Dreaming For Global Brides, The Wedding Dress Town "Cut" 2.4 Billion Yuan "Happiness Industry"

The beautiful wedding dress is a symbol of sweet happiness and a witness of good love. When the bride wears her wedding dress to the palace of sweet marriage, people may not know that most of these elegant and beautifully made wedding dresses come from a small mountain town Dingji Town, Lu'an City, Anhui Province.

In this small town with a registered population of more than 50000, there are currently more than 500 enterprises and more than 15000 people engaged in upstream and downstream industries related to wedding dresses. Every year, nearly 5 million wedding dresses are produced and sold, with an annual output value of 2.4 billion yuan. The products are exported to more than 30 countries and regions, such as the United States, New Zealand, Spain, etc.

The wedding dress displayed by a wedding dress enterprise in Dingji Town. Photographed by Wang Haiyue, reporter of Xinhua News Agency

  "Transferred" wedding dress industry

Dingji Town, located in the Dabie Mountains, was originally a traditional agricultural town. The relationship between wedding dress and Huqiu, Suzhou, 400 kilometers away.

Huqiu used to be one of the main production places of wedding dresses in China, and also the main gathering place of Dingji people who went out to work in the 1990s. Entering the 21st century, the wedding dress industry has shifted from Suzhou. Dingji Town seized the opportunity to introduce a series of investment promotion policies to encourage Dingji people to build a "wedding dress town" in their hometown.

Xu Chang, 70 years old this year, should be one of the first batch of Ding Ji people returning from Suzhou. The lower land and labor costs in the town gave him an opportunity. He transformed an abandoned brick factory into a factory and recruited more than 100 people to produce wedding dresses.

"When he first came back, there were no supporting facilities in the surrounding area, and the auxiliary materials were transported by buses to and from Suzhou, and then the wedding dress was shipped out." Xu Chang did not expect that in just a few years, this place would become one of the largest wedding dress producing areas in China.

Workers make wedding dresses in Xuchangying's wedding dress factory. Photographed by Zhao Jinzheng, reporter of Xinhua News Agency

With the rise of "returning to hometown and opening factories" and the improvement of infrastructure conditions, many wedding dress factories have sprung up in Dingji, and auxiliary material stores such as lace, embroidery, plastic beads have also gathered in response to the situation. More than a dozen express enterprises have successively settled in, and a complete production chain from auxiliary material production to finished product production and market sales has gradually taken shape. Today, there are more than 15000 wedding dress express packages every day, which are sent from here to all parts of the country and even across the ocean.

  Transformation password behind "hot sales"

The wedding dress production process is complicated, and it is difficult to use assembly line production. With the rising labor costs and the increasing pressure of digital transformation, the wedding dress enterprises in Dingji Town began to move from purely manual to mechanized. Intelligent equipment such as automatic cutting machines and computerized embroidery machines gradually replace basic processes. The roar of machines and the click of sewing machines resonate on the production line.

Xu Xiaolong, the factory director of Lu'an Zhongyuan Wedding Dress Co., Ltd., is operating the computer to cut the bed automatically. Photographed by Zhao Jinzheng, reporter of Xinhua News Agency

Cutting is the key to making wedding dresses. A skilled worker needs to cut for nearly half an hour according to the pattern, while an automatic cutting machine can accurately cut out the shape input in the computer in about 60 seconds.

Automatic positioning, punching, cutting... In the production workshop of Zhongyuan Wedding Dress Co., Ltd., the circular blade runs at high speed on the computer automatic cutting bed, and pieces of complete cloth are precisely cut, and then cut into different shapes and sizes.

With the continuous improvement of people's living standards and aesthetic needs, Dingji Town's wedding dress also pays more attention to quality and design style. Those that can't keep up with the trend will soon be eliminated from the market.

Many companies have established their own design teams to design one or two new models every day. The sample clothes shall first be sold in offline stores for trial sale, and then decide whether to mass produce them according to the market response.

Dingji Town produces and displays Chinese style show grass clothes. Photographed by Wang Haiyue, reporter of Xinhua News Agency

From "single production" to the design and launch of their own exclusive "blockbuster", the collective trademark of "Dingji Wedding Dress" has been successfully approved. There are more than 400 wedding dress brands in the town, and many brands are taking advantage of the east wind of e-commerce to speed up "going out".

   New Path of "Going to Sea" and "Crossing the Border"

Every year from May to June, many schools in the United States welcome graduation season, which also affects Dingji Town, a town thousands of miles away. At present, the workers in Dingji Town are busy sewing the latest beautiful dresses for the girls at this year's graduation party.

"After Christmas, we will usher in the peak season of foreign trade processing, and we will be busy until June this year." The head of a clothing company in Dingji Town said that in foreign countries, except for weddings, all kinds of dances will use wedding dresses and gowns, which also means a larger overseas market.

In Dingji Town, the anchor is selling children's dresses live on the dithering platform. Photographed by Zhao Jinzheng, reporter of Xinhua News Agency

"Cross border sailing" is becoming a new track for Dingji wedding dress. According to relevant data, Dingji Town has more than 30 foreign manufacturers with an annual output value of nearly 600 million yuan, and its products are sold to Europe, America, Australia and other countries and regions.

The wedding dress industry in Dingji Town is still moving towards a vertical and finely differentiated market. From a single traditional wedding dress, it has gradually expanded "cross-border" to many fields such as mother's dress, children's dress, new Chinese style clothing, etc. "China Dingji Wedding Dress Characteristic Town" gathers and integrates wedding dress production and marketing, wedding custom culture, wedding photography, catwalk display, etc., to drive the extension and upgrading of the whole wedding dress industry chain.

At the beginning of the new year, this town has welcomed another batch of global merchants. Dingji Town's "happy industry" is a romantic and warm "love dream" for global brides. On the way of "threading the needle" for love, it also accumulates and bursts new vitality for its own development.

(Source: Xinhuanet)