HANGZHOU — As summer heat lingers, Yiwu, the eastern Chinese city known as "the world's supermarket", has already ushered in the "Christmas season".

Shops in the Yiwu International Trade Market are filled with festive surprises — Santa Claus in summer outfits for Southern Hemisphere customers, and street lamps with artificial snowflakes swirling inside their lampshades — all carefully packed and ready to be shipped worldwide.

While Christmas products await their global journey, machines producing the molds of those products are humming at factories in the Yiwu mold town, some 17 kilometers away. Workers are busy rushing to fulfill a continuous stream of orders.

Yin Zhenghua, head of Yiwu Dingfeng Mold Factory, which specializes in producing molds for Christmas ornaments such as snowmen, pine cones and bells, emphasized the importance of high-quality molds.

"A good mold is the foundation for producing millions of high-quality and consistent products," he said.

He added that in the small commodities sector, disruptive innovation is rare, with most improvements being minor upgrades in appearance, function or structure. "The mold town significantly reduces the cost and time for trial and error in microinnovation," Yin noted.

Since early 2025, his company has developed 80 new molds based on manufacturers' feedback, generating over 700,000 yuan ($98,544) in revenue.

Chen Qizhi, general manager of the Yiwu Xianglaiji Craft Factory, which orders over 100 molds annually in the mold town for its new designs, highlighted the advantage of geographical proximity.

"The small commodities market requires speed — fast updates in design and quick order delivery. Having the mold town nearby allows manufacturers to communicate, sample, modify, and produce efficiently," he said.

To address the historical challenge of outsourcing mold production to cities of Taizhou in East China's Jiangsu province and Dongguan in South China's Guangdong province, Yiwu began systematically developing its own mold industry in 2014. Today, the 22-hectare Yiwu mold town hosts over 1,200 mold enterprises and employs more than 10,000 people.

According to Tong Binbin, general manager of Yiwu Mold Industry Development Co, the market transaction volume of the mold town reached 2.04 billion yuan by August, representing a 56.4 percent year-on-year increase.

The mold town produces over 3,000 types of molds annually, with 30 percent used locally, 30 percent supplied to enterprises in Zhejiang and neighboring provinces, and 40 percent exported to Southeast Asia, Africa and South America.

"Yiwu mold town will continue to focus on the fast, flexible and cost-sensitive small commodities mold market while enhancing its advantages," Tong said, adding that the mold enterprises would strive to provide one-stop services, from industrial design and mold manufacturing to small-batch production, to improve the efficiency, speed and quality of Yiwu's manufacturing.

Xinhua