Wedding dress firms unveil top figures

"Will there be one day that I can wear a wedding dress like this for my own wedding?" With a big smile a woman poses the question to her colleagues at a workshop in Suzhou that supplies Zhao Xiaogang with wedding dresses.[Photo/China Daily]

Zhu Ningfeng, a teacher-turned-entrepreneur, has been focused on wedding dress selling since 2006 with two of his friends because they "have considerable demand overseas and they are mainly produced in China, suitable for online sales".

Unlike Zhao, whose wedding dresses are priced between 70 to 150 euros ($86 to $184), targeting the low-end market, Zhu's online shop, Vponsale, aims at the middle market with an averaged price of 350 euros.

It marks itself out by having its own design team to avoid providing the same wedding dresses as others.

Zhu sources materials from three manufacturers in Suzhou and four in Guangdong province. Transaction volumes on the website have increased tenfold from 2009 to 2011, with total sales of 40 million yuan last year, said Zhu.

While the euro debt crisis and the slowdown of the US economy have hit overseas orders in different manufacturing sectors, Zhu said his online shop hasn't yet felt the pinch. "Many customers may turn to online stores that provide quality products at reasonable prices during a weak economic climate," he said.

He does face a challenge though, just like many other Chinese enterprises that have manufacturing advantages but have a lot to learn in making themselves known by international customers.

"The most difficult thing is how to get a customer, how to make yourself different from others who sell the same products online," he said.

His solution is to get as many hits as possible by setting up his own Web page on social networks, such as Facebook.com and Twitter.com, and uploading photos and videos of his own wedding dresses on popular websites such as Youtube.com.

Expansion into more markets is the next big solution. The company has started to sell to the Middle East and South Africa.

Tapping into emerging markets has been an increasingly common practice for many e-commerce websites. In the first quarter of this year, Chinese exports to Brazil, Russia and India via e-commerce went up 79 percent from the same period last year, compared with 35 percent to the US, said Alan Tien, PayPal general manager of China.

PayPal's total transaction volume in the Chinese mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong was huge in 2010, reaching $4.4 billion on year-on-year double-digit growth, he said, expecting such a growth rate to continue in the years to come.

PayPal is what the majority of Chinese e-commerce websites use to receive payment and to conduct international marketing based on the service's 110 million buyers across the world.

chenlimin@chinadaily.com.cn