A new kind of fast fashion
Robots, drones and designer goods: Caroline Leaper meets the woman who is changing the way we shop
The key difference between the way that Chinese and British women shop, according to Xia Ding, is a matter of loyalty. “Women in the West find designers that they like and return to them again and again,” she explains. “I wouldn’t say that Chinese women are more easily influenced, but there is a stronger desire here to follow the trends. No one sticks with one or two favourite brands; they are much more experimental and they’re constantly looking for what’s new.”
Ding has spent decades comparing the shopping habits of the East and West as a retail analyst and strategist, living between Beijing and North Carolina in the United States. She’s watched the Chinese fashion market emerge from, as Vogue China editor Angelica Cheung once put it, “a place with new money and no taste”, to become one of the luxury industry’s most valuable and clued-up territories.
Earlier this year, Ding was appointed president of the fashion division at “Asia’s Amazon”, Jd.com, China’s second-largest online retailer with a revenue of more than £29.5billion in 2016. The competition between JD and the country’s current leader, Alibaba, is fierce, with JD currently the fastestgrowing of the two businesses. Both previously focused on more accessibly priced, wide-ranging goods ( just as Amazon does here), but as Alibaba announced plans to enter the luxury fashion market, so too did JD. The latter’s potentially-winning move? Hiring Ding to lead their evolution.
“When I joined JD, the discussion was just beginning as to how we should tackle high fashion,” Ding explains. “Originally, the team were thinking of making it a part of the existing Jd.com, but the more I talked to consumers and to luxury brands, the more I realised that to be taken seriously by the industry we would need to create a dedicated fashion destination.”
Cue Toplife, the new luxury e-tailer launched on Oct 10 in China, with the potential to become the Net-a-porter of the East and, ultimately Ding hopes, the West too. “We didn’t set out to rival Net-a-porter, but in the end I think we’ll probably achieve that result,” she says. “Thirty-two per cent of all luxury goods [a worldwide market worth £234billion in
2017] are sold to Chinese people, whether that’s when they’re overseas or at home in China. The Chinese love luxury goods, and the trend now is that they are buying more from home. Net-a-porter and Farfetch both have Chinese branches, but at this moment they are probably behind us in terms of actually understanding the Chinese market.”
JD is an enormous operation and already boasts the most tech-savvy customer service system in the world. They have the planet’s largest drone delivery network (allowing them to offer highspeed
‘People like to feel special and individual here in China. Unique silhouettes sell well’
shipping to even the most rural parts of China) and in June they launched an army of driverless vans and delivery robots, initially to service customers at the country’s biggest universities.
When it came to deciding on the type of service that Toplife should offer, though, Ding says that she was keen to strip everything back to basics. “For the luxury customers, we wanted something completely different and special,” she says, acknowledging the irony that, with all the gadgets in the world, the most luxurious thing in retail is still personal, human interaction. “We have dedicated delivery people who wear suits, ties and white gloves. Everyone who works on Toplife has been trained as a fashion adviser, who can tell the customer what the collection was about and who the designer is.” Ding cites Gucci, Prada, Armani and Saint Laurent as the brands that are currently most popular with Chinese consumers, as well as Huishan Zhang as a favourite Chinese name enjoying considerable international success. “People like to feel special and individual here,” she says, which makes sense considering that the population reached more than 1.379billion last year. “The brands doing well are the ones giving a story behind the clothes, and creating limited edition pieces. Unique silhouettes or exclusive prints sell well. For someone to say ‘I can get it, but you don’t have it’; that’s very powerful in China.”
In the UK, few of us will have heard of JD (its initials being the same as a certain, unassociated sports company) but that’s something Ding wants to change. “One of the reasons that they hired me was definitely to help bridge the East and the West,” she says. “I lived in the US for 15 years, working for international brands, and I understand what designers worry about when it comes to cracking China.”
One of her first “bridging” moves has been to sponsor the British Fashion Council and Vogue’s Fashion Fund for 2018, which will see JD award £200,000 to a Uk-based designer with plans to take their business global. In the process, Ding has befriended some of fashion’s biggest characters, from American Vogue editor Anna Wintour, to designers Tommy Hilfiger and Diane von Furstenberg. “For us, we want to be relevant and present at London Fashion Week by helping to launch new designers,” says Ding. “China is a huge and complicated market, but the consumer is so into quality and individuality and they want to find new, niche designer brands. We want to make a path for, say, Mary Katrantzou, to bring her collection to Chinese customers.”
An in-depth understanding of fashion brands and how women shop is what undoubtedly sets Ding apart from the other, almost exclusively male, business executives in the boardroom at JD. It’s remarkable to think that she was once somebody’s chemistry teacher.
“I was an amateur model in school, that was probably where my first interest in fashion came from,” she explains. “But I have a very technical background. Chemistry was my major at university, then I was a polymer scientist and I taught chemistry at the Nanjing University for a while. I moved to the US to work as a finance planner for an apparel brand called Champion and that’s how I got my first basic training about the market. It’s been an unusual journey, but I feel lucky now that I’m doing my dream job.”
Asking Ding which labels dominate in her own work wardrobe is futile. “I don’t ever stick to one brand, so I guess I’m just like any other typical Chinese shopper,” she laughs. “If I really have to say one that I like, I guess it would be Saint Laurent because their suits are cut like men’s, but for a woman, and they make me feel empowered.”
Black is her go-to colour, but Ding loves to experiment with unusually embellished evening dresses and asymmetric tailoring. “I’m pretty tall, 5ft 8in, and slim, so I like to wear a lot of pantsuits for work,” she adds. “I think they suit my figure.
“I always like to feel like a businesswoman who is in fashion, though, rather than a fashion woman who is in business.”