Loving leftovers
|
|
Rating 0/5 [0 Votes]
|
 Print |
 E-mail |
|
|
"When you to buy something for 10 yuan nowadays, you expect it to be gone in a blink, but that's the price for which you can buy a long sleeve T-shirt here," a Beijinger named Yangyang told Beijing Television when the biggest weihuo (leftovers) market in North China - Hand in Hand weihuo wholesale market - opened recently in Zhaogongkou.
There were a lot of people like Yang busy searching the "10 yuan" counter, but the new market is not the only place where leftover lovers can find a place to dig in.
What's a weihuo?
Most of the time, when foreign brands place orders for production they specify the allocation of raw materials; of course, the amount rationed is greater than the number of orders to be completed to ensure a sufficient amount of qualified final products. As a result, after delivering the orders, local manufacturers find themselves with the remaining surplus clothing. These are referred to as weihuo, or leftover products.
According to Hong Tao, a professor at Beijing Technology and Business University, based on his research of the clothing industry, weihuo can account for anywhere from 5 to 20 percent of the original amount of clothing produced. According to State Administration of Industry and Commerce (SAIC) statistics, in China there are 200,000 clothing enterprises, 80,000 of which are engaged in foreign trade clothing manufacturing; a lot of their weihuo gets distributed to cities like Beijing and Guangzhou. The manufacturers and clothing distributors have already earned a reasonable profit after completing 60 percent of their orders or sales, so for the remaining weihuo, a good way to get rid of them is to sell them to small-scale vendors on the cheap. As a result, there are large, sometimes famous markets where bargain hunters can go dig in to hunt for the good stuff at such surprisingly low prices that you may not even feel the need to negotiate, unless you're particularly skilled or determined.
Still not free of fakes
Counterfeits also exist on the weihuo market. Hong told Lifestyle that foreign trade companies usually have with a strict contract with manufacturers and carefully control how much fabric is used for production - sometimes there's not a scrap left. Copies, therefore, are the result of bulk imitations crafted - sometimes by external factories, sometimes by those commissioned to make the real product - using original photos of the products or samples, and often are made with more low-grade fabric than the originals. Later, when they go to the vendors, counterfeits with fake trademarks mix freely with bona fide items.
Generally, weihuo from new collections cannot be sold off by factories in the first two to five years, and many popular famous brands absolutely prohibit the sale of their products as weihuo, so if you encounter vendors claiming they have the latest collections, you may want to think twice before buying if you want the real deal.
Consumers should also be wary of the so-called original weihuo of European and American brands, as consumers from these countries have figures very different from Chinese, and so weihuo for those markets are mostly sold abroad. If you are petite and can easily fit these brands, then they're likely fakes. "This is also why here in Beijing, most of the clothing weihuo you see are Japanese and Korean brands," Hong said. Last but not least, consumers should pay attention to trademarks - manufacturers will cut out the brand tags when weihuo leave the factory to avoid trouble and also because the products aren't meant for export.
source globaltimes.cn
