hangs on each suit. The paper tags, which wear out easily, were later switched to cloth strips, and handwritten guides, sometimes illegible, were replaced by printed codes.
Suits with electronic cards line up in Redcollar’s factory. (Photo credit: Redcollar)
Today an electronic card dangles from automatically cut fabrics throughout its journey in the factory until it becomes a suit, containing all the information the workers need for the 300 production processes. The system matches the customer’s measurements to specific modules under the algorithms Redcollar developed, and generates a pattern with CAD programs within five minutes – conventional manual drafting would take a half or a whole day. Such automatic patterning, perfected through time, is key to Redcollar’s low alteration rates.
Redcollar’s C2M system now has 20 subsystems with new functions such as scheduling production and delivery. It contains a pool of over 2 million customers’ data, more than ten million pattern models, 30,000 types of fabrics and tens of thousands of design elements.
Directly connecting consumers with the factory, the C2M data system allows Redcollar to bypass the intermediaries such as big e-commerce sites. Redcollar’s vice president Li Jinzhu says the model can create a brand new commercial civilization, and bring an end to problems like counterfeiting that the current channels haven’t solved.
A litany of China’s suit and other menswear makers are catching up with this ascending market. Major exporter Dayang Trands has developed its own smart manufacturing system, looking to ramp up annual made-to-measure production to 500,000 suits over the next five years, and made a $30 million strategic investment this March in Canada’s made-to-measure menswear retailer Indochino for further expansion in North America. Dayang reported a 25% rise in overseas made-to-measure sales to $12 million in 2015 on a slight drop in overall revenue.
Youngor, one of the domestic market leaders ringing up $2.2 billion sales last year, has rolled out a “mass customization” plan, optimizing its IT system for supply chain management as well as dabbling with more personalization choices. Giuseppe, Joeone and other followers also initiated flexible manufacturing programs.
Proud as Zhang is of his special method, there might have been other alternatives. Chinese suit maker Saint Angelo has launched its online system with the $3 million investment last year in Jim Brothers, a local men’s shirt maker touting an algorithm that generates a consumer’s measurements based on their photos sent via its mobile app. Raking in $335 million total revenue in 2015, Saint Angelo hopes to boost made-to-measure to half of its own label sales by 2017.
Zhang Tianbing notes: “The hardest part is to reverse a company’s organizational structure, with processes traditionally lined up from product design to procurement, manufacturing and then distribution. You can’t break it down overnight.” The transition is even harder for successful brands with established distribution channels.
The younger Zhang believes Redcollar caters to today’s consumers with no real brand loyalty. (Photo... [+]
Zhang Daili’s daughter Yunlan, Redcollar’s heir apparent and president since 2009, believes today’s consumers have no real brand loyalty – in a time of easily accessible quality products they would readily switch to what they like better. With the C2M system allowing customers to create something they know they’d like better, it might be a swim-or-die situation for brands too big to turn around.
Redcollar established a separate company KuteSmart in 2007 for the system, with which China’s conglomerate Fosun entered into a strategic partnership last November and pledges to raise the investment to $456 million. Several Chinese manufacturing giants such as Haier and Huawei have also come to pick Zhang’s brains.
Under a Chinese government-initiated program, Redcollar started researching on replicating the system for other sectors in 2013 and began providing such services last December. The core of the system, as Zhang Daili puts it, is to break down the manufacturing process to standardized modules.
The company has helped 30 plus Chinese manufacturers in over 20 sectors, including motorcycles, appliances, electronics, future, jewelry and cosmetics – it may even broaden to cover overseas companies, in light of Fosun’s stakes in a series of apparel and accessories brands such as Italy’s Caruso, Germany’s Tom Tailor and Greece’s Folli Follie.
“It would replace [the old business model] as long as it cuts costs in the value chain, for apparel as well as other sectors,” avers Zhang Tianbing with Deloitte. “Pioneers have emerged and the foundation will be laid over the next three to five years, then the following five to ten years will see this model’s rapid replication.”
