Rongcheng clothing industry is to make more efforts at marketing in an attempt to establish its own clothing brands, instead of pasting other brands on products produced and processed in the area, said Rongcheng Party Secretary Zhang Hao, in Rongcheng county, Baoding, in North China’s Hebei province.
Aiming to strengthen the industry and surpass current limitations, the county government decided to launch a campaign to transform and upgrade local business, focusing on added value growth as opposed to merely expanding the quantity produced.
After thirty years of development, Rongcheng clothing industry has progressed in leaps and bounds. Its business covers over 50 countries and regions in the world. Its product value in the upper half of 2010 makes up 81.4 percent of the country’s total, with six months revenue amounts to nearly 40 percent of the county’s total.
However there are still many problems. “We have plenty of orders at hand, but we are still making clothes for others,” said Zhou Yancheng, president of a clothes making plant in Rongcheng county on July 24,2010. It’s a headache shared by many clothes makers in Rongcheng.
To speed up the transformation, more than 60 local companies have made a total of 20 trips between February and June 2010 to Zhejiang province and Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province to learn from the two regions experiences in moving up the production value chain. 15 new projects with over 10 million yuan investment were set up, with total fixed assets investment reaching 720 million yuan.
The government encourages brand building by cooperating with big brands in China and abroad, and inviting famous personalities to popularize local brands. By the middle of 2010, Rongcheng companies had signed many celebrities such as Wang Gang, Jiangtao, and had also registered 12 clothing brands in the European Union, Russia, etc, generating 10 million dollars of export revenues a year.
The companies are also seeking partnership and support from higher education institutions like the Bejing Institute of Clothing Technology and Tianjin Textile College, to improve design and research.
