Small tailor on the Internet

In an era when the Internet has changed, no industry can do it. This time, it is the tailor-made tailoring of this narrow and high-end "handicrafts".

Imagine how to produce if the fabric, style, and size of each piece of clothing are different. Maybe a tailor shop can do customization, but are you willing to wait a few months for this? A company called Jimbrothers solved the conflict between customization and efficiency.

With technical innovations and an internet platform, you can cut out a fit shirt for you through photos. It takes 30 minutes for a cup of coffee and you can wear a custom-made garment that will never "bashing."

Although it calls the foreign name, it is a Chinese company rooted in the Yangtze River Delta. It is not the apparel industry's designers or entrepreneurs who promote this change. Instead, it is a “cross-border” star—Wu Jianke, chairman of Wuxi Jim Bros Fashion Custom Technology Co., Ltd.—the former vice president of Siemens Home Appliances China Co., Ltd., from a multinational company. From executives to entrepreneurs, from the electronics industry to the apparel industry, the span is very small.

However, when Wu Jianke accepted an interview with this reporter, he disapproved. In his view, what he wants to do is "subvert the production method of the garment industry." This is both the core competitiveness of the company and its own business vision.

But in front of him, there are many martyrs. The forerunners in costume customization have been unable to escape the fate of the funeral.

For example, the jeans and garment manufacturer Levi Strauss provided a service for making classic jeans for many years. However, customers need to go to the store and have their employees hold the tape one by one. During the same period, Mattel customized "Barbie's friend" and General Mill customized cereals, both because of too much trouble for ordering products to customers and too many problems in the production process, and become customized fields. Yellow flowers tomorrow. In fact, with a few exceptions such as Nike's Nike ID project, personalization has rarely been successful.

Can the Jim Brothers jump out of the apparel industry trap of “large-scale operations and product personalization”?

When the entire appliance industry praised Siemens for its outstanding performance in 2010, Wu Jianke, 45, chose to leave the company for 15 years.

Entrepreneurship is not impulsive. In a conversation with a friend a few years ago, Wu Jianke learned that the industrial model of the garment industry has entered a predicament: The production costs have risen rapidly, and high inventory pressures have become overwhelming, and highly homogenous competition has made enterprises Almost unprofitable.

At the same time he also thinks of his own situation: height 180 cm, long arm size, so that he can not buy a fit shirt. In the existing market, either the standardized production of clothes, style and number can not be satisfactory; or the traditional tailor shop, cutting level and efficiency is slow. There are a lot of people who can't buy fit clothes with similar distress. The market demand is very obvious.

Wu’s goal is clear and he decided to overcome the production process flow for the rapid production of custom shirts. And he knows that rapid customization of personalities in terms of scale is a paradox in management.

At first, Wu Jianke thought naively that he would do a good job of collar and sleeves in advance and quickly get dressed when needed. It was later proved that this method does not work. However, he is not unfamiliar with computer technology, so he thinks that IT technology can be involved in aspects such as measurement, design, and tailoring.

The core value of the clothing custom model is “fitting”. In the custom tailor shop, from tailoring, cutting, fitting, sewing, re-testing, and detailed trimming, the only requirement of the entire production process is to look around at the size. Now, by using the Jim Brothers website or mobile MMS, providing two photos on the front and side, the computer can measure the size of the body and compare it with the massive personal body data in the corporate database, and then pull out the matching patterns and digitally crop. The data comes from the tens of thousands of samples that were collected for free in 2 years.

"Accurately obtaining the three-dimensional dimensions of the human body through two-dimensional photographs of the human body" is not an easy task. Wu Jianke and his team opened a celebration of champagne after the successful development of the transmission of photographs. However, it was later found that the image information of mobile multimedia messages that were compressed during the transmission process was as high as 90%, and such pictures could not be measured at all. On July 27, 2011, Wu Jianke clearly remembered this day, and his team captured the original digital image restoration technology.

Customization of the Internet Even when interviewed, Wu Jianke will habitually observe other people's wear. He set his sights on a foreign man at the table, and his collar was quite generous. Wu said: "He must not buy a suitable shirt because the neck is too thin. However, if he is told that he can go to the Jim Brothers, he is likely to say 'NO' because he has not experienced it." Wu Jianke knows the key to high-end customization: Through the "experience" to grasp the precise customer groups.

Unlike traditional sales thinking, the Jim brothers sold their shirts for the first time, but they had a beautiful gift box. The box contains coupons, product brochures, body instructions, fabric cards and a ruler. With this box, customers can easily participate in the process of measurement, selection, and hands-on design. The value of the gift box is not only so, this way of contacting the customer has also obtained the customer's body type data information and began to establish a long-term relationship. In September of this year, thousands of copies of gift boxes with prices between 500 and 3,000 yuan were sold. "At present, the production scale of our 100 employees is relatively small and we have to set a production quota," said Wu Jianke.

The "precision experience" and "user first" deeply imprint the imprint of the Internet industry. Yes, it is not just the "quantitative" link that has been changed by technology. In fact, Wu tried to forge new companies using Internet thinking and reinvent the industry. "The new technology is the core, and the Internet is the platform and direction for the future," he told reporters.

Compared to Internet distributors, Jim Brothers has led the selection of richness and real experience. Login to the Jim Brothers website where customers can personalize colors, styles, accessories, and more. If you think it is not enough, you can ask to embroider letters or text in the corresponding part of your shirt. At present, the company's computer flexible production system realizes the possibility of fabrics with 3.2 million shirt designs and rapid production. This result has increased the design and production management capabilities of the original computer system by nearly 10 times, making it possible for each person to wear a different shirt.

If the model of the Jim brothers is attributed to technology, it is easy to overlook other aspects. “Our core members may be working in a coffee shop. The technical staff may be a photographer or a college student just graduated.” Wu mysteriously said: “He may not understand computers or even know us. He just talks about himself. How to complete a work of art.” If you continue to ask questions, Wu will laugh instead of answering. The only thing that can be made clear is that if you use Internet ideas properly, you can have no laboratories, no large production workers, or even build your own factory.

Wu Jianke said: "Customized rigid demand is fit, and the ultimate demand is personality." By the end of this year, Jim Brothers, which has made rapid customization, will open a personalized design section online, from fit to complete customization. (Text/Yang Bingxin)