In Hong Kong, we also had a dinner with my daughter’s college friend. He works for a Hong Kong apparel company, which mass-produces clothing with the thread imported from Milan and the style adapted from Milan, and exports them to Japan’s major department stores, supermarkets, and other apparel companies. He has to also coordinate to eliminate inferior products.
I really respected his courage to leap into the world where he cannot use Japanese at all and has to do business in only Cantonese and English every day. He is now 25 years old. He ordered our food in quite well Cantonese, even though it was only his fourth month in Hong Kong.
Delicious seafood was put on the table one after another. We fully enjoy the time with the great dishes we never tasted before. We had seven dishes and paid about 5000 yen for each, so the price was also reasonable.
His often goes to a trade show in Dongguan, 2 hours from Hong Kong, to find some good samples as the show displays all the samples of cutting-edge fashion in Milan. His job in Hong Kong is to introduce those samples he found to Japanese companies.
Dongguan is a strange place. He told me that in Dongguan, they display all the samples from all kinds of production companies, like the samples of 100 yen goods, bottles for cosmetics, handbags, designer bags, furniture, sundries, apparels, shoes… you name it. I’ve never been there myself, but I heard Japanese buyers are having hard times there, because if they negotiate directly with the Chinese dealers, they always get suckered; They receive different products from what they ordered or nothing at all even though they paid the money, or they are imposed to buy too expensive products in the case they can’t convert yen into US dollar, HK dollar, or yuan very well.
China has grown as a world factory, which can manufacture cheap products at twentieth or thirtieth price of the market price. However, China’s domestic labor costs and the price of plastic products and other materials are getting higher these days. Now, people are wondering how long this China’s local production magic will last.
This daughter’s friend says his company is also shifting its production base from China to Vietnam, where the labor costs are lower. I felt I was learning things I couldn’t see in Japan by coming to Hong Kong, little by little. I always wanted to know how the apparel industry is adapting to the incongruous trend, as I have exceeding interest in fashion. Even if Milan has insisted from the year before, “The trend color of next year is yellow!” sometimes an opposite trend comes up and soon yellow clothes are piled up in warehouses as dead stock.
No-name brands might be able to sell them at a bargain, but the more famous the brand is, the more carefully it has to deal with the dead stock products. When I asked him what the companies do with their dead stock products, he said they regularly hold a special bargain called “family sale” at distribution centers like the one in Oomori?or in hotels to sell them to their employees or their families at 70% or sometimes 90% off prices. They also send them to outlet malls after deliberately keeping for 2, 3 years. But he said his company sometimes just has to throw them away because the storage cost is not cheap either. Moreover, there?is a profession in China that picks them up from the trash to sell in their street shops. Anyway, it was again a story of mass-production and mass-consumption age that always requires waste and too much use of materials.
